De Nagele

De Nagele (also known as "Urker Kerkhof" or just "Nagel") was a small island that used to lay in the Zuiderzee off the coast of Overijssel. Nowadays part of Flevoland, de Nagele was named after the delta of the river Ijssel from which it spawned. Once a common inland trading route for Stavoren during the middle ages, great floods reshaped the area and molded the island to be located between fellow islands Urk and Schokland. Registers of chapels from Urk and Emmeloord acknowledge the existence of its chapel and church between 966 en 1118. It's always been known as a fishing village which had mysteriously sank into the sea somewhere around 1300. This occurance spawned unsettling stories of a graveyard in the sea on the island of Urk.

A Fishermen's Tale
According to the local tales, de Nagele was not a village but an entire city where the people had lived in sin. One fateful day the pastor of Nagele heard about a brawl gone wrong in the local inn and hasted to stop two burly men from killing each other. Courageously he threw himself betwixt two bloody knives and pleaded for both men to stop. Sadly his words mended very little and the pastor met an untimely end when one of the knives pierced his heart. "The Nagale will perish," the pastor preached before dying, "the sea will take this unholy place and fishermen will tear their nets onto the stones". And so his prophecy came to be.

Curse of the Nagele
Fishing in the Nagele promised no boon. It was said the entire place was a graveyard and their nets would rip onto the stones of the ruined city. Those who tried, hauled in nothing but headstones, baptismal fonts and altar candlesticks. A fisherman who tried his luck there in 1772 caught an alter candlestick in one of his nets. In 1776 another fisherman hauled in a baptismal font. The church of Emmeloord in Schokland decided to display this baptismal font in 1825 until the church's eventual move to the main land of Overijssel in 1861. The Schokker church had been reconstructed in Ommen and because of city expansion this building was later replaced for the catholic church of Ommen in 1939 where the font resides until this very day.

Modern Times
The layout of the Netherlands changed a lot over the course of the 20th century. With the creation of dykes, the Zuiderzee was no longer a sea and the brackish body of water was split up into Ijsselmeer and Markermeer. A large portion of the sea was claimed as artificial land, which not only connected Schokland and Urk to the main land and into the province of Flevoland (which in the process also saved Schokland from completely disappearing into the sea) but also put de Nagele back on Dutch maps as it once was.