They were Protestants from Moravia, in what is now the Czech Republic, and they left because staying meant persecution. From 1722 they began arriving in Upper Lusatia, where a young nobleman named Count Nicolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf invited them to settle on his Berthelsdorf estates. Christian David, a Moravian carpenter and missionary, built the first house. Zinzendorf, still in his early twenties when this started, did not remain a landlord for long; he took on the leadership of the community and spent the rest of his life shaping it, until his death in 1760. What the settlers brought with them was a memory. They claimed descent from the reform movement of Jan Hus, the Bohemian preacher condemned and burned at the stake at Konstanz in 1415, and they had spent three centuries as a suppressed minority. Herrnhut was the first place in a very long time where they could build in the open.

The early years were not harmonious. A community assembled from refugees of several backgrounds argued, as communities do, and by 1727 it was close to breaking apart. In May the residents signed a Brotherly Agreement setting out how they would live together. Then, on 13 August 1727, something happened at a communion service that the participants could not fully explain and never stopped referring to. In their own description, the people of Herrnhut learned to love one another; they attributed it to a visitation of the Holy Spirit, and Moravians have called it their Pentecost ever since. The continuous prayer watch dates from that summer. So does everything that followed, because a village that had nearly torn itself apart instead turned outward, and did so on a scale that has few parallels.

In 1732 two ordinary tradesmen left Herrnhut for the Caribbean - Johann Leonhard Dober, a potter, and David Nitschmann, a carpenter - bound for Saint Thomas in the Danish West Indies. It is generally counted as the beginning of the organised Protestant missionary movement. The following year Matthaeus Stach and two companions founded a mission in Greenland and named the place Neu-Herrnhut. Others went to South Africa in 1738 and to Denmark in 1771. In the twenty-five years after 1727 this village sent out a hundred missionaries, more than all Protestant churches together had managed in the two centuries since the Reformation, and roughly nineteen hundred more have gone in the years since. Set that against the size of the place: Herrnhut's population today is under six thousand. Few of these people came home. They went to colonies and coastlines where Europeans died quickly of disease, and they went knowing it.

The town exports one other thing, and you have probably seen it without knowing where it came from. The Herrnhuter Stern is a twenty-five-pointed paper or plastic star, lit from inside, hung in windows and on porches through Advent and Christmas. It has been manufactured here commercially since 1897, and it has spread far beyond the church that first hung it. Commerce is not new to Herrnhut either. Abraham Dürninger founded a trading house here in 1747 which grew into one of the largest in Europe, and a shop bearing his name still trades on Dürninger Straße. The modern economy is a mix of church administration, light manufacturing and visitors - a former East German town that has done rather better than most of its neighbours, largely on the strength of what happened here in the 1720s.

In 2024, UNESCO added Herrnhut to the World Heritage List as part of the serial site Moravian Church Settlements, alongside Christiansfeld in Denmark, Gracehill in Northern Ireland and Bethlehem in Pennsylvania. The grouping is the point: these are four towns on three continents built to the same principles by the same movement, and Herrnhut is where the pattern was set. It remains the world headquarters of the Moravian Church, the Evangelische Brüdergemeine. What a visitor finds is a quiet, orderly place around Zinzendorfplatz, walkable end to end in an afternoon, socially conservative in a way that will not suit everyone, and unusually welcoming regardless of what you believe or do not. The founders prized persuasion over coercion, having been on the receiving end of the alternative. Upper Lusatia lies all around: Obercunnersdorf with its timber-framed Umgebindehäuser six kilometres off, Löbau and its cast-iron tower eleven, Bautzen and Görlitz within an hour, and the Zittau Mountains and the Czech border to the south.