 We spent two days in Molotschna, a colony with nearly 3-score villages.
Our ancestry had lived and worshipped in 24 or more of these villages. We could not
schedule all of them. What were we looking for anyway? How does one get a feel
for Place? We took two of the three tours to Molotschna. The tour
leaders primarily concentrated on Mennonite buildings that still existed. Only a
small number of buildings remained, and of those, most were constructed after the last of
our particular forebears had left. The sense of place would come from the experience
of being there in a more abstract sense -- seeing the openness of the steppes, trying to
imagine the kind of farms that then existed.
Molotschna map with 19th century German names. The blue and red
lines indicate the two bus tours that we took. |
There were, however, a few distinct buildings that our families would have known, most
notably, churches in Alexanderwohl, Rückenau, and Ohrloff. The streets are the
roads that they traveled. The threshing stones are those that they used.
Otherwise, we found places that gave us new memories. The villages were now poor
with little for the routine tourist to see. Looking for photographs, it was often
the windows that seemed to give a vision into the past, so they were often photographed.
Just to keep things from getting too cumbersome, this section is divided into three
parts -- Molotschna I, II, and III.
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