Old Sarepta


Old Sarepta now Krasnoarmeysky Rayon, is a district of Volgograd, in Russia.
Sarepta was founded 28 kilometers south of Tsaritsyn by the Moravian Brethren in 1765 when Catherine II sought to attract German settlers to expand crop production in southern Russia and defend against the invasions of Kalmyk, Kazakh, and Tatar tribes. Its name comes from Sarepta in I Kings 17:7 and here derives from that of the Sarpa river, which flows into the Volga nearby.
The city was renamed Krasnoarmeisk in 1920, and became a district of Volgograd in 1931.
A set of eighteenth century buildings in Sarepta that escaped the bombing during the Battle of Stalingrad is since 1990 an open-air museum called the Old Sarepta Museum of History and Ethnography.
see also: New Sarepta, Alberta, Canada