Merzdorf (Upper Lusatia)

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A place-name sign erected according to the old model at the original location reminds of Merzdorf.

Merzdorf , Łućo in Upper Sorbian , was a village in what is now the district of Görlitz in Saxony and the administrative seat of the municipality of the same name, which consists of three villages. The village, located in the Sorbian settlement area of Upper Lusatia , became famous as the birthplace of the Sorbian scientist and folk writer Jan Arnošt Smoler .

The place, first mentioned in a document around the year 1400, was relocated from 1975 to 1978 and its place was dredged from June 1979 to July 1980 by the Bärwalde open-cast mine . The area of ​​the original location today belongs to the municipality of Boxberg / OL and has since been recultivated; The northwestern shore of the Bärwalder See is about a kilometer away .

geography

Aerial photo from 1960

Located on the right bank of the original Spreelauf , Merzdorf was surrounded by an extensive, sparsely populated heathland. Schöpsdorf was around 1.5 kilometers southwest, followed by Uhyst after a further two kilometers . Downriver the distance to Bärwalde was about two kilometers. Boxberg is around four to five kilometers from the original location to the northeast and Kringelsdorf to the east. About ten kilometers to the south-east are Klitten and Jahmen .

Merzdorf was in the form of a street village with a corridor at 127  m above sea level. NN , occasionally heights of up to 140 meters were reached on inland dunes .

history

Local history

Archaeological excavations before the village was dredged over revealed some tools used by post-glacial hunters and gatherers that can be assigned to the Palaeolithic and Mesolithic .

The permanent resettlement of the region around Hoyerswerda by Milzener and Lusitzer probably occurred from the south from the 10th century. A settlement around 1200 is assumed for Merzdorf, which was expanded in the 14th century by German immigrants from Swabia in the second phase of the German settlement in the east . It was first mentioned in documents around 1400, the first mention of the German name Merteinsdorf together with Schewbsdorf took place in 1418 in King Wenceslas IV's loan book .

The half-timbered church from 1611 had to be demolished in 1934 due to dilapidation.

Around 1500 Merzdorf already had a church, which at that time was still a subsidiary church of Klitten . The two neighboring villages Bärwalde and Schöpsdorf were parish in it. The church building was rebuilt in 1611 as a half-timbered church.

During the Thirty Years' War , rule over Upper Lusatia finally changed from the Kingdom of Bohemia to the Electorate of Saxony as a result of the Peace of Prague in 1635 , after Saxony had exercised it for several years.

In the course of the Congress of Vienna , Merzdorf came to Prussia in 1815 and was assigned to the newly created district of Hoyerswerda in the province of Lower Silesia in 1825 . The almost entirely Sorbian peasant population had to resort to forestry in addition to agriculture at that time. The district administrator wrote to the government of the Liegnitz administrative district in 1881 : "The municipalities of Bärwalde, Merzdorf and Schöpsdorf are among the poorest municipalities in the district, the lands there consist mostly of very light sandy soils and only provide extremely low yields."

The new church could already be consecrated in 1935. The last service took place in 1977, in 1979 it was blown up.

Under these circumstances, many farmers sold their lands to the lignite companies that were active in the Lusatian lignite mining district at the beginning of the 20th century . Until the planned excavation of the pit, the farmers were allowed to continue cultivating the fields. The old half-timbered church was demolished in 1934 and replaced by a massive church building that could be consecrated as early as 1935. As early as 1925, the Evangelical Bible Community based in Chemnitz built a chapel.

After the end of the Second World War , the lignite companies were expropriated and their lands were redistributed as part of the land reform (“Junker land in peasant hands”).

Due to the administrative reform of 1952 , the community was on the southeastern edge of the newly formed Hoyerswerda district in the Cottbus district , the Weisswasser and Niesky districts were in the immediate vicinity. On January 1, 1957, Bärwalde and Schöpsdorf were incorporated into Merzdorf. In this way socialist structures should be consolidated and the collectivization of agriculture should be promoted.

The Merzdorf Atonement Cross at its new location in Bärwalde

The planning of demolition was officially announced on December 16, 1969 at a residents' meeting. The resettlement of the village took place in 1975 and 1976. The atonement cross from the 14./15. Century was brought to Bärwalde shortly before the demolition in 1977 and erected there. The last service was held in the church on April 24, 1977, and the last Bible study in the Bethlehem Chapel was held on April 1, 1978. On May 19, 1978, the last meeting of the municipality of Merzdorf took place in Bärwalde. Before that, on January 1, 1978, the district of Bärwalde, which was not affected by the opencast mine, became an independent municipality again. In the same year the demolition of Merzdorf began, the corridor of which was incorporated into the municipality of Bärwalde. The Evangelical Bible Fellowship also built a new chapel there.

Schöpsdorf was resettled until 1981 and then dredged over, the corridor was connected to the southern neighboring community of Uhyst .

Population development

year Residents
1825 152
1840 175
1871 228
1885 219
1905 212
1925 240
1939 202
1946 234
1950 283
1964 497
1971 476
italics: community with districts

When the Saxon state recession was surveyed in 1777, 10 possessed men , 3 gardeners and 14 cottagers were counted in Merzdorf .

