If you look closely at Benjamin Buller’s village in the map below, you will see that it is given the full name Kol. Sofijskaja, the latter part of which we know as Zofyovka. Looking to the northwest, one also spots Kol. Władysławow. This raises the question of why these villages but not others have the abbreviation Kol.
To a great extent the rural villages of that day (in contrast to towns and urban areas) were populated by “like” people. For example, Zofyovka was a Mennonite village, not a village of Mennonites, the Polish nobility, and native Volhynians all intermingled. This is not surprising; we see the same sort of dynamics today. Such divisions were not absolute, of course, and different groups sometimes lived side by side even in small villages.
Still, the abbreviation Kol. said something about the people in this village. The inhabitants were not citizens but colonists (Kol. stood for “Kolony”). That is, the people in Volhynian villages with Kol. before the village name were emigrants from some other region, often “Germany,” to use the term loosely. Colonists generally did not have the same rights as citizens; their lives in the host country were far more tenuous and subject to disruption than citizens’ lives, which explains why our family and other Mennonite families moved from place to place so often.
As we have chance to look at other maps of Volhynia, be on the lookout for villages with Kol. as the first element; this will indicate that the village was filled with colonists, perhaps even Mennonites.
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The map also uses other abbreviations to identify noteworthy locations:
- M.H. = Meierhof = steward’s house (steward of the noble?)
- W.H. = Wirtshaus = tavern
- Z.S. = Ziegelschlag = brick mold (i.e., a place where bricks are formed; a brick factory)
- J.H. = Jägerhaus = gamekeeper’s house
- R. = Ruine = ruins (i.e., ruins when the map was drawn in 1911)
For additional abbreviations and the German equivalents, see the list here.
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