to marry by the age of 30 in an effort to boost the population. Maintaining the Swedish heritage From 1787 to 1805, German colonists were invited to Gammalsvenskby to bolster the region's population. The Germans referred to the area as the "" (Swedish District) and the village as "Alt-Schwedendorf". They soon founded three neighbouring villages: Schlangendorf, Mühlhausendorf, and Klosterdorf. With the arrival of these Germans, the Swedes were quickly outnumbered and eventually many of the area's pastors and teachers were German-speakers who did not know Swedish. Although the Swedes did not make full use of the arable land they had been allocated — they focused their industry more on fishing than farming — the reallocation of farm land to the German newcomers strained relations between Gammalsvenskby's Swedes and their German neighbors, although intermarriage between the communities did occur, as is evidenced by parish register entries for weddings in both communities' churches. While the Swedes and Germans were sometimes rivals, they were never enemies and the two communities cooperated when times were bad. Despite this, the people of Gammalsvenskby maintained their traditions, Church of Sweden Lutheran faith, and old Swedish dialect. At the end of the 19th century, some ties with Sweden were re-established, with the Ukrainian Swedes viewed as a "lost tribe" that preserved older Swedish traditions, such as writing in runes and maintaining an older form of the Church of Sweden's liturgy. Prince Carl raised more than 6,000 rubles in Sweden and Finland to support construction of a new Swedish church in the village to replace the previous wooden church given by Prince Potemkin that burned in the mid-19th century. The new parish church of St. John opened in 1885. For a time, before the revolutions that followed World War I, visits from Sweden became frequent, and some villagers subscribed to Swedish newspapers. Despite this, there were efforts by Russia to better integrate the Ukrainian Swedes with the Russian Empire. The original settlement plans exempted Ukrainian Swedes from conscription into the tsar's army, but this changed by the end of the 1800s and 130 men from Gammalsvenskby were inducted into the Russian army during World War I. Relocation attempt to Sweden During the Russian Civil War, Gammalsvenskby was largely held by the Red Army, although the village did come under artillery fire from the White Army under General Anton Denikin. After fighting moved away from the villages in 1921,