The first census, in which every single inhabitant was counted equally, showed a local population of 152 inhabitants in 1825. By the time the empire was founded in 1871, the population rose to 228, then fell slightly by the beginning of the 20th century. Arnošt Muka counted only 9 Germans among the 226 inhabitants around 1880, the Sorbs made up the majority of the population with 96%.

The relatively high number of 240 inhabitants at the time of the Weimar Republic could not be maintained until the outbreak of the Second World War . After the war, the population rose to pre-war levels due to refugees and displaced persons from the east, and in 1950 it reached a level of 283 inhabitants. At the same time, according to Ernst Tschernik , the Sorbian-speaking population sank to only 53% by 1956 .

Due to the merger of Bärwalde, Merzdorf and Schöpsdorf, the community had around 500 inhabitants. In 1964 the population was still higher than the total of the population of the three towns in 1950, but in 1971 there was a downward trend.

Officially, 182 people in 72 households were resettled in the course of the demolition in Merzdorf. Most of them moved to Hoyerswerda and Weißwasser , the rest to Bärwalde or built new homes in other rural communities, mostly in the Uhyst / Boxberg area.

Place name

The German place name is recorded as Merteinsdorf in 1418 , as Mertensdorff in 1429 (with -ss- in 1473) and as Merzdorff as early as 1536 . In addition to the current spelling Merzdorf (1597, 1768), Mertzdorff can still be traced in 1658 . The name probably goes back to a Marten, Merten or Martin who presumably led a group of German settlers as the locator .

The Sorbian place name is mentioned around 1400 in the form of a personal name as Lucze in a tax directory of the Bautzen council archives, later forms are Wucżo (1767 in Christian Knauthe's Derer Oberlausitzer Sorbenbaren complex church history ), Wuczo (1800) and Łućo (1843). In 1975 Ernst Eichler gave wuč as the dialectic pronunciation , which could explain why the Sorbian name was only given as Łuć on the place-name sign at the entrance to the village from the direction of Schöpsdorf . The name probably goes back to the Sorbian word łut for " linden , linden bast ".

memory

Memorial stone on the site of the church
Information board at the memorial for Merzdorf and Schöpsdorf on Bärwalder See

At the site of the former location, a memorial stone today reminds of the village. Another memorial for Merzdorf and Schöpsdorf is located a little south of them on the north bank of the Bärwalder See .

In Bärwalde the original Merzdorfer Straße still bears this name, in the Hoyerswerdaer Neustadt some streets in the residential complex 8 were named after villages that were devastated by opencast mines in the former district area. The character of the local Merzdorfer Straße has changed from a residential street to a thoroughfare since 2000 when there was a lot of housing demolition.

Personalities

  • The Lutheran theologian and hymn poet Johann Mentzer (1658–1734) was born in the neighboring town of Jahmen and in 1691 took up his first pastorate in Merzdorf.
  • The Protestant theologian and later Görlitz pastor primarius Johann Gottfried Mosig (1726–1805) had been pastor of Merzdorf since 1749.
  • The Sorbian philologist, writer and publisher Jan Arnošt Smoler , German Johann Ernst Schmaler (1816–1884), was born the son of a cantor in Merzdorf.

Sources and further reading

literature

  • Günter Meusel et al .: Merzdorf . From the story of a small heath village. Bautzen 1979.
  • Frank Förster : Disappeared Villages . The demolitions of the Lusatian lignite mining area until 1993 (=  series of publications by the Institute for Sorbian Folk Research in Bautzen . Volume 8 ). Domowina-Verlag, Bautzen 1995, ISBN 3-7420-1623-7 , pp. 127-133 .
  • Joachim Mühle (Ed.): From the Muskauer Heide to the Rotstein . Home book of the Lower Silesian Upper Lusatia District. Lusatia Verlag, Bautzen 2006, ISBN 978-3-929091-96-0 , p. 272 (text by Lothar Simon).

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Federal Statistical Office (Ed.): Municipalities 1994 and their changes since 01.01.1948 in the new federal states . Metzler-Poeschel, Stuttgart 1995, ISBN 3-8246-0321-7 , pp. 279 .
  2. ↑ Evangelische Kirchgemeinde Horno (ed.): Lost home . Mining and its effects on churches and parishes in Upper and Lower Lusatia. 2007, ISBN 3-935826-88-5 , pp. 58-65 .
  3. ↑ Merzdorf in the Digital Historical Directory of Saxony
  4. ^ Frank Förster: Disappeared Villages , page 130.
  5. ↑ Von der Muskauer Heide zum Rotstein , page 272.
  6. ^ Ludwig Elle: Language policy in the Lausitz . Domowina-Verlag, Bautzen 1995, p. 249 .
  7. ↑ a b Ernst Eichler , Hans Walther : Ortnamesbuch der Oberlausitz . Studies on the toponymy of the districts of Bautzen, Bischofswerda, Görlitz, Hoyerswerda, Kamenz, Löbau, Niesky, Senftenberg, Weißwasser and Zittau (=  German-Slavic research on naming and settlement history . Volume 28 ). Volume I, name book. Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 1975, p. 134 f .
  8. ^ Illustration in Günter Meusel et al .: Merzdorf , page 102.

References

The list of abandoned locations in the Lausitz coal area gives an overview of other places that were partially or completely canceled in the Lausitz coal region .

Web links

Commons : Merzdorf / Łućo  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Coordinates: 51 ° 24 '  N , 14 ° 32'  E