Mennonites in a Muslim world
Kyrgyzstan’s Mennonite town is one of Christendom’s most remote in the Muslim world.
Each Sunday, a rickety white bus wheezes down the main street of one of Christendom’s most remote and odd outposts in the Muslim world.
The bus travels only a few hundred yards but continues a long, meandering journey begun nearly 500 years ago by German-speaking Mennonite Christians fleeing persecution in Europe. Having survived the fury of the Roman Catholic Church, the Russian empire and then the Soviet Union, their community today in Central Asia is small and shrinking but, against the odds, is still hanging on.
Their principal stronghold here is the village of Rot Front, or Red Front, the Soviet-era name of a tidy, two-street settlement at the foot of the Tian Shan Mountains in Kyrgyzstan, a Muslim-majority nation of breathtaking natural beauty and deep poverty formed when the Soviet Union imploded in 1991.
Rot Front, formerly known as Bergtal, or Mountain Valley, is the easternmost outpost of the Mennonite exodus from Europe, which also scattered believers westward to North and South America.
The German community in Rot Front lived for generations in a closed world — entirely German-speaking, dominated by religion, fighting off modern intrusions like television. It is still wary of outsiders but, as residents began emigrating to Germany in the 1990s, and those left behind began using cellphones, interaction with the wider world has grown.
Out of a village with more than 1,000 people, only 10 German families are left. The German bakery closed years ago and the local primary school dropped mandatory lessons in German. The teaching is now all done in Kyrgyz and Russian.
But the Sunday morning bus helps keep alive the religious faith at the heart of the still deeply devout German residents.
Driven by Nikolai Pauls, an ethnic German car mechanic whose 11 siblings have now nearly all left for Germany, the bus collects worshippers — a mix of German Mennonites and Kyrgyz converts — from outside their homes and deposits them at the village’s biggest building, a prayer hall decorated with biblical verses in archaic versions of both German and Russian, written in Gothic script.
Irina Pauls, the bus driver’s wife and a singer in the church choir, said she and her husband had planned to move to Germany years ago but stayed put because their five children did not want to leave their friends.
Whether to leave, she said, “is a very painful question.”
She has often visited relatives in Germany, where nine of her 11 siblings now live, and admires German order and neatness.
“Here, Kyrgyz people think we are crazy because we cut the grass,” she said.