06 July 2014

Sidonia

Many people have been executed for witchcraft.

One of the more notable, whose legend spawned an opera after which in turn an ill fated World War II ship was named, was Sidonia von Borcke, a litigious Pomeranian* noblewoman who never married and lost most of her family young.  She and a former employee of the Lutheran Abby where where lived in her later years where she served as a sub-prioress, was executed at the age of seventy-two in 1620 after many nobles who had arguably persecuted her died mysteriously.  The former employee and then she confessed to murder by sorcery while being tortured.  A thousand pages of the trial record remains available as a historical document.

* Pomerania means land by the sea and refers to a principality on the South Coast of the Baltic Sea, much of which is now part of Poland.

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