A Rundling is a form of circular village, now found only in Northern Germany, typical of settlements in the Germanic-Slav contact zone in the Early Medieval period.
The Rundling was a relatively common village form created by German law, but housing Slav farmers. It usually comprises a central, circular village green owned in common with individually owned farmsteads radiating out around it like the spokes of a wheel. The best examples are now only in a small area of Lower Saxony in Germany near to the town of Lüchow. Nineteen of these villages have been put forward as an ensemble for consideration as a possible World Heritage Site, and a decision is expected in 2023.
At the City Hall in Oslo on 11 June 2015 the Rundlingsverein was awarded the Grand Prix for the European Union Prize for Cultural Heritage/Europa Nostra Award 2015. This was in recognition of 46 years of voluntary work in preserving these ancient settlements.
Such villages were originally found across a strip of central Germany from Kiel to Bohemia (where they are occasionally referred to as a Rundling, Runddorf, Rundlingsdorf, Rundplatzdorf or Platzdorf), often indicated by village names ending in -itz, -ow and -thin. Virtually all such Rundlinge are now only to be found in the small area of Wendland.
History and origins
There are no contemporary historical records of the founding of these circular villages, but a consensus has arisen in recent decades that they were founded in the 12th century, on land that had not been previously cultivated, probably because of its essentially low lying boggy nature, its tendency to be flooded and the relative poverty of its sandy soil. The current leading theory is that of Professor Dr Wolfgang Meibeyer, who believes that all the Rundlinge were developed at more or less the same time in the 12th century, to a model developed by the then Germanic nobility as suitable for small groups of mainly Slavic farm-settlers. Whether these settlers were there by choice, by conquest or by forced settlement is no longer known. It does seem to have happened without much bloodshed, and the following centuries showed a living together of Germans and Slavs. This eventually led to an assimilation and eventual disappearance of the Slavs as a separate ethnic group with their own language, Wendish (Wendisch) or Polabian (dravänopolabisch), which is the language used for the majority of the Rundling names, and still to this day for certain unusual features of local rural architecture and land-use.
In Slavic languages the term for the later German term "rundling" was "opole". Opole etymology is "around" (o) + "the field" (pole). The village green in the middle was (and sometimes still is) called the "maydan". The best preserved opole-rundlings are to be found in Hanoverian Wendland, where the Germanised population still often bears surnames such as Kufhal (, "smith"), Ribak (, "fisherman") and similar. It can also be found elsewhere, such as Byšičky in the Czech Republic. In present and formerly Slavic speaking countries in Central/East Europe many references to the opole can still be found, like the cities of Opole (formerly Oppeln) in Poland, Opolye in Russia, Opole Ter in Hungary or Apoldu du Jus in Romania, which is indicative of the Slavic origin of the rundling/opole concept, as German colonisation never reached the most eastern parts of the Slavic lands where the "opole"-toponymns still exist.
This separate Slavic language remained more generally in use in the region of Lüchow until the 18th century, and there is a written chronicle and dictionary still in existence drawn up by Johann Parum Schultze of the village of Süthen, in around 1725, which marks the increasing loss of the old language. The area of its historical use is now often called Wendland after those Slavic peoples who were called the Wends, and it corresponds more or less with the current administrative boundaries of the district of Lüchow-Dannenberg. Two related Slavic ethnic groups were the Wenden of the Spreewald and the Lusatian Sorbs of Upper Lusatia (Oberlausitz), together making a group of about 60,000 who still are said to be able to speak Sorbian in the Spreewald, an area of Eastern Germany near the Polish border around the towns of Bautzen and Cottbus.