The twin cities of Kitchener and Waterloo are situated about 100 km / 60 mi west of Toronto.
Kitchener, known as "Berlin" until the First World War, and renamed after General Lord Kitchener, is Canada's biggest center of German immigration.
The twin cities of Kitchener and Waterloo were founded in the late 18th C by the
Mennonites, originally a German sect and named after its Friesian founder, Menno Simons (1492-1559). Some of its members emigrated straight to Canada, while others came here from Pennsylvania in 1783 during the American War of Independence. Like the Amish - named after their founder Jakob Ammann - the Mennonites are Anabaptists, a sect founded in Zurich in 1525 and persecuted from the outset because of their beliefs in adult baptism and pacifism, who finally found a new homeland on the North American continent. Today the orthodox Mennonites still speak an old German dialect and wear plain, unadorned dress with no buttons, collars or pockets.
They ride in horse-drawn buggies as they are not allowed to own cars; neither can they own telephones or other such products of modern technology, and live by farming without machinery, as they did 150 years ago. They still sell their produce on local markets in Kitchener and Waterloo. The Mennonites in Canada now number around 100,000.
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