Museum Schokland stands on a former island that now rises subtly above the reclaimed Noordoostpolder in Flevoland. Its archaeology, historic church and outdoor landscape tell a distinctively Dutch story: communities repeatedly adapted to wet ground and an advancing sea before large-scale reclamation made the island part of the mainland.
Schokland began as a peninsula and had become an island by the fifteenth century. Erosion and flooding made life increasingly precarious, and the government ordered the final evacuation of its inhabitants in 1859. When the Noordoostpolder was reclaimed in the twentieth century, the former island became surrounded by dry agricultural land from 1942 onward. Its contours, settlement mounds and harbor traces remain legible in the flat polder.
