Qualla: Wildeshausen

Wildeshausen: Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gerd Fahrenhorst, CC BY 4.0. In the year 851, a man named Waltbert rode into a sparsely settled patch of the North German Plain carrying a box of bones. The bones were the relics of Alexander, a Roman boy who, the Christian story said, had been martyred with his mother and six brothers during the early persecutions. Waltbert was the grandson of Widukind, the Saxon chieftain whom Charlemagne had finally bludgeoned into baptism. Now Widukind's grandson was using those same Roman saints to convert his own people. The relics ended up in a *Stift* on the Hunte river, and the village around it became Wildeshausen - today the capital of the Oldenburg district, a market town of cobbled squares and quiet brick streets where a 1403 shooting guild still runs the Pentecost calendar.

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Image: Gerd Fahrenhorst | CC BY 4.0

Wildeshausen: Five Thousand Years of Burials

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Billboa, CC BY 3.0. Long before Waltbert and the bones of St Alexander, the people who lived along the Hunte were already burying their dead in style. Stone monuments and graves around Wildeshausen date back to the third millennium BC - the Kleinenkneter Steine were reconstructed in the 1930s and st...

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Image: Billboa | CC BY 3.0

Wildeshausen: Translatio Alexandri

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gerd Fahrenhorst, CC BY 4.0. Waltbert's pilgrimage was a piece of medieval logistics that today reads like a road movie. He crossed the Alps to Rome, secured the relics of Alexander and his family, and brought them home over the mountains and back through the Saxon forests. The official date the relics arriv...

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Image: Gerd Fahrenhorst | CC BY 4.0

Wildeshausen: A Brief Swedish Town

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Krzysztof Golik, CC BY-SA 4.0. Some history is famous; some is wonderfully obscure. In 1648 the Peace of Westphalia handed several pieces of northwest Germany to the Swedish crown - including, of all places, the little town on the Hunte. Sweden gave Wildeshausen to Count Gustav Gustavsson of Vasaborg, an illeg...

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Image: Krzysztof Golik | CC BY-SA 4.0

Wildeshausen: The Town Is the Guild

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Risorto Celebrano, CC BY-SA 3.0. Walk into Wildeshausen at Pentecost and you will find a town that has not really stopped being medieval. The Schützengilde - the citizens' shooting guild - was founded in 1403, and the week-long *Gildefest* that grows out of it has been running every Pfingsten since. The mayor is...

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Image: Risorto Celebrano | CC BY-SA 3.0