Lymanske (Ukrainian: Лиманське; German: Selz) is a rural settlement in Rozdilna Raion of Odesa Oblast in Ukraine.

[2] The villages of Selz (named after Seltz in Alsace) and Kandel were established at this location along the Kuchurhan River in 1808 by Roman Catholic German and Alsatian (French citizens) immigrants to the Kutschurhan Valley, then part of the Russian Empire.

It received its present name after the remaining German residents were driven from the area by the advancing Soviet army in 1944.

Germans began settling in southern Ukraine and the Crimean Peninsula in the late 18th century, but the bulk of immigration and settlement occurred during the Napoleonic period, from 1800 onward, with a concentration in the years 1803 to 1805.

Tsar Alexander I (grandson of Catherine the Great), invited German settlers to develop the land in the newly acquired territory north of the Black Sea.

These included: free land, exemption from military and civil service, tax-free loans, local self-government, and freedom of religion.

Like its namesake in the ancestral town in Palatinate, Germany, Kandel consisted of a long street that stretched almost two kilometers.

Kandel also had 77 artisans and craftsmen who produced a variety of agricultural implements in iron and wood; there were also many basket weavers and broom makers.

Prior to the turn of the century, a wave of emigration of the Russian German community began after the reforms of Alexander II.

The resulting disaffection motivated many Russian Germans, especially members of traditionally dissenting churches, to migrate to the United States and Canada, while many Catholics chose Brazil and Argentina.

The Russian Civil War of 1919 hit the Selz people especially hard when during early August the farmers attempted a three-day stand against General Grigori Kotovski’s Bolshevist cavalry regiment and finally lost.

The residents hid in cellars and camps for several days, until on Sunday, August 10, Romanian soldiers and a mounted officer arrived from the South and marched first into Kandel, then into the other villages, and declared their sovereign rule over the settlements.

A March 12, 1944 announcement ordered the population to prepare for “administrative resettlement.” The people of Kandel, initially heading toward Franzfeld, were the first to leave.

76 other wagons and 450 Selz residents were captured and sentenced to life in labor camps, while the women and children were deported to the northern Urals.