For centuries Reric existed exclusively on parchment. Frankish chroniclers knew it mattered; nobody knew where it had been. Candidates were proposed and defended — Oldenburg, Luebeck, the Obotrite stronghold at Mecklenburg, and the coastal village of Alt-Gaarz, which was renamed Rerik in 1938 on the strength of a guess that turned out to be wrong. Since the 1990s the identification has settled on a site near Gross Stroemkendorf, on the eastern shore of the Bay of Wismar, excavated by the University of Kiel and the Mecklenburg-Vorpommern state archaeology department between 1995 and 1999, following earlier work at the end of the 1980s. The case is circumstantial and it is strong: the foundation and destruction dates match the written record exactly, which is not something a coincidence usually manages.

Reric was laid out, not accreted. It appears around 735, shortly after Slavs of the Obodrite people began settling this coast, and it was from the start a deep-water port with a planned layout — a decision about ship draught made before the first house went up. Around the 760s the settlement shifted south and the ground it vacated became the cemetery. At its extent it ran 500 metres along the shore and covered roughly twenty hectares. The finds describe a working town rather than an industrial one: Sukow-type pottery of the sort associated with eighth-century West Slavic populations, later Feldberg ware in smaller quantities, hoards of Norwegian schist whetstones brought across open sea, and evidence of textile, iron and bronze working at a domestic scale. The whetstones are the tell. Somebody was sailing regularly between Norway and this beach, and doing it often enough to leave stock behind.

Reric sat inside a Slavic polity with rulers, fortresses and a foreign policy. The Obodrites had raised strongholds at Mecklenburg and Ilow in the early eighth century — among the earliest Slavic settlements near this coast — and within ten kilometres of the port archaeologists have found the remains of Slavic open settlements. Their prince from about 795 was Thrasco, also written Drasco or Drazko, and he was Charlemagne's ally rather than his subject. In 798 he led a combined Frankish and Obodrite force to a heavy victory over the Nordalbingian Saxons on the Schwentine. That alignment is the reason Reric prospered and the reason it died: the Franks were at war with Denmark, the Obodrites were on the Frankish side, and Reric was the Obodrite window on the Baltic.

Godfred had been taxing Reric's trade for years. In 808 he chose to own it instead. He came with his fleet, forced the Obodrites to acknowledge him as overlord, destroyed the emporium and the villages around it, and moved the merchant community wholesale to Hedeby, the emporium closer to Denmark near modern Schleswig. The annals give the numbers no dignity, but the event was a forced migration: households, workshops, ships and children shifted across the Baltic at the pleasure of a king who wanted their tolls flowing into his own harbour. In the same year Godfred set about strengthening the Danevirke across the neck of Jutland. Taken together the two projects read as a single policy — wall off the south, concentrate the trade behind the wall.

The destruction was not total. The following year, in 809, Thrasco was murdered at Reric by a man of Godfred's, which means there was still enough of a place to be murdered in. The archaeology follows the annals with almost uncomfortable precision: the latest datable well timbers recovered from the site come from 806, 809 and 811. Wood cut, sunk, and then no more wood. The name outlived the town. Adam of Bremen and Helmold of Bosau, writing generations later, call the Obodrites the Reregi — probably a rendering of Reric, a people remembered by the harbour they lost. Today the site is farmland and shoreline near a village most Germans have never heard of, and Reric's merchants, or their children, spent the rest of their lives trading out of a Danish harbour they had not chosen.