Amazing - a Swedish village in the Ukraine

In the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter
(Oct 3rd 2008) I read an interesting
article about a little Swedish village in
Southern Ukraine.

Swedish?
Yes, even called Gammalsvenskby
(=Old Swedish village).

How old? Founded more than 220 years
ago.

But let us first go back to the north and
back in time.

One tradition tells that a group of
of Finnish-Swedish farmers had settled
on the Estonian coast between
1250 to 1400.

Another tradition tells that Swedes had
come as soldiers to the island Dagø off
the Estonian coast in 1681, to protect
Sweden's eastern front.

In 1781 Catharine II exiled around 1200
of these Swedes from Dagø to an area
named Novorossiia, an area taken from
the Turks, in what today is in the
south of Ukraine.

During the eight month long march
covering 2000 km, half of them died.
The survivors reached the river Dnejpr
in Southern Ukraine in May 1782.

Here they started a settlement they
first called Svenskbyn and then
Gammalsvenskbyn.

But life was hard and on January 1st
1784 only 135 of those deported from
Dagø were still alive in
Gammalsvenskbyn.

The Swedes kept their language, their
traditions and their Lutheran religion
in Gammalsvenskbyn till 1929.

Following the difficult times in the Ukraine
after the Communist Revolution, Stalin's
rule and a terrible famine in the 1920's,
the villagers decided to move, as a group,
to the country their ancestors had left
several hundred years earlier.

In 1929 the Swedish Red Cross helped
the 900 villagers to go by boat down
the Dnejpr and then by train to Trelleborg
in Sweden.
Many settled on the island Gotland,
to the east of southern Sweden.
Some emigrated to Canada.

Some decided to leave Sweden and
go back to Gammelsvenskbyen in 1931.

There 18 of them were arrested during
the years 1937-1938 and disappeared,
for ever.

The church the community had built
back in 1885, was closed in 1929.
In 1989 the church was reopened,
this time as an orthodox church,
with an added cupola.

In October 2008, the King and Queen of
Sweden visited Gammelsvenskbyen
and attended a service in the church.
Today the official name of this place
is Zmijevka.


There is still a group of women
who speak the oldfashioned Swedish
this group has kept alive.

The King told the reporter he was
surprised their "old Swedish" wasn't more
different - he could easily understand
what they said.

Arvid Norberg, who was born in
Gammalsvenskbyen and came to Sweden
in 1929, has made a website, in Swedish.
Worth checking out, if you read Swedish.
In one part he describes what you can see
if you go there these days.
http://www.gammalsvenskby.se/RundtrippiGsby.htm

There is also a text in English worth reading
http://www.gammalsvenskby.se/ENGLISH1.htm

For me, this brought me back to the
research I did some years ago for a student
who was a decendant of the Germans who
settled in this area around the same time.
Fascinating!