Thousands of fans of the Middle Ages on Saturday donned their tabards and lowered their visors to relive the heady days of 1410, when a Polish-Lithuanian army smashed the Teutonic Knights.
On the real site of the Battle of Grunwald, some 2,200 re-enactors clashed head on as they marked the 600th anniversary of what is seen as a tide-turning moment in the region’s history.
Battling in stifling heat, the knights, archers, cavalry and halberd-wielding footmen were watched by what police said was a crowd of up to 200,000.
PHOTO: EPA
Grunwald, in northern Poland, is a magnet for fans of all things medieval, who flock here every July to don itchy flax clothes, codpieces and chainmail, quaff mead, and enjoy a good ruck.
The battle is serious stuff. Although the knights’ swords are blunted, they barely pull their blows in a full-throttle skirmish.
“I got this in training [on Friday],” a knight named Janek said, pointing to a plaster cast on his left arm which was just visible under his armor.
“But it didn’t stop me getting stuck right in again [on Saturday],” he added, grinning as he lurched to his feet with a clunk of metal.
Serious injuries are relatively rare, with dehydration and heat-stroke a greater worry, participants said.
The battlefield rang out to the sound of bombards — early cannons — whose blast and acrid black-powder smoke failed to faze the horses of a charging unit of lancers.
Nearby, Monika Iwanska, 17, carried a wooden bucket of water to a group of slumped knights. The only concession to modernity was a clutch of drinking straws — supping water through a visor is not exactly simple.
“It’s my first time here,” Iwanska said. “I got into this because my boyfriend’s a knight.”
“The atmosphere’s really great. But it’s about more than that, because I really like the Middle Ages and you learn [a] lot about the past by living it for real,” she added.
Tomasz Konopka, commander of a “banner,” or medieval military unit, kept staunchly in character, haranguing his troops.
“Form up! You call that a line?” he yelled, whacking an errant knight with the flat of his sword.
The original battle on July 15, 1410, helped speed the decline of the mainly-German Order of the Teutonic Knights, warrior-monks who wielded power along the Baltic coast from the 13th century.
Victory fueled the rise of a powerful Polish-Lithuanian united state which lasted four centuries, and the battle enjoys iconic status in both nations today.
Jaroslaw Struczynski, who acts as the Teutonic Knights’ Grand Master Ulrich von Jungingen, was booed by the crowd as he rode sneering onto the field.
“I figured someone had to play him,” Struczynski said ahead of the battle.
Von Jungingen died in the battle, so Struczynski, one of the founders of the re-enactment, has had to hit the deck more than a dozen times.
What started as a low-key gathering of Polish Grunwald fans in the early 1990s has spiraled into an ultra-authentic event which organizers say is Europe’s largest knightly re-enactment.
Along with participants playing peasant levies and camp-followers — who take the total number to 6,000 — the knights spend a week camping out living history-style.
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