The Village of Karolswalde

The largest and earliest Mennonite village in Kunevskoy, Karolswalde, was established sometime in the late 18th Century.  The village can also be spelled as its German name as Karolswalde (literally in German, “Karls Forest”), Carlswalde or even Karls Waljd (Russian, Ukrainian: Карсвальд).  Its Polish name was Holendry Slobodzkie or in Ukrainian, Sloboda Galendry (Слобідські-Галендрі; Слобідські-Галендри in Russian).  This name may stem from the village ¾ of a mile to the north, Slobodka, which is named after a term meaning a sort of suburb (in this case, a suburb of Ostrog).  Holendry being a mutation of the term Olendry or Hollander, Holendry Slobodka may mean the Dutch (or in this case, Prussian) suburb (of Ostrog).   In the 1920s, after the Polish-Soviet War, it came to be known as Prikordonnoe (Russian: Прикордонное; Ukrainian: Prykordonne, Прикордо́нне) since the village sat right on the Polish-Soviet border (prikordonnoe being a Russian term for boundary).

Karolswalde traditionally takes its name from a certain Karol Dirks, the head of a Mennonite family travelling with a caravan through Volhynia on its way from Prussia to the Michalin Colony or South Russia in the late 18th or very early 19th Century (the Michalin Colony [Russian: Mikhailin, Михайлин; Ukr: Mykhailyn, Миха́йлин; Polish: Michalin; German: Michalin] was located about 24 miles south of Berdichev at 49°, 35“ North; 28°, 55” East.  The majority of the Michaliners transferred to the Karolswalde community in the very early years of the 19th Century).  One of the sons of Karol Dirks , Benjamin, became sick when the caravan reached Ostrog.  Polish troops in the area volunteered to keep the sick boy as he could travel no longer and the caravan was hard-pressed to continue its journey.  The Dirks family, travelling with the caravan several miles south of Ostrog, could not endure the thought of leaving their son, so turned back to retrieve him, and settled there on the edges of the forest.  Further details are unknown, but the village of Karolswalde is said to have been named after this Karol Dirks.  Benjamin Dirks, the son who fell sick, in 1817 became the first elder of the Karolswalde community.  Subsequently, an agreement with a local nobleman, the Russian Crown Prince Karl Jablonovsky, regarding a land-lease arrangement was reached and other Mennonites soon settled in the village.  Inside the front cover of the Karolswalde Churchbook was the following inscription:

Mennonites who previously lived in the Kingdom of Prussia, near Driesen and Swetz, who migrated and settled in the Wolhynien government, near the city of Ostrog, in the year 1802 and later, with the permission and a written agreement of his sovereign Majesty, the Russian Crown Prince, Karl Jablonovsky.

The lease arrangement with Jablonovsky permitted that the Mennonite tenants paid something on the order of $.50 on the dollar in rent.  The land remained the property of the Jablonovsky family while any buildings built by the Mennonites became their property.  The Jablonovskys probably included stipulations such as mill rights, meaning that the Mennonite tenants were obligated to take any harvested grain to a Jablonovsky-controlled mill for processing.  This mill would have given a lower price to the Mennonites ensuring more profit for Jablonovsky in the subsequent sale of the milled grain.  (The Jablonovsky Family, also spelled Yablonovsky, owned large portions of land in the area including a large estate and palace centered at the village of Krivin, several miles to the northeast of Karolswalde)

          

Karolswalde stood (and still stands today) about 2.5 miles south of the Ostrog Castle.  The castle and accompanying church stand on a hill on the northern banks of the Vilia River.  The golden domes of the Church of the Epiphany in the Ostrog Castle complex were in ruins for most of the 19th Century, but may have still been visible from Karolswalde which was situated in a north-south orientation on the east bank of the Vilia and its tributary, known to the Germans as the Ritschke River (which is only a tiny stream).  Situated on the banks of the river, Karolswalde sat at a very low elevation of only 195 meters or so above sea level (about 640 feet), on marshy land barely higher than the river.

