Tom Marsden

This series was inspired by a visit to the Azerbaijani town of Goygol and discovering its German heritage, the town having been founded as Helenendorf by German migrants in April 1819. Fleeing poverty and religious persecution in Württemberg, these Germans set up over a dozen colonies between eastern Georgia and western Azerbaijan in total, which generally flourished due to the migrants' expertise in wine and cheese making. But tragically, in the autumn of 1941, following the Nazi attack on the Soviet Union, Stalin deported them all (some 46,000 according to the German cultural organisation EuroKaukAsia) to Central Asia.

As Goygol prepared to mark its 200th anniversary in 2019 and I was fascinated by the fate of its former German residents, I set off in their footsteps from the South Caucasus to Kazakhstan and southwest Germany to track down survivors and descendants, hear their stories and make photos as I went.