Mårhøj

Facts

Weapons hidden from the Germans

By Lars Bjarke Christensen (11 stories)

Mårhøj passage grave from the Peasant Stone Age is near Kerteminde. This communal tomb, which is built of huge stones, is over 5,000 years old. It was first examined in 1868 by a local farmer's son, who added a door at the entrance. Conrad Engelhardt, an archaeologist working for the National Museum of Denmark visited the tomb the following year and he was impressed. The farmer's son's renovation work was exemplary and the key to the tomb was given to visitors without charge, which was rare at the time. As a rule, guests visiting portal tombs in Denmark had to pay an entrance fee to explore the closed burial chambers.

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The patriotic archaeologist

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Story written by Lars Bjarke Christensen

Time / Periode 3400 3000

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Conrad Engelhardt (1825-1881) was one of the noteworthy Danish archaeologists of the 19th century. Throughout the 1850s and until the war with Prussia and Austria in 1864, he was in charge of the archaeological collection in Flensborg. This collection includes a number of unique Iron Age weapons from bogs in Nydam and Thorsbjerg. When war broke out, Engelhardt secretly evacuated the valuable collection to Korsør, where it lay hidden for some years until German spies revealed its location. After the war, a few objects from Nydam and Thorsbjerg were incorporated into the National Museum Collection, as they had once been part of King Frederik VII's prehistoric collection. After the war in 1864, Conrad Engelhardt was employed by the National Museum of Denmark, where he had worked as a young man under the world-renowned museum curator Christian Jürgensen Thomsen.