A Mennonite Town in Muslim Central Asia Holds On Against the Odds

ROT FRONT, Kyrgyzstan — Each Sunday morning, 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.