(about 120,000), or elsewhere in Eastern Europe or when they were forcibly repatriated from occupied Germany to the Soviet Union. Colonies in the Black Sea region Schwedengebiet This enclave of German settlement, established by the Russian imperial government, lies on the west bank of the Dnieper river in the Beryslav Raion district of Kherson Oblast, Ukraine, some 12 kilometers (or 7 Versts under the old Tsarist system of measurement) east-north-east (16.6 km by car, and 16.4 km by approved footpaths ) of the town of Beryslav on the same side of the river. Originally settled in 1782 by manumitted ethnic Swedish serfs from the Baltic island of Hiiumaa (Dagö) in present-day Estonia who were freed by Catherine the Great and invited to settle here, the district took its German name — Schwedengebiet translates as "Swedes' district" — from these earlier settlers, despite the fact that once the Germans began to arrive as official settlers during the Napoleonic period, they soon outnumbered their Swedish precursors. Due to attrition, Swedish numbers had fallen within a few years of their leaving their Baltic homeland. To make up for this shortfall, new settlers, mostly ethnic Germans originating in the lands of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, such as Württemberg, and the Austrian Habsburg hereditary lands, as well as Poland and Alsace-Lorraine, were invited to settle in the area from the turn of the 19th century. Both the arrival of the Swedes and the later advent of the Germans formed two stages of the same official Russian imperial policy designed to secure what was then a relatively new part of the Russian Empire which had only been in Russia's sway since they had defeated of the Ottoman Empire in 1774 and won these vast southern territories, known first as New Russia, and later as Southern Russia. The oldest village, first established in 1782, was the Swedish Lutheran village of Gammalsvenskby. In the period 1802–1806, after a generation alone, during which their numbers had been supplemented on occasion by Swedes captured in war and other, mostly temporary, sojourners from Danzig, the local Baltic Swedish community was faced with the arrival of German speakers. This not only meant that they no longer had this area to themselves, but the Swedes had to share their original wooden church with some permanent incomers, ethnic German Lutherans. As it happened, the Germanophones also included Roman Catholics, which