While Uppsala is famous above all from a text, Thuringia holds the best-excavated Germanic sanctuary in the ground: the sacrificial bog of Oberdorla. A moor in which, for over a thousand years, idols were set up and offerings made – animals and humans alike.
The sacrificial bog at Oberdorla and Niederdorla in the Unstrut valley was used from about the 6th century BC into the Migration Period – over a thousand years of religious continuity at a sacred lake. It is one of the most important sites for Germanic belief anywhere.
Around a small body of water the archaeologists (above all Günter Behm-Blancke) uncovered numerous cult places: fenced precincts, hearths, offering pits – and again and again wooden idols. Some are simple forked branches or plank figures in which deities were worshipped.
In the wet peat survived what otherwise perishes: besides pottery, animal bones and weapons, there were human sacrifices – bog bodies, some with signs of a violent death. The bog gave and took; it was a threshold to the Otherworld, where people made contact with the powers.
Exactly such water- and earth-cults are described by the Roman Tacitus for goddesses like Nerthus: a holy place in the bog, processions, sacrifice in the lake. Oberdorla is thus a tangible archaeological counterpart to the ancient written sources – and it lies in the middle of Germany.
Nerthus · Donar’s Oak · The Old Germanic Feasts · The Norse pantheon.
Günter Behm-Blancke, Das Opfermoor von Oberdorla. Tacitus, Germania. Rudolf Simek, Dictionary of Northern Mythology; Jan de Vries, Altgermanische Religionsgeschichte. Opfermoor Vogtei open-air museum.