A road passing south out of Ostrog Nowy Miasto (the New City of Ostrog, the portion of town south of the Vilia River; Russian: Новый город; Ukrainian: нове місто) ran through the village of Slobodka along the river and then entered Karolswalde from the north.  The houses in Karolswalde were all built (and still stand today) on the west side of the road.  The Mennonites, in typical Hollander fashion, laid Karolswalde out with the village between the main road and the river.  Houses were spaced along the road and fields were marked off as long strips between each house and the river.  This gave each farmer access to water.  Different nationalities also had different ways of setting up their yards.  Ukrainians and Poles always used separate buildings for their animals.  Frisians set up the single building they used for animals and people with these two compartments at a 90 degree angle.  Germans also had one building for animals and people, but the building was straight instead of at an angle.  Germans also typically built their houses with dovetail corners while Ukrainians usually simply used a method more similar to today's post-and-beam or corner-post systems.  Russians may have allowed animals to live in the same compartment as people but introduced the “Russian Oven” upon which the family slept in the winter.  Remnants of these variations can be seen on satellite views of the area today.

German-style dovetail corner

The road continued south through the village, leaning slightly toward the west.  At a bridge crossing the Ritschke, the road turns more sharply to the west towards the village of Kamenka (2 miles away) at a fairly level elevation, or east into the forest and uphill toward the village of Jadwinin (1.5 miles away).  The portion of land between the village and the Vilia (to the west) was used as hay pasture, while the Ostrog Forest bordered the village to the east.  On the west side of the road, within the northern edges of the village, stood the cemetery.  Somewhat farther south, just north of the bridge, stood the church.  Across the road from the church stood the school.  South of the bridge on the west side stood a small pond.  A map from the early 1930s indicates an inn stood south of the bridge to the west and 2 gamekeeper’s lodges stood across the bridge to the east; just inside the borders of the woods.

This village was the seat of the German (more specifically, West Prussian) Mennonite settlements in the larger Ostrog area.  In the Karolswalde Parish were the villages of Jadwinin, Karolsberge, Fuerstenthal and Gruenthal.  A German map of the area from 1897 lists Karolswalde as a Kirchdorf, which was a medieval German term for the seat of a priest or a parish village.  Most of the Mennonites left the village in 1874, after which time the village came to be populated by German Lutherans.  The Lutheran Church in Karolswalde fell under the authority of the Parish of Rivne.  By 1905, 75 families lived in the village and in 1907 a new Lutheran church was built.  The population in 1906 was 70 households with 521 people.  In 1915, Russian Cossack soldiers were quartered there for service in World War I.  After the Polish –Soviet War of 1921, the village fell right on the new border; to the west was Poland and to the east was the Soviet Union.  Many Poles and Germans from the Soviet side tried to escape into Poland through the village.  In the late 1920s, the village was collectivized and by 1935 all the German villagers had been evicted.  After the collectivization process, the village appears to have been initially placed in the same collective as the other German villages of Leeleva and  Michailowka.  Later it may have been moved to a collective including the villages of Mezhirich and Slobodka.  The church was destroyed in 1956, and the cemetery was destroyed in either 1954 or 1984.

The portion of the village that stood south of the bridge may have been known as Karolsberge (in German, literally “Karls Mountain”). Extinct today, the village of Karolsberge was founded around 1828, as the German Mennonite population expanded.  Also known as Karlsberg, Karls Berge or Carlsberg (Russian, Ukrainian: Карсберг), the village appears in Mennonite records as well as maps from the late 19th Century.  On maps from the early 20th Century, the village is not marked and appears to have been merged with Karolswalde.

Today, Karolswalde (or Prykordonne) lies in the Ukrainian Rivne Oblast or Province (Рівненська область), Ostrog Raion or District (Острозького району), Mezhiritsky Village Rada or Council (Межиріцька сільська рада).  The population in 2001 was 84 people.