QUEER COMMUNITIES.

Auckland Star, Volume LX, Issue 200, 24 August 1929, Page 7 (Supplement)

QUEER COMMUNITIES.

LOST TRIBES' RECLUSES AND

FANATICS.

INHABITING UNLIKELY PLACES

EVE-LESS EDEN OF MOUNT ATHOS

The eight hundred inhabitants of a Swedish village in Southern Russia have recently applied for permission to return to Sweden —the homeland to which they are strangers, as have been their ancestors for generations. Gemmelsvenskby, "Old Swedish Burg," tucked away in Soviet Russia, is probably more Swedish than Sweden itself to-day. For two and a-half centuries a band of exiles whose numbers have grown from two to eight hundred have fanatically preserved the religion, traditions, customs and speech of their forefathers. It is quite possible that upon their "return to Sweden they will find as much difficulty in making themselves understood as an Elizabethan Englishman would in twentieth century London.

Queer communities of exiles, recluses, fanatics, clans and tribes have staked their claims in the unlikeliest places of the earth. Kronstadt and Hermannstadt, in Transylvania, are Saxon cities, the former a veritable Nurnberg. In Yugoslavia the province of Banat boasts several such colonies, isolated only figuratively in their national traditions, speech and mode of life; in reality they are on excellent terms with their neighbours, though not "mixing." Between the Danubian town of Pantchevo and Velke Beckerek runs a chain of villages, Slovak, Rumanian, German. Hungarian and others. Travellers' tales of lost tribes, isolated in desert oases, Siberian steppes or inaccessible mountains lose no romance in the telling.

No less strange is the Eve-less Eden of Mount Athos in Greece, a tiny republic of 5000 monks, supreme in a world of their own, where no female creature, human or animal, is allowed to enter. In Egypt some of the Coptic monasteries are extremely difficult of access, the ."monastery" consisting of not a single building, but rather an entire community, a little stronghold which is a law unto itself. The island of Bunana, near Tulagi, in the Solomon Islands, is inhabited only by women, having been selected by the Australian Board of Missions as a colony where white women teachers instruct native girls during a two years' course. Don Juans are specially guarded against by the watchful white teachers, who claim that they inspire a superstitious fear in the hearts of the intending marauders.

Doukhobors, or "spirit-wrestlers," of whom some seven thousand emigrated from Russia to Canada thirty years ago, are descendants of a religious sect first heard of in Paissia about two hundred years ago, and probably forerunners of the various "nude cults" in vogue today. The Doukhobors object to all forms of government, decline to pay rent or taxes, live frugally, and appear naked. Periodically they cause disturbances in Canadian towns by indulging in nude parades. Three years ago Dr. Goldberg, of Berlin and Dusseldorf, founded the "Zaratlmstra Colony" of nude sun-worshippers, who live on the top of the one of the highest Riviera mountains, about twenty miles from Nice. They have no money, no property, no marriage laws, no passports, and no nationality. According to Dr. Goldberg, the colony is "a world within a world."

Religious orders, with their laws for seclusion, chastity and service, are most often little "States within a State," following regimes set' down centuries ago. But very rarely arc the monkish members out of touch with modern thought, world movements and international politics. They leave that form of unworldliness to'less inspired communities.