Bolshoy Tyuters Abandoned Island – Full Of WW2 Wehrmacht Relics!

A lot of my friends always say things like: “there are no places left for metal detecting, soon we will only be detecting at some local parks and beaches!”. However, I am sure that, at least in Europe, we have plenty of places full of history, and we will need more than 500 years to search it all with metal detectors. We will even leave a lot of cool spots to our kids, to be sure!

And just recently I got some info about a very interesting island in the Baltic Sea. As you know – the Baltic Sea has more than 1500 years of history, and it was the main sea of the Vikings, for sure, and they’ve left a lot of traces on more than 100 000 islands all over the Baltic sea. But, there is one island which still keeps a lot of secrets and which has a lot of artifacts on it, and this island is called Bolshoy Tyuters. Let’s check what this island have!

As you know, even Vikings probably lived or stayed there for some time. This island was populated by Finns at the beginning of the 16th century and fishermen lived there until 1939, till the beginning of the Soviet-Finnish war.

You can find an old cemetery of Finnish fishermen on this island. There was an old Protestant church there, but it burned down at the beginning of the 2000’s. But let’s go back to the history. In 1941, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union, the Soviet army somehow left this island and that was a big mistake. German and Finnish forces captured the island and made it a castle in the sea – this island had a lot of artillery, big stocks of guns and ammunition placed on it. The Soviet army tried to capture the island with the help of several ambushes and so on, but none of them were much successful. In 1944, when the situation changed and Finland left war, the Soviet Army captured the Baltic states, and the German forces escaped from the island in one day, leaving all of the artillery, ammunition stocks and all the other stuff on the island.

Of course, the German forces damaged all of the objects, and for many years this island was a very dangerous place to visit and stay on because it has mine fields, grenades, and tons of explosives hidden all over it. Right now it is all cleaned and made safe by common Russian-Swedish operations in 90’s-2000’s and everyone can visit this island, one must just get a permission by the Russian Border Guard Authorities and rent a ship to travel to the island.

I’ve picked up some of the photos from that island and made a gallery. Just check this out, this island is still full of relics and Wehrmacht artifacts! It’s just amazing, guys!

Man, I wish to detect there!

Happy Hunting, guys! And if you are looking for more war relics and finds, just check here. Do you have something to share? – share it with us and your friends!