Hope Valley (Bessarabia)

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Hope valley is the desert of a Bessarabian German town in the Ukraine . The place was founded in 1842 in the historic Bessarabia landscape and leveled in 1946 when a military training area was built .

Hope valley around 1910

location

Map section with Hope Valley from 1907 with ethnic distribution in the region

The place was in the historical landscape of Bessarabia east of Borodino in the Karadai valley with the river of the same name, today Odessa Oblast , Ukraine .

history

The area of ​​Bessarabia came in 1812 in the Treaty of Bucharest from the Ottoman vassal state of Moldova together with the Budschak to the Russian Empire . The new acquisition was treated as a colonization area and initially assigned to the Governor General of New Russia . In a manifesto of 1813, Tsar Alexander I called German colonists into the country to colonize the newly won steppe areas in New Russia. German emigrants founded the place here in 1842 as the last of 24 German mother colonies in Bessarabia. They were established by immigrants, while daughter colonies were later established by residents of the mother colonies. It was founded by 25 families who had to leave the Karlstal estate in the Cherson Governorate, about 50 km away, in 1842 . The Welfare Committee in Odessa, as the Russian settlement authority for German colonists, assigned the families “Steppe 9” as the last uninhabited piece of land in the Budschak. This ended the Tsar's generous land allocation to German settlers.

In 1843 the colonists named their settlement Hope Valley. By 1847, other families from the communities of Glücksthal, Neudorf, Kassel, Worms, Bergdorf moved from the Cherson governorate east of the Dnestr to Hope Valley. In 1848 the colony was complete with 82 farms, each of which was equipped with 60 desjatinen land.

The land made available to the colonists was, as in large parts of Bessarabia, fertile black earth , which was suitable as arable and pasture land. There were wells in the settlement and the center of the village was crossed by the Karadai water, fed by springs. In the vicinity of the village, material for building construction was extracted in quarries. As in the rest of Bessarabia, viticulture was intensively pursued by the German colonists and almost every farm had a small vineyard.

In cattle breeding, the medium-weight colonist horse was mainly bred as warm blood, with the most popular color being black. As in many other German colonist villages, cattle and sheep breeding was neglected. Only young and beef cattle were kept in large quantities because the sale in the direction of Odessa brought in good proceeds. In the course of time, several craft businesses settled in Hope Valley, which were carpenters, wheelwright, saddler, cooper, tailor, shoemaker and blacksmith. One of the first blacksmiths was Johannes Höhn, who moved to Hope Valley with his family in 1854. He experimented on a new type of plow with an iron plow, which became world famous as the colonist plow. Later his son Johannes opened an agricultural machinery plant in Odessa with 1,300 employees, which supplied Russia and other countries with its products. Johannes Höhn later became an honorary citizen of Odessa.

Schoolhouse and church around 1910

Most of the residents worked in agriculture. In 1858 a school house was built that also served as a prayer house . In 1905 the residents built a church with 700 seats. After the Soviet occupation of Bessarabia in the summer of 1940, covered by the Hitler-Stalin Pact , the Bessarabian German residents joined the resettlement to the German Reich in autumn 1940 under the motto Heim ins Reich .

After 1945 Hope Valley belonged to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic under the names Russian: Надеждино Nadeschdino / Ukrainian: Надеждине Nadeschdyne . During the Soviet era, the place was completely destroyed in 1946 when a military training area was set up, as were four Moldovan villages. A memorial plaque erected by former residents in 2004 in the area of ​​the former cemetery commemorates the former location. The course of the streets and the locations of the earlier settlement houses can still be seen in the aerial photo.

Residents

In 1930 the place had 1,772 residents of German and 74 residents of other origins. In 1940 there were 1,930 residents of German and 59 residents of other origins.

See also

literature

  • Albert Kern (Hrsg.): Heimatbuch der Bessarabiendeutschen . Aid Committee of the Evangelical Lutheran Church from Bessarabia, Hanover 1964, pp. 277–280.
  • Werner Schabert: Hope Valley: Current interim report in: Mitteilungsblatt des Bessarabiendeutschen Verein , issue 2, February 2020, p. 12
  • Werner Schabert: Hope Valley: History in: Bulletin of the Bessarabiendeutschen Verein , Issue 2, February 2020, p. 13

Web links

Commons : Hope Valley  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Axel Hindemith: Hindemith - a Silesian family name in Bessarabia, co-founder of Hope Valley (pdf, 333 KB)

Coordinates: 46 ° 19 ′ 13.1 ″  N , 29 ° 20 ′ 51.7 ″  E