in the village

OUR HOUSE WAS BUILT IN 1904

Our village, Nikolipolia (Nicholas' field) was one of the old Mennonite settlements. Catherine the Great invited some German people. mostly farmers to settle in an underused area of Ukraine.  There had been outlaws in this area. The Mennonites were promised religious freedom, as long as they didn't evangelize the local people, and they did not have to serve in the army. Things went well during the first years, they were properous farmers, and they expanded to new settlements, inckuding ours. There were two village here, Nicholasfeld and and Franzfeld, but they were combined into one later. There are many house with construction dates on, from the late 1880's to 1919. After the revolution and Ukraine's inclusion in the USSR, persecution and even vilence against them (they were blamed for the war as Germans, and prosperity was not seen as a good thing) more and more Mennonites emigrated to North America, with as much as they can take with them (less as time went on) Most Mennonites that remained hide their German roots for safety as communism and WWII progressed. Even tombstones were vandalized because they had German on them, and some Mennonite villages completely disappeared.

We went for a walk at the beginning of May turing left from our front yard...

 

 

 no wait that's summertime...

one of my favorite photos from last summer

nope,  that's winter in the village

Here's the end of April pics!  Most houses in the village have a fence and gate, and many have a flower bed in front of that with some kind of fencing to keep the cows out as they walk past every day on the way to and from the pasture. There are a few fences you can see in like this one, but many new fences are made of cement panels, less visability but more security. There are more in the village every year and lots of them in the city.

You might notice this house has two paint colors- the right side is pinky/lavendery with purple and and gold shutters, the left white with green and blue. Like many old Mennonite houses in the village it was turned into a duplex in Soviet days, and still is, with two gates and a fence down the center of the yard.

This little house was a wreck three years ago when we came, someone has done a lot of work on it to turn it into the cute little home you see now.

One of the nicest kept Mennonite houses in the village the numbers say built in 1890, two families still live in it