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Where there is no law, but every man does what is right in his own eyes, there is the least of real liberty
Henry M. Robert

German Colonists in Transcarpathia

10 March, 1999 - 00:00

Gisella’s retinue included high-born noblemen, famous knights,
merchants, and peasants. Thus began the German colonization of Transcarpathia
to last from the twelfth through fifteenth centuries. The first colonists
hailed from northern Germanic regions of Lower Saxony and Flanders and
settled in what is now district centers Berehove, Tiachev, and other settlements.
In the eleventh century, the Berehove region was Transcarpathia’s first
region where Hungarian feudal lords settled firmly. According to a 1098
letter of credentials, these lands belonged to a Hungarian king’s brother.
After his death they were handed down to his son Lampert who founded the
city of Lamperhasa (literally, Lampert’s house). Hungarian magnates, interested
in higher profits from their estates, invited German colonists, primarily
craftsmen. In the thirteenth century, the city had so many colonists that
its name was changed to Lampersas, Sas meaning Saxon. It is not until 1507
that the city came to be called Beregsas. Yet, the village of Sasove, Vynohradiv
district, also confirms by its name the fact of having been founded by
the Saxons. Many German settlers of this period died of various epidemics,
while the survivors were assimilated by the local population.

A new wave of German colonization was immediately caused
by the suppression of Ferenz II Rakoczi’s uprising against the Austrians.
In 1728 Austrian Emperor Charles VI gave the greater part of Transcarpathia
as a gift to the German religious dignitary Count Lothar Franz Schoenborn
Buchheim, an ally of the Austrian Habsburgs. In return for their services,
the Schoenborn family also received estates in the Lower Austria west of
Vienna (county Buchheim). It was Schoenborn who assisted German settlers
to come to the Mukacheve region. Franconians from Bamberg and Wuerzburg
settled in the Slav villages of Verkhni Koropets and Novoselytsia, founded
in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Later on, Verkhni Koropets and
Novoselytsia also receive a few more families from the Schwabian Schwarzwald
and Bavarian Franconia, respectively.

The 1770-80s saw the beginning of Austrian colonization
of the area. To carry out salt-mining, lumbering, and other operations,
Maria Theresa and her son Joseph II resettle some Austrians from Salzkammergut
to the Maramor region in eastern Transcarpathia. An Austrian colony, Deutsch-Mokra
(now Komsomolsk), was established in the upper River Teresva basin, near
the village of Ruska Mokra. A group of colonists settled in the village
of Dubove. Later, residents of Deutsch-Mokra founded the village of Koenigsfeld
(now Ust-Chorna). In the nineteenth century, descendants of the Deutsch-Mokra
Austrian colonists began to resettle in the villages of the Teresva valley.

In the early nineteenth century, Count Schoenborn, whose
family had by then lost its church offices in Germany, recruited and resettled
in Transcarpathia Germans from Bohemia and Slovakia. Countess Sophia Schoenborn
founded in 1804 the village of Sophia (Sodiendorf), which received Czech
settlers, and in 1807 the village of Frideschew for the Slovak Spis region’s
Germans, the so-called Zipseren (after Zpis, the German name for Spis).

In 1776, small groups of German foresters arrived in Uzhhorod
and settled on Mynaiska Street. In 1850, the city received a group of German
peasants from Salzburg and, a little later, from the Palatinate by invitation
of the civil authorities. All of them were given houses, land plots, and
forest leasing rights. The local population called all Germans Schwabians.

Several groups of German settlers had thus taken shape
in the region by the early nineteenth century: the Schwabians and Franconians
in the Mukacheve area and partially in the town of Khust, Austrians in
the Teresva valley, the upper Tisza river basin and partially in the village
of Bordivka, Mukacheve district, Germans from Bohemia and Slovakia in area
of Rakhiv, Yasin, and in the villages of the Latorytsia river basin, north
of Mukacheve and around the village of Zahattia. Another mixed-population
group settled in the Pidhorod neighborhood of Mukacheve.

It is of interest that Hungarian statistics once noted
the German population of Transcarpathia had doubled from 15,231 to 33,694
in 1880-1910. The Czech statistics of 1921, however, show its abrupt decline
(7,668 or 3.1% of the total population). We do not yet know the exact number
of Germans still living in Transcarpathia after the extensive migrations
of the past decade.

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