Dagblad van het Noorden looks back on the past year. Today is the month of June in which traces of very old buildings were found in Ter Apel.
Anyone who walks around the Monastery in Ter Apel in these dark days is walking in an area where people already lived and worked eight hundred, nine hundred or perhaps a thousand years ago. A small settlement must have already been there then.
Post holes
This became clear last summer. Then archaeologists and archeology students found post holes that pointed to such an ancient settlement from perhaps the year 1000 of our era.
Frits Bergman, Rienhart Wolf and the other directors of the Monastery, which now serves as a museum, were pleasantly surprised. “In 2000, remains of an old farm had already been found during excavations,” says Wolf. “But a settlement from perhaps the year 1000, that was and is very special. So far before the year 1465, when the Crosiers founded the monastery, people were already living here.”
Ground radar research
Wolf and his fellow directors knew that there had to be ‘something’ in the soil. A building history study of the Monastery already pointed to older buildings on site, and ground radar research also showed ‘disturbance’ in the soil. “We naturally wanted to know more about this and asked for and received subsidies from the province of Groningen and from the local Hesse Fund,” Wolf reflects. “This way we were able to hire the University of Groningen and archaeologists.”
In 2022, lecturer Stijn Arnoldussen from the RUG started digging with archeology students, together with experienced archaeologists such as Ko Lenting. First mainly at the rear of the Monastery. Post holes have also been found there. In the warm months of this year, digging at the front was resumed and it then became completely clear that people were already living around the Monastery Enclave about a thousand years ago.
On a sand ridge
“A found water well also points to this,” says Wolf. “In itself it makes sense, that building. The Monastery stands on a sand ridge, which is higher than the land around it. Such a higher place invites you to live.”
Jochem Abbes is a historian and chairman of the Westerwolde Historical Association. He is also happy with the results of the excavations. “We now know a little more about the history of our area and that is nice. When you now walk around the Monastery, you do so with the knowledge that there once was at least one farm. And maybe more. It is a historical sensation, that feeling that people lived here so long ago.”
Much emptier and more desolate than now
The Westerwolde area in the year 1000, what did it look like? “Of course much emptier and more desolate than now, largely impassable,” says Abbes. “But it is likely that the oldest church villages Onstwedde, Sellingen, Vlagtwedde, Wedde and Vriescheloo were already there. Sources indicate that they were also there in 1150. So they may have existed a century earlier. Ter Apel was not a church village, but there seems to have been a settlement there. It is difficult to say whether those people were the oldest Ter Apelers at the time.”
Those warm summer days of 2023, Rienhart Wolf looks back on the warm summer days of 2023 with pleasure. “It was exciting to follow the excavations, to see how many useful and other objects were recovered from the ground. To see those post holes. If you looked into those holes in the bottom, you saw, as it were, the ancient Ter Apel, with its inhabitants. Frits Bergman and I played here as children, but we could not have imagined that such discoveries would be made here later. And we’re not there yet.”
A chapel perhaps?
Because Stijn Arnoldussen has already announced that he wants to work on the site in front of the Monastery again in the spring of 2025. This summer, remains of a building that stood together with or just in front of the Kruisheren monastery were also found there. Was it attached to that monastery? Did the monks use it as a guest house for travelers? Or was it a stand-alone building that was there before? A chapel perhaps, from the fourteenth or fifteenth century? These are questions to which Arnoldussen cannot yet provide answers.
“Me neither,” says Wolf. “But I am already looking forward to those excavations in 2025. We still have to find additional subsidies to finance them. We also had indications for such a chapel or other building before. In 1933 the Monastery was restored and something was found in the ground. But there was no money for further investigation, so the hole in the ground was closed again.”
Rewriting history
Wolf hopes that the soil will reveal its secrets during the next excavation. “And that we can then completely rewrite the history of the monastery enclave. But we can already do that now. A historian who wants to write a book about the Kruisheren monastery of Ter Apel will no longer be able to avoid the spring and summer of 2023.”