Herthasee (Rügen)

The almost circular Herthasee on the island of Rügen is about a 170 meter long, 140 meters wide and up to 11 meters deep lake, the right on the trail between the visitor parking in Hagen in the forest of the national park Jasmund ( in the municipality of Lohme ) and the National Park center king chair is. Hertha Castle, one of up to 17 meters high ramparts from the time of the Slavic settlement from the 8th to the 12th century is located on its northeastern shore.

Hertha Sage

The Roman historian Tacitus and politicians had in his treatise Germania, which originated around the year 98 AD, just the worship of the deity Nerthus ( Hertha), Mother Earth, is mentioned. This is said to have (probably out of context in the Baltic Sea ) occasionally climbed on an island in the ocean in a sacred grove one drawn by cows and cars have driven over the land herein. After this trip, which brought a festive and peaceful time with yourself, the car and the goddess was bathed himself in a remote lake, where those who helped her were subsequently engulfed by the sea.

In the 17th century the chronicler Philip Clüver in his treatise Germania antiqua ( Leyden 1616, Volume III, p 107) had first brought this saga with the lake in the Stubnitz in context. He believed he had discovered with the Borgsee and the Borgwallsee on Jasmund peninsula of Rügen by Tacitus described the location of the event. One of the most important supporters of this theory untenable from today's perspective, was the historian and philosopher John Micraelius, who was also rector of the company founded in 1543 Pedagogium in Stettin in the mid-17th century. In the Romantic period, some authors of the first travel books about the island of Rügen attacked around the year 1800, this saga again. Here, the fabric was poetically significantly exaggerated to some extent. When Karl Nernst (* 1775, † 1815), a student of Ludwig Gotthard Kosegarten, one reads in his "Walks through Rügen " for example:

Before today commercially successful settlement of the announcement to this place about the year 1893 by the enterprising landlord of the inn at king chair, which also arranged the nearby so-called sacrificial stone and its environment for advertising purposes, was the sea, in spite of the then already repeatedly published Hertha mystical spectacle, usually only Borgsee or Black Lake and the adjacent castle Hertha only Borgwallsee. Sassnitzer children deserved at that time in their school holidays, pocket money trying to entertain tourists with appropriate horror stories. However, also take up other places, to be the scene of Hertha Sage.

Herthasee seen with the Hertha castle ( in the forest), from the south

He was formerly also Black Lake - probably because of the gloomy surroundings and the marshy subsoil