German Evangelical Lutheran Congregation in Kiev

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The St. Katharinen Church
Worship room
Stained glass window of the church interior

The German Evangelical Lutheran Congregation in Kiev is a German-speaking Protestant church community in the capital of Ukraine . She belonged to the German Evangelical Lutheran Church of Ukraine (DELKU) from 1992 to 2016.

First church

Beginnings in the 18th century

The founding year is 1767, when a group of German Lutherans in Kiev began to celebrate church services . On August 1, 1767, a church book was also created. Services initially took place in the private apartment of the German pharmacist Georg Friedrich Bunge . He led the congregation and promoted it by having his children's tutor, Christoph Leberecht Grahl (1744 - March 30, 1799), act as pastor of the congregation (he later also became his son-in-law). Until 1799 Catholics were also baptized and buried by Grahl , as all Roman Catholic clergy had fled when Kiev was ceded by Poland to Russia in 1686 . In 1799 there was again a Roman Catholic vicar in Kiev.

The German Evangelical Lutheran Congregation was excellently networked in its early years: Prince Ludwig Adolf Peter zu Sayn-Wittgenstein , later field marshal and defender of Riga and St. Petersburg against Napoleon Bonaparte, was baptized here . Other famous names can be found in the church records, some parishioners, some godparents : Field Marshal Count Levin August von Bennigsen , General Karl Wilhelm von Toll , General Carl Gustav von Sievers , Otto Heinrich von Lieven , the princes of Dolgoruki , Daschkow, Vjasemski, Trubezkoi and Volkonsky . A total of 14 members of the Ost -Sacken noble Baltic family have been parishioners for over fifty years.

It is probably thanks to this that from 1787 the evangelical pastor in Kiev - it was still Christoph Leberecht Grahl - received an annual salary of 300 rubles from Tsarina Catherine II . From this, the Russian state later derived the right to be able to fill the pastor's position again if there was vacancy .

19th century

At the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century, two wooden churches were built one after the other for the growing community, and in 1857 the church of St. Katharinen, which is still in use today . In the middle of the 19th century, the congregation, whose membership had stagnated at around 300 for decades, quickly more than doubled. This was based on the expansion of Kiev operated by Tsar Nicholas I , which in general led to a strong increase in the number of inhabitants, but also on the establishment of the University of Kiev in 1834, where German teaching staff were employed in large numbers. This made the community's wooden church too small and the construction of a stone church possible. In 1857 the St. Katharinen Church, which is still in use today, was inaugurated. Since 1852 the community also ran its own school with German as the language of instruction, the Martinsschule , which was also given its own building in 1864. This, like the poor house of the community, which was inaugurated in 1882, was located in the immediate vicinity of the church. The clergy were usually trained at the University of Dorpat .

In 1811, by order of the minister of culture, there were 318 parishioners from 138 families. In 1874 there were 2,330 Protestant Germans in Kiev; in 1904 there were 4,700. The Evangelical Lutheran Church was a state church in Russia . The rising development of the community ended with the First World War , with which people of German descent - even if they were Russian subjects - were met with deep distrust on the part of Russian society and the state, and the February Revolution of 1917, which led to the separation of church and state, however for the first time also led to freedom of religion . The attempts of the German Evangelical Lutheran Congregation in Kiev to reorganize itself within the framework of an independent Ukraine that was now emerging were destroyed by the October Revolution and the annexation of Ukraine to the Soviet Union in 1919.

Downfall

As a result of the anti-religious policies of the Soviet Union, the church's property was confiscated and nationalized as early as 1919, but the church building was initially left for the church to be used for worship services. The community was then gradually destroyed by repressive regulations and arbitrary arrests under Stalinism . Richard Göhring, for example, the son of the last pastor in the community and theology student, was abducted on charges of “anti-Soviet activity” when he tried to distribute aid from Germany during the great famine of 1932/33. By 1937, all Protestant pastors and seminarians in the Soviet Union had been abducted, murdered or - if they were foreign nationals - deported. The Kiev community also had to stop its activities. The state bureaucracy then staged a "voluntary" dissolution of the community in April 1938 and the church building was finally withdrawn. An “application from the community that no longer exists” (!) Served as the basis .

