Qualla: Chortitza Colony https://qualla.com/chortitza-colony en-us © 2026 Bendyline Thu, 23 Jul 2026 20:34:14 GMT Qualla serial false Qualla support@bendyline.com yes https://qualla.com/_m/u/b/8/b/chortitza-colony-wp/hero-small.webp Qualla: Chortitza Colony https://qualla.com/chortitza-colony Chortitza Colony: Introduction https://qualla.com/chortitza-colony/ Photo credit No machine-readable author provided. Warendorfer assumed (based on copyright claims)., CC BY-SA 3.0. In the winter of 1787, two hundred and twenty-eight families left the Vistula delta and set out across a continent for land they had never seen. They were Mennonites, Dutch in ancestry and Low German in speech, drawn east by a promise from Catherine the Great: free acres, religious freedom, exemption from military service, the right to their own schools and their own language. What they founded in 1789 on the banks of the Dnieper, near the island of Khortytsia, became Chortitza, the first Mennonite colony in the Russian Empire. It is remembered still as the Old Colony, the mother of them all. Its story runs from bare sod dugouts to prosperity, and then to one of the twentieth century's long tragedies.

Read more: Chortitza Colony on Qualla

Image: No machine-readable author provided. Warendorfer assumed (based on copyright claims). | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/u/b/8/b/chortitza-colony-wp/ub8b-chortitza-colony-intro.mp3 0:06 1 full Chortitza Colony: The Bargain with an Empress https://qualla.com/chortitza-colony/ Photo credit No machine-readable author provided. Warendorfer assumed (based on copyright claims)., CC BY-SA 3.0. The Mennonites of the Vistula delta had a problem their faith could not solve: too many people, too little land. When Prussia absorbed the region in 1772, new laws made it nearly impossible for them to buy more. So when Catherine II's 1763 manifesto invited Europeans to farm Russ...

Read more: Chortitza Colony on Qualla

Image: No machine-readable author provided. Warendorfer assumed (based on copyright claims). | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/u/b/8/b/chortitza-colony-wp/ub8b-chortitza-colony-the-bargain-with-an-empress.mp3 0:06 2 full Chortitza Colony: Sod Houses on the Steppe https://qualla.com/chortitza-colony/ Photo credit No machine-readable author provided. Warendorfer assumed (based on copyright claims)., CC BY-SA 3.0. The pioneering years nearly broke them. Their intended site near Kherson had become a battlefield in a new Russo-Turkish war, so they were resettled near Alexandrovsk, present-day Zaporizhzhia. Barges carrying their possessions arrived ransacked; building timber was stolen before...

Read more: Chortitza Colony on Qualla

Image: No machine-readable author provided. Warendorfer assumed (based on copyright claims). | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/u/b/8/b/chortitza-colony-wp/ub8b-chortitza-colony-sod-houses-on-the-steppe.mp3 0:06 3 full Chortitza Colony: A World of Their Own https://qualla.com/chortitza-colony/ Photo credit No machine-readable author provided. Warendorfer assumed (based on copyright claims)., CC BY-SA 3.0. Out of that hardship grew something remarkable. By the mid-nineteenth century Chortitza was prosperous, self-governing, and quietly modern. Every village ran its own elementary school at a time when compulsory education was unknown across most of Europe; the Central School, found...

Read more: Chortitza Colony on Qualla

Image: No machine-readable author provided. Warendorfer assumed (based on copyright claims). | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/u/b/8/b/chortitza-colony-wp/ub8b-chortitza-colony-a-world-of-their-own.mp3 0:06 4 full Chortitza Colony: The Long Unmaking https://qualla.com/chortitza-colony/ Photo credit No machine-readable author provided. Warendorfer assumed (based on copyright claims)., CC BY-SA 3.0. The First World War ended the calm, and the Russian Civil War brought terror to the villages. Late in 1919 the anarchist army of Nestor Makhno occupied the colony; its fighters murdered and raped, and the typhus they spread eventually reached nearly the whole population, killing ...

Read more: Chortitza Colony on Qualla

Image: No machine-readable author provided. Warendorfer assumed (based on copyright claims). | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/u/b/8/b/chortitza-colony-wp/ub8b-chortitza-colony-the-long-unmaking.mp3 0:06 5 full