"Rovenki Revisited" a Roven'ki Travel Page by hunterV

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I visited this city before, but I have never spent four days in the city, like I did last time.
I was there in 1998 with my Austrian friends who had come to Rovenki before within the framework of their historical research on forced labor in Germany during the Second World War. My friend Margarethe, a historian and a teacher, wrote a book about the fate of the Ukrainian “Ostarbeiter” - Ukrainian teenagers who were deported to Germany in 1942 to work in what is now Vorarlberg, Austria.
In April 2007 my Austrian friends invited me to work with them again visiting those veterans who used to work in Austria during the war. So I had another chance of staying in Rovenki, this time for four days.

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Downtown Rovenki, Luhansk region, Ukraine

Industrial Center of Luhansk Region

Rovenki is not far from Luhansk – just an hour’s drive by bus (about 60 km to the southeast).
The city occupies a large area together with its numerous suburbs - ten small coalminers’ settlements and fourteen villages– 217 sq.km, a little less than the territory of Luhansk.
About 100,000 inhabitants live in Rovenki with all its suburbs and about 87,000 residents live in the city itself.
The official data of the city council says the average age of the residents is 40 years old.
The city’s industrial base includes 27 enterprises, 9 construction enterprises, 3 construction enterprises, 180 small businesses and about 2,000 private entrepreneurs.
There are seven coalmines in the city.
Some more information about the city on the Internet is only in Russian:
Information and communication center of Rovenki;
”Svetilen” Orthodox Journal of the Southeast of Ukraine

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Rovenki was mentioned for the first time in 1705.
There were two settlements of Russian Don Cossacks on the territory of the present city: Novy Aydar and Ossinovy Rovenyok. Then it was mentioned as Ossinovy Rovenyok or simply Rovenyok.
The city has always been famous for its coalmining enterprises (seven coalmines) and “Young Guards” memorial. It was a must for many Soviet schoolchildren to visit that city to pay tribute to the heroic deeds of “Young Guards” underground organization that consisted of young people who remained in the city during the Nazi occupation in 1942 and conducted a lot of subversive activities against the invaders. They were arrested and executed in January 1943 in Rovenki. The tomb of their leaders was a place of pilgrimage of Young Communist League members during Soviet times.

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