Gross Heydekrug church
The church in Groß Heydekrug (1939–1946 Großheidekrug , today in Russian Vsmorje ) was one of the last Protestant church buildings in East Prussia before the Second World War in 1931 . It was a plastered brick building without a tower with a roof turret for hanging bells. The church was demolished in 1948.
Geographical location
Before 1945, Groß Heydekrug was the largest village on the Frischen Haff with 2,412 inhabitants and belonged to the Fischhausen district (1939 to 1945 Samland district ) in the Königsberg administrative district of the Prussian province of East Prussia . Today Vsmorje is a settlement with 1883 inhabitants and belongs to the Swetlowski gorodskoi okrug (Svetly district) in the Russian Kaliningrad Oblast ( Koenigsberg region (Prussia) ). The place is halfway between Kaliningrad (Königsberg) and Primorsk (Fischhausen) on the Russian trunk road A 193 , the former German Reichsstrasse 131 . The nearest train station is Ljublino -Nowoje on the Kaliningrad-Baltijsk railway line (Königsberg-Pillau) , the former East Prussian Southern Railway .
The location of the Groß Heydekruger church was in the eastern outskirts south of the main road (today: Sowjetskaja uliza) in the direction of the old Kaporner Straße (Spasskaja uliza) and is probably - no longer recognizable - in the area of today's Bratskaja mogila ( mass grave site ).
Church building
The Groß Heydekruger Church was a compact, plastered brick building, the interior of which could be enlarged by connecting it to the parish hall. The church did not have a tower. A small roof turret served as a device to hang a bell that had been donated by the mother church Medenau (now Russian: Logwino ) for the consecration of the church .
The interior of the church was covered by a deep vault . A simple cross rose above the simple altar . The pulpit was to the left of the altar at the arch of the sanctuary.
The church was consecrated on November 15, 1931. In the last months of the Second World War the church was badly damaged. The ruin was demolished in 1948 and used as a quarry.
Parish
Groß Heydekrug was originally not a church village and belonged - probably even before the Reformation - to the Medenau church . This was incorporated into the Fischhausen church district (today in Russian: Primorsk), which was part of the church province of East Prussia of the Protestant Church of the Old Prussian Union .
When a school was built in Groß Heydekrug in 1744, services have been held here ever since. The rapidly growing population of the village on the Haffstrom, which was developing into a summer retreat for the townspeople from Königsberg (Prussia) , made the use of special auxiliary preachers necessary from 1896. From 1909 on, Groß Heydekrug became a separate pastoral care district, to which at least 2,000 parishioners belonged in the 1925 census. In 1929 an independent parish was established in Groß Heydekrug, but it did not give up its connections to the mother church. The culmination of the development of the parish was the consecration of the church in 1931.
The escape and expulsion of the local population from Groß Heydekrug and the anti-church ideology in the Soviet era brought church life in Vsmorje to a standstill.
It was not until the 1990s that new Evangelical Lutheran congregations emerged in Kaliningrad Oblast , the closest of which is that in Swetly (room shack) . It is a subsidiary of the Church of the Resurrection in Kaliningrad (Königsberg) in the Kaliningrad provost of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of European Russia .
Parish places
With the establishment of a separate parish in Groß Heydekrug, nine places - which previously belonged to the separate pastoral care district - were separated from the mother church in Medenau and united to form their own parish Groß Heydekrug. Next to the church there were:
| German name | Russian name | German name | Russian name | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kaporn | Fun bunk | Nautzwinkel | Zhukovskoye | |
| Klein Heydekrug | Pokeiten | |||
| Margins | Zhukovskoye | Jug of four brothers | Kosmodemjansky | |
| Marching | Volochayevskoye | Widitten | Izhevskoye |
Pastor
Between 1896 and 1945, pastors (assistant preachers until 1929) worked in Groß Heydekrug:
|
|
Church records
The church records for the parish of Groß Heydekrug survived the war and are now kept in the Evangelical Central Archive in Berlin-Kreuzberg :
- Baptisms (1896-1944)
- Confirmations (1898 to 1944)
- Weddings (1896 to 1944)
- Funerals (1896-1944).
In addition to the confirmation documents, there are also alphabetical lists of names.
Individual evidence
- ↑ As of October 14, 2010
- ↑ Walther Hubatsch , History of the Protestant Church in East Prussia , Volume II: Portraits of East Prussian Churches , Göttingen, 1968, page 33, Fig. 36
- ↑ Wsmorje - Großheidekrug, Kaporn at ostpreussen.net (with photos)
- ↑ Patrick Plew, The churches in Samland: Groß Heydekrug (with photos and video clips)
- ↑ Walther Hubatsch, History of the Evangelical Church of East Prussia , Volume III: Documents , Göttingen, 1968, page 454
- ↑ Evangelical Lutheran Provosty Kaliningrad ( Memento of the original dated August 29, 2011 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. (German Russian)
- ↑ Walther Hubatsch, History of the Evangelical Church in East Prussia , Volume III (as above)
- ↑ Friedald Moeller, Old Prussian Protestant Pastor's Book from the Reformation to the Expulsion in 1945 , Hamburg, 1968, page 46
- ↑ Christa Stache, Directory of the Church Books in the Evangelical Central Archive in Berlin , Part I: The Eastern Church Provinces of the Evangelical Church of the Old Prussian Union , Berlin, 1992³, page 49
Coordinates: 54 ° 41 ′ 51.4 ″ N , 20 ° 15 ′ 1.7 ″ E