Caucasus Germans () are part of the German minority in Russia and the former Soviet Union. They migrated to the Caucasus largely in the first half of the 19th century and settled in the North Caucasus, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Armenia and the region of Kars (present-day northeastern Turkey). In 1941, the majority of them were subject to deportation to Central Asia and Siberia during Joseph Stalin's population transfer in the Soviet Union. After Stalin's death in 1953 and the beginning of the Khrushchev Thaw, the Caucasus Germans were allowed to return, though only few did. Many assimilated and, after 1991, immigrated to Germany.Mukhina, p. 169. Although the community today is a fraction of what it once was, many German buildings and churches are still extant, with some turned into museums.
History Origins The victory of the Russian Empire under Catherine the Great in the Russo-Turkish War of 1768–1774 ensured its expansion into the Caucasus. It also created a need in populating these lands with Russian subjects in order to hasten their exploration.Mukhina, p. 12. In the late 18th century, the government permitted families of Volga Germans to settle in the Kuban displacing the native Circassians who were being exiled from their lands to the Ottoman Empire. However, poor infrastructure, lack of organization of the officials responsible for the settlement and the refusal of the military personnel to have these lands populated by non-Russians were an obstacle to the steady and constant migration of the Germans. In 1815, while participating in the Congress of Vienna, Russian Tsar Alexander I visited Stuttgart, a city in his mother's native Kingdom of Württemberg. Upon witnessing the oppression that local peasants were undergoing either due to belonging to different non-Lutheran Protestant sects or to their participation in separatist movements, he arranged for their settlement in Russian Transcaucasia in order to form agricultural colonies.
Early 19th century On September 21, 1818, the first German settlement in Transcaucasia, Marienfeld, was established by a group of Swabian Germans near the Georgian capital Tiflis (Tbilisi), along the Kakheti highway, now part of Sartichala. Two months later, another group of colonists founded another settlement in Georgia on the bank of the Asureti River and named it Elisabethtal, after the Emperor's wife Elizabeth Alexeievna (now Asureti in the Georgian province of Kvemo Kartli). Within the next year, five more colonies were established in eastern Georgia: New Tiflis (later Mikhailovsky Avenue, now part of David Agmashenebeli Avenue in Tbilisi), Alexandersdorf on the left bank of the Kura (now the vicinity of Akaki Tsereteli Avenue in Tbilisi), Petersdorf (near Marienfeld, now part of Sartichala) and Katharinenfeld (now Bolnisi). Three more colonies were founded in Abkhazia: Neudorf, Gnadenberg and Lindau.
By the late 1840s, there were five German colonies in the North Caucasus. The migration waves (especially to the Don Host Oblast) grew beginning in the second half of the 19th century with the capitalist influence on farming in Russia. Germans would immigrate not only from the regions adjacent to the Volga River but also from the Black Sea region and Germany. The majority of these Germans adhered to various branches of Protestantism: most were Lutherans, Mennonites, or Baptists. Roman Catholics formed a minority and lived in six colonies. The Arrival of Germans in the North Caucasus by Anzor Ostakhov. Previously available online at Eirpd.ru
In the winter of 1818–1819, 194 Swabian families primarily from Reutlingen arrived in Elisabethpol (Ganja) in eastern Transcaucasia from Tiflis. They were granted land 6 kilometres to the west of the city and founded the town of Helenendorf (Goygol) in the summer of 1819. Another German settlement, the town of Annenfeld (later merged with the city of Shamkir) was founded almost simultaneously 40 kilometres away from Helenendorf.
Germans became an active and well-integrated community in Russian Transcaucasia. Unlike the settlement of Russian religious minorities, German colonies were located in "places that were more economically advantageous, close to cities or important transportation routes." It became "typical for Caucasian administrative centers to have a satellite agrarian German colony." According to Charles King, "rows of trees lined the main streets" of the German colonies near Tiflis. "Schools and churches, conducting their business in German, offered education and spiritual edification. Beer gardens provided the main entertainment." In eastern Transcaucasia, German colonists were overwhelmingly bilingual in Azeri, while Russian was formally taught in schools starting in the late 19th century.Fred Zimmer (1901). The Colony of Helenendorf, Elisabethpol Governorate. A Collection of Materials for the Description of Locales and Peoples of the Caucasus, #29. Department of Caucasus Education District Publ. Dolma, a traditional dish in the Caucasus and the Middle East popular among all Caucasus nationalities, became as common with the Caucasus Germans as traditional German dishes.Dr. K. Stumpp «Die Auswanderung aus Deutschland nach Russland in den Jahren 1763 bis 1862». Tübingen. 1974.
The Baltic German naturalist and explorer Friedrich Parrot encountered Swabian settlers near Tiflis on his expedition to Mount Ararat in 1829. He listed their settlements and personally visited Katharinenfeld and Elisabethtal, describing them:
These colonies may be known to be German at first sight from their style of building, their tillage, their carts and wagons, their furniture and utensils, mode of living, costume, and language. They contrast, therefore, strongly with the villages of the natives, and very much to their advantage, particularly in the eyes of one who has lived for some time, as was the case with us, wholly among the latter. [...] At last, after riding for five hours, I espied, high on the left bank of the river [i.e. the Khrami], symptoms not to be mistaken of the German colony: these were, regularly-built white houses, with good windows, doors, and ridge stone on the roof. I joyfully rode up, and found that this was Katharinenfeld.
