Qualla: Middelaldercentret

Middelaldercentret: Introduction

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit User:TigerPaw2154, Public domain. In 1989 the local museum at Nykøbing Falster built a trebuchet to mark the town's 700th anniversary. It was meant to stand for three weeks. Somewhere between fifteen and thirty thousand people came to watch it throw. Nobody dismantled it. Two years later a kitchen tent and a ring of workshops had appeared around the machine, and by 1992 the whole thing had been constituted as a private institution. Middelaldercentret is what grew from a siege engine that outstayed its welcome - a full medieval market town on the Guldborgsund shore where the year is always around 1400 and the weapons are fired daily.

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Image: User:TigerPaw2154 | Public domain

Middelaldercentret: The Machine That Would Not Come Down

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Toxophilus, CC BY-SA 4.0. The trebuchet was the first working full-size reconstruction of its kind anywhere in the world. Its success prompted a two-month scoping project in the summer of 1991 called the Medieval Technology Centre: a series of workshops and a kitchen tent set up around the machine to see ...

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Image: Toxophilus | CC BY-SA 4.0

Middelaldercentret: Living in 1404

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Toxophilus, CC BY-SA 3.0. The centre runs on the current calendar offset by exactly 610 years. In 2014 it was 1404, and so on. That offset is enforced with unusual seriousness. Staff and volunteers dress in period costume and, during opening hours, live as townspeople of a Danish market town would have li...

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Image: Toxophilus | CC BY-SA 3.0

Middelaldercentret: Five Centimetres

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Robbie C, CC BY-SA 2.0. Reconstruction here is research, not theatre, and it produces the kind of rivalry that only experimental archaeologists have. Having built the world's first working trebuchet in 1989, Middelaldercentret went on to help build the one at Warwick Castle, which then held the record f...

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Image: Robbie C | CC BY-SA 2.0

Middelaldercentret: Boats, a Church, and a Machine That Cannot Work

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Toxophilus, CC BY-SA 4.0. The harbour holds reconstructed vessels - the Gedesby ship, sailing as Agnete, along with the Bredfjed ship and the Egernsund pram - built with period tools like everything else. In 2010 work began on a medieval church, a reconstruction of Kippinge Church in north-western Falster...

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Image: Toxophilus | CC BY-SA 4.0

Middelaldercentret: Who Comes to 1404

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Baj at da.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 2.0. Reenactment groups travel here from around the world, and since 2010 a week-long summer festival has widened the period on display; the Company of Saynt George, who portray the years 1460 to 1490, have been guests several times. The centre runs courses in historical weapon use fo...

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Image: Baj at da.wikipedia | CC BY-SA 2.0