Gammalsvenskby

Verbivka (Standard Swedish: Gammalsvenskby, local Swedish dialect: Gammölsvänskbi; literally: "Old Swedish Village"; Ukrainian Старошведське, Staroshvedske; German Alt-Schwedendorf) is a former village that is now a neighborhood of another village of Zmiivka (Ukrainian: Зміївка) in Beryslav Raion of Kherson Oblast, Ukraine. It is famous for having close relations to the Swedish cultural heritage.

The village of Zmiyivka itself also includes three former villages settled by ethnic Germans. These were the two Lutheran villages of Schlangendorf and Mühlhausendorf and the Roman Catholic village of Klosterdorf. In the nineteenth century, the whole region, and large parts of southern Russia contained villages settled by Germans belonging to various Protestant faiths, particularly Lutherans and Mennonites, as well as Roman Catholics. Askania-Nova biosphere reserve is nearby.

The population of Gammalsvenskby traces its origins to Hiiumaa (Dagö) in present-day Estonia, once a part of the Duchy of Estonia. According to the Treaty of Nystad, the island was ceded to the Russian Empire. The part of the local peasant population who were in conflict with the local aristocracy petitioned the Russian Empress to accept them as their subjects.Catherine II of Russia accepted the petition under the condition that the peasants were to be resettled in the newly conquered territories from the Ottoman Empire that were named New Russia (today in the Southern Ukraine). Enticed by promises of new fertile land, they trekked overland to southern Ukraine, as colonists for the new territories that Russia had won from the Ottoman Empire. While some sources call the Estonian Swedes' migration an outright expulsion from their Baltic homeland, other accounts stress the fact that these poor and oppressed serf farmers were given what may have seemed like a generous offer to them. Regardless of the impetus, the outcome of this mass migration was, however, disastrous. Less than half of the nearly 1,000 villagers died on the march to their new home to which they were required to get to on their own. On arrival, they found no trace of the houses they had expected to find. Moreover, in their first year in Ukraine, an even larger portion of the settlers died. According to the records of the Swedish congregation, of the original thousand or so who had set out for Ukraine 18 months earlier, only 135 people remained alive by March 1783, a terrible reduction in their numbers.

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