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A film on Tage Brolin from Främmestad,
Sweden, and
the Swedish village, Zmejevka,
in southern Ukraine.
In southern Ukraine lies Zmejevka, better known in Sweden as
“Gammalsvenskby” (“Old Swedish Village”).
Since the early 1990s, many from Sweden have visited the
village, but not many have come to know it and its residents as
well as Tage Brolin from Främmestad in Västergötland, Sweden.
The people of Ukraine’s Swedish settlement trace their roots to the island
of Dagö off the Baltic Sea coast of Estonia.
How Swedes made their way initially to Dagö is unclear,
but they seem to have arrived there in the 1200s.
Perseverance and pride have resulted in the people of
Gammalsvenskby, through generations of extreme difficulty,
retaining a keen sense of being Swedish.
When Russia took control of Estonia from Sweden in 1721, the Dagö Swedes’
circumstances changed for the worse.
In 1781, the Russian Empress, Catherine the Great, forced
1,200 Swedes to leave the island and make the more than 1,200 mile
long trek to the southern Ukraine.
The journey began in August and is remembered as “The
Death March.” On May
1, 1782, when the Swedes finally ended their journey and looked
out on the desolate steppe along the Dnieper River, merely 500 had survived
sickness, starvation and the Russian winter.
Prospects of land, cattle, and lodging turned out to be
empty promises. The
first year in the south the Dagö Swedes lived in dugouts, and
many more succumbed. By
spring 1783, approximately 135 survived of the 1,200 that had set
out from Dagö a year and a half earlier.
Life in Ukraine has been framed by war, crop failure, and famine, yet the
Swedes there have endured and succeeded in retaining their Swedish
language and traditions. Finally
at the end of the 1980s with the disintegration of the Soviet
Union, the Swedish villagers in Ukraine could begin to establish
on-going contact with Sweden.
In “Gammalsvenskby: My Second Home,” which is approximately 60 minutes
long, we pay a call on Tage Brolin’s friends in Gammalsvenskby.
We meet interesting people who tell their dramatic life
stories in an ancient Swedish.
The film is beautiful, gripping, and humorous all at once.
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