Back from touristic break

We are back in Kiev in a coffee shop after a very restful overnight train ride. It was nice to play the role of tourists, and we had a very successful trip considering that we did all the planning for it the same day that we left. Yesterday we were able to do an additional visit to the village that my Thiessen ancestors lived in. Our guide was Victor Penner, a Mennonite whose family remained here in spite of Soviet persecution and may well be related to me somehow. He is extremely knowledgeable about all the local villages and history, having been one of the researchers for the definitive resource on Mennonite history in Ukraine. Looking at his picture, I wouldn't be surprised to see him walking down the street in the Manitoba town my mom grew up in. We took hundreds of pictures in our two days in Zaporizhia, and I hope to come back again with a little more time. Even though we saw a lot of old Mennonite gravestones in a couple of cemeteries, most of them were removed and used for building foundations, so it is unlikely that I will be able identify ancestors' graves. However, it is fascinating to walk or drive on the main streets of the villages where they lived. We visited 6 Mennonite villages and saw countless old houses, commercial or community buildings, and gravestones. One village is now a thriving industrial part of the city; 5 Mennonite factories (originally for carriages and farm machinery) were consolidated into what is now the biggest auto maker in Ukraine, which still uses a lot of the original buildings. Other nearby Mennonite villages range from thriving suburban to sleepy rural to completely disappeared (it is assumed that their building materials were recycled in the 1940s while residents were in exile in Germany).

Mennonite houses are made of high-quality clay brick, with unnecessarily steep roofs originally designed to shed Prussian snow, thick pillars at corners, always two windows in the gable of the short side facing the street, cross-shaped brick pattern from alternating short and long bricks, and decorative layers at ceiling level.

Stan and Ju on the old ferry landing from Nieder Chortitza (where property records from 1847 indicate that my Thiessen ancestors lived) to Schoenwiese (in the distance, where the Mennonite factories were located).

The 600-year-old oak tree where the first Mennonites in this part of the world camped on their arrival. Only the leftmost branch is still alive, but it is surrounded by daughter trees.

Monument to Mennonite victims of Stalinist terror, including Victor's grandfather, made with granite from the Janzen Quarry