Pastors

  • 1767–1799 Pastor Adjunkt Christoph Leberecht Grahl (* 1744, † March 30, 1799)
  • November 30, 1799–1810 Pastor Adjunct Wilhelm Ferdinand Bauerschmidt
  • 1812-24. April 1842 Pastor Adjunkt Justus Friedrich Eismamm († July 10, 1846)
  • February 13, 1843–1859 Pastor Adjunkt Johann Gottfried Abel († February 5, 1859)
  • 1859–1873 Pastor Adjunct Alexander Fromhold Svenson
  • June 17, 1874–1908 Pastor Friedrich Wilhelm Ludwig Wasem (September 6, 1838 in Dorpat ; † April 15, 1911 in Kiev)
1886–1888 with Pastor adj. Viktor Friedrich August Dobbert (May 10, 1862 in Prischib , Taurian Governorate ; † June 25, 1927 in Stettin )
1888-1891 with Pastor adj. Gideon Rinne (born March 28, 1861 in Reval , † April 1, 1897)
1891–1892 with Pastor adj. Alexander Anton Bosse (born January 4, 1858 in Wohlfahrt, Livonia ; † February 16, 1919 in Riga)
1892–1894 with Pastor adj. Georg Rath (born January 19, 1865 in Hoffnungsfeld , Cherson Governorate )
  • 1909–1920 Pastor Heinrich Gottfried Wilhelm Junger (born February 13, 1878 in Riga ; † September 12, 1963 in Nyköping , Sweden)
  • 1920–1932 Pastor Richard Königsfeld
  • 1933–1935 Pastor Johann Göhring (born June 7, 1876 in Alexanderhof / Alexanderhilf, Yekaterinoslaw Gouvernement , Prischib parish ; † after 1935 in Karelia )

Established in 1990

With the reforms under Mikhail Sergejewitsch Gorbachev it became possible again to found an Evangelical Lutheran congregation in Kiev. In 1990, some of the few surviving parishioners who still lived in Kiev and had been confirmed in the old parish before 1938 came together for this purpose. The legal basis was then created by the Law of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic on Freedom of Conscience and Religious Organizations of April 23, 1993.

From the beginning, the community tried to return the historic church. From 1991 , the first church services could take place in a windowless room of the old church building, which until then had been used for the special exhibitions of the Museum of Folk Architecture and Customs of Ukraine . However, a long process full of bureaucratic and actual difficulties made the return of the church possible only on November 29, 1998 - the 1st Advent .

Since 1992 the parish has had full-time pastors again, who are sent by the EKD . In 1996, on the 450th anniversary of Martin Luther's death, it organized a colloquium on Martin Luther and Lutheranism - probably the first on this subject that ever took place in a successor territory to the Russian Empire or the Soviet Union.

The congregation today consists of the descendants of Germans from Russia , members of the German-speaking embassies , German-speaking company representatives in Kiev, but also Ukrainians and Russians who joined the congregation because of their interest in church music or Martin Luther. The service is held in German, prayers and sermons are translated into Russian .

In 2016, the congregation left the German Evangelical Lutheran Church of Ukraine due to strong dissatisfaction with the administration of Bishop Maschewski .

literature

  • Alexander Karlowitsch Dellen: Brief news about the Evangelical Lutheran congregation in Kiev . Dorpat approx. 1857 [possibly Festschrift for the inauguration of the Church of St. Katharinen]
  • Johann Jakob Lerche: Life and Travel History . Hall 1791.
  • Nikolaus Neese: History of the Evangelical Lutheran Church and Congregation in Kiev . Kiev 1882.
  • Klaus-Jürgen Röpke: From the living room to the stone church . In: Kiev. St. Catherine's. Festschrift for the rededication of the church. Munich 2000, ISBN 3-583-33108-7 , pp. 11-23.
  • Eugen Teise: The re-establishment of the community - the work of strong women . In: Festschrift for the rededication of the church. Munich 2000, ISBN 3-583-33108-7 , pp. 93-95.
  • Tatjana Terjoschina: Do not be afraid, you little flock. The history of the Evangelical Lutheran congregation in Kiev. In: Festschrift for the rededication of the church. Munich 2000, ISBN 3-583-33108-7 , pp. 63-91.
  • Tatjana Terjoschina: The seven-year struggle for the return of the church . In: Festschrift for the rededication of the church. Munich 2000, ISBN 3-583-33108-7 , p. 29.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Homepage of the Kiev municipality ( Memento of the original from December 25, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , accessed December 24, 2015  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / katharina.kiev.ua
  2. ↑ Online encyclopedia on the culture and history of Germans in Eastern Europe - religious and church history from: Tatjana Terjoschina: Do not be afraid, you little flock . The history of the Evangelical Lutheran congregation in Kiev. In: Terjoschina / Roepke: Kiev , accessed on December 24, 2015
  3. ↑ Th. Hirschhausen u. a .: Addendum to the album of the Theological Association in Dorpat . Published by the Theological Association, Dorpat 1929, p. 42, University of Tartu online library , accessed December 24, 2015
  4. ↑ Erik Amburger: The pastors of the Protestant churches in Russia: from the end of the 16th century to 1937: a biographical lexicon . Institute for Northeast German Cultural Work; Martin Luther Verlag, Lüneburg; Erlangen 1998, ISBN 3-922296-82-3 , p. 104 (557 pp. Wolhynien.net [accessed March 19, 2017]).
  5. ↑ Achim Reis: Years of Building. In: Festschrift for the rededication of the church. Munich 2000, ISBN 3-583-33108-7 , pp. 99-101
  6. ↑ Florian Kellermann: Protestants in the Ukraine - Ideological trench warfare in the Evangelical Church. Deutschlandfunk, April 22, 2016, accessed on March 22, 2017 .