The colonies suffered during the Russo-Persian War of 1826–28. Many of the settlements had been raided by marauding Kurds in 1826 who, according to Parrot, killed 30 people of Katharinenfeld's 85 families and captured 130 more.Friedrich Parrot: Reise zum Ararat. Edition Leipzig: 1985. p. 189. Half of those had not yet returned at the time of the naturalist's visit in 1829. While visiting the great bazaar in Erivan (Yerevan) with Khachatur Abovian (the Armenian writer and national public figure), Parrot encountered "two Württemberg women, with five children" who "talked to one another in true Swabian dialect."Parrot, p. 194. They were from Katharinenfeld and Parrot resolved to tell their relatives back home about their location. When Parrot visited the village and told the colonists the news, he was very well received. The two women who he met in Erivan returned from comparably benign captivity with a "wealthy Tatar chief" where they had been pressured to convert to Islam. Parrot surmised that others might have been sold into slavery deeper into Turkish territory. Furthermore, he told of a case where a man received a letter from his wife who had married a Persian cleric in captivity and therefore allowed him to remarry.
Some Germans moved voluntarily further south to Russian Armenia. Those who came from Württemberg were inspired by the concept of meeting the end of the world at the foot of Mount Ararat.Garnik Asatryan and Victoria Arakelova, The Ethnic Minorities of Armenia , Routledge, part of the OSCE, 2002 On the invitation of Parrot, the Armenian writer Abovian attended the German-speaking University of Dorpat (Tartu) in present-day Estonia. He became a Germanophile and, after his return to the Caucasus, married a German woman, Emilia Looze, in Tiflis. They moved to Abovian's native Armenia and "established a complete German household."
During his travels to the Caucasus during the Russo-Turkish War of 1828–1829, the celebrated Russian poet Aleksandr Pushkin visited one of the German colonies near Tiflis and recorded his experience in his Journey to Arzrum. He ate dinner there, but was unimpressed by the food and the beer. "We drank beer which is made there, with a very unpleasant taste, and paid very much for a very bad dinner," he wrote.
In 1843, during his visit to Russian Transcaucasia, German Baron August von Haxthausen also visited the German colonies of Georgia and the Tiflis region and extensively described their agricultural practices. He related an account from Moritz von Kotzebue about an unsuccessful religious pilgrimage of German colonists to Jerusalem, led by a woman who "knew the whole Bible by heart, from beginning to end" and who "exercised a kind of magical influence on all around her."Haxthausen, pp. 54–56. During his travels in the Caucasus, Haxthausen was accompanied by Peter Neu, a Swabian colonist from the Tiflis area who had "a remarkable genius for languages and knew a dozen European and Asiatic tongues,—German, French, Russian, Circassian, Tatar, Turkish, Armenian, Georgian, Persian, Kurdish, etc." In addition, he "possessed a rich gift of poetical imagination and had an inexhaustible treasury of märchen, legends and popular songs, gleaned from all the countries he had visited."Haxthausen, p. 51. Neu accompanied Haxthausen, Khachatur Abovian and Abovian's uncle Harutiun on a visit to the Yazidi community of Armenia.Haxthausen, p. 177. Haxthausen, Abovian and Neu also visited the center of the Armenian Apostolic Church at Etchmiadzin and Neu accompanied Haxthausen on an excursion to the area of present-day South Ossetia.Haxthausen, pp. 197 and 260.
Late imperial era Additional German colonies were established in eastern Transcaucasia during the latter half of the 19th century and in the beginning of the 20th century. In the Tiflis Governorate as of 1926, a total of 9,000 Germans lived in the colonies of Alexandersdorf (now part of Didube, Tbilisi), Alexandershilf (now Trialeti), Blümenthal (later Chapaevka, now Kavta), Elisabetthal (now Asureti), Freudenthal (now part of Sartichala), Georgsthal (now Dzveli Kanda), Gnadenberg (now Dziguta), Grünthal (later Akhali Ulianovka, now Ruisbolo), Hoffnungsthal (now Akhalsheni), Katharinenfeld, Lindau (now Lindava), Marienfeld (now part of Sartichala), Marnaul (now part of Marneuli), Neudorf (now Akhalsopeli), Neu Tiflis (now part of Kukia and Chughureti, Tbilisi), Petersdorf (now part of Sartichala), Steinfeld (now Kotishi), Traubenberg (now Tamarisi), Waldheim (now Ipnari), and Wiesendorf (now Akhali Marabda).Sudaba Zeynalova. Germans in the Caucasus, pp. 222-223.
Beginning in the 1880s, in addition to Helenendorf and Annenfeld, six more German colonies were formed the Elisabethpol Governorate: Georgsfeld in 1888, Alexejewka in 1902, Grünfeld and Eichenfeld in 1906, Traubenfeld in 1912 and Jelisawetinka in 1914. They became populated mostly by the descendants of the Germans from the two older colonies of Helenendorf and Annenfeld. By 1918 according to the German consul in Constantinople, there were 6,000 Germans living in these colonies overall. Helenendorf became the primary spiritual center for the Germans of the eight colonies. The oldest Lutheran church in present-day Azerbaijan, St. John's Church, was built in this town in 1857. Other Lutheran churches were built in Gadabay, Shamakhi, Elisabethpol, Baku and Annenfeld in 1868, 1869, 1885, 1897 and 1911 respectively. The ceremony of laying the first stone of Baku's German Church of the Saviour was attended by Emanuel Nobel, brother of Alfred Nobel, and other members of the city's elite. by Jeyla Ibrahimova. Azerbaijan-IRS