Görlitz and Upper Lusatia

An old city of the Six Towns

Görlitz first appears in the records in 1071 and received town privileges in 1303. It grew rich on trade, sitting on an old east-west road across central Europe. In 1346 it joined Bautzen, Kamenz, Lauban, Löbau, and Zittau in the Lusatian League, often called the Six Towns, formed to keep the peace in Upper Lusatia. Görlitz became the wealthiest and largest of the six.

For centuries Upper Lusatia belonged to the Bohemian crown. In 1635, during the Thirty Years' War, it passed to the Electorate of Saxony. So by the time the Schwenkfelders arrived in 1726, Görlitz was a Saxon and Lutheran city, ruled from Dresden, and only a short walk from the Silesian border they had just crossed.

The city already had a history with independent religious thinkers. The shoemaker and mystic Jakob Böhme settled there around 1599 and lived and wrote there until his death in 1624.

Arriving as refugees

The first families came in secret in late 1725 and early 1726, and the main group followed after Easter 1726. Officials in Görlitz and the local pastor received them kindly. Still, the official ruling was that the newcomers might be tolerated but not protected. They could rent houses in Görlitz but not buy them, and they were not allowed to hold public worship or even private meetings. When local boys threw mud at them in the streets, the city set a fine for anyone who harassed them, which put a stop to it.

For people who had left farms and houses behind, this meant starting over as tenants and laborers, with little security and no right to gather openly for their faith.

Count Zinzendorf, Berthelsdorf, and Herrnhut

Many of the exiles settled instead about 15 miles to the southwest, on the estates of Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf. In 1722 the young count had bought the Berthelsdorf estate from his grandmother, and that same year he let Protestant refugees from Moravia, led by the carpenter Christian David, build a settlement on his land. That village became Herrnhut, the birthplace of the renewed Moravian Church.

Zinzendorf offered the Schwenkfelders the same kind of shelter. In Berthelsdorf and the nearby villages of Hennersdorf and Herrnhut they were allowed more property rights, and many bought small farms or built houses. A 1905 survey identified ten houses in Berthelsdorf that had been built or owned by Schwenkfelders. Burials of exiles who died there between 1725 and 1734 are remembered by a monument erected in 1934. One building in the village, the Gemeindehaus, is traditionally said to have been their meeting place, though no records confirm it.

Told to leave

The refuge did not last. The Jesuits in Silesia kept pressing for the exiles to be sent back, and after the Elector of Saxony died in 1733 the pressure grew. In April 1733 an order from Dresden called for their removal. Zinzendorf told them he could no longer protect them and gave them a year to find a new home.

At a meeting on June 8, 1733, the families decided to go at once. They looked at Georgia, but the arrangements could not be made in time, so they chose Pennsylvania, where a few of their own had already gone in 1731 and 1733. On April 20, 1734, the first family left Berthelsdorf. By April 28 the group had gathered at Pirna on the Elbe, and the next day they set off by boat down the river toward Altona near Hamburg, then on to Haarlem and Rotterdam. Zinzendorf sent two Moravians along with them, partly to scout out mission work in America.

Görlitz today

After the Congress of Vienna in 1815, Görlitz was moved to Prussia's province of Silesia. At the end of the Second World War in 1945, the new border was drawn along the Neisse, splitting the city in two. The part east of the river became the Polish town of Zgorzelec. In 1998 the two sides declared themselves a joint European City.

Görlitz came through the war with its old town largely intact and is now known for its Renaissance and Baroque streets. Herrnhut, about 25 kilometers to the southwest, is still the world center of the Moravian Church, and Berthelsdorf became part of the town of Herrnhut in 2013.