Albania In 2017, there were 380 Friends in
Albania within its one Evangelical (
Gurneyite) meeting. As of 2017, there were 106 Friends in the combined Monthly Meeting.
Nineteenth century The Society of Friends in Norway started in 1814, with the highest concentration of Quakers living in and around
Stavanger. In 1819, Quakers Knut and Anne Halvorsen had their marriage recognised and were allowed to reside in Norway. Other named Quakers were allowed to live in the Stavanger area by the Norwegian Royal Decrees of 1826 and 1828, on the condition that they reported births, deaths, and marriages to the authorities and did not proselytise. During this time two Quakers, Elias Tastad and Knut Halvorsen, were prosecuted for burying their deceased family members in un-consecrated soil. During the
1825 mass migration of Norwegians to America, the numbers of Norwegian Quakers in the country diminished by a third. In 1846, the Society of Friends became the first officially registered and legal religious society outside the state church of Norway. It was not until 1956 that other groups (the
Methodists and Lammers society) were registered in a similar way. Throughout the 1840s, Norwegian Quakers were subject to the Act Relating to Dissenters (1845), which was intended to keep dissenting groups in small, isolated pockets of Norwegian society. Despite this, Quakerism continued to spread, and new meeting houses were built in
Kvinesdal,
Sauda,
Røldal,
Skjold, and
Tromsø during the 1840s. Still a relatively small population, Quakers numbered 473 in the 1865 census. During the latter half of the nineteenth century, Quakers were very active in the Norwegian peace movement, which threatened their status as an organisation. After the Napoleonic wars, Norway maintained conscription, and a number of Norwegian Quakers were punished for
conscientious objection. One of the first recorded Norwegian Quaker conscientious objectors, Soren Olsen, was lashed for three days in 1848. In a wider act of objection, in 1898 the clerk of Stavanger meeting refused to submit the names of Quaker conscripts to the local authorities. In 1898, the Norwegian Society of Friends became a private religious organisation, which meant that the organisation was no longer subject to the act on dissenters. The society accepted new members and was able to continue to carry out funerals and marriages.
Twentieth century In 1909, a group of Norwegian Friends attended London Yearly Meeting and in 1920, several Norwegian Friends attended the first worldwide conference of Friends. The peace testimonies prompted a new movement of collections and campaigning in Norway, which has continued to the present day. In 1937, Ole Olden established the periodical
Kvekeren which was issued across Scandinavian countries. During
World War II a number of Norwegian Quakers, including Olden and Lund, were imprisoned by the occupying German forces for resistance work. Lund was active in the Norwegian underground movement protecting Norwegian Jews and refugees and in 1947 she became the first member of the Oslo Worship Group to become a Quaker. Olden was later nominated for the 1957
Nobel Peace Prize. Lindgrov School was established by Norwegian Friends in 1959, contributing ideas to national policies concerning training and work as aspects of care for people with learning disabilities. In 1975, a Monthly Meeting was established in
Kristiansand.
Notable Quakers Well-known Norwegian Quakers include
Elise M. Boulding,
Asbjørn Kloster, and
Sigrid Helliesen Lund.
Poland Quakers arrived in Poland during the
Interwar period (1918–1939) to assist with humanitarian aid for the newly
re-independent nation. As of 2017, there were only 20 Polish Friends divided between three small meetings. Peter met with
William Penn and attended meetings for worship whilst in England. Despite these initial connections, during the latter seventeenth century in Russia, the name "Quaker" was one of a number of pejorative terms for religious individuals who challenged earthly powers in the name of personal experience of the divine. Records show that Quakers were prosecuted in Russia as early as 1689. In 1779, the
Ecclesiastical Dictionary listed "Quakers" as "nothing else but crowds of deranged people and enthusiasts who are possessed". Further formal Quaker contact with Russia came in the 1760s, when
Empress Catherine II sought a physician to inoculate herself and her son against smallpox. Catherine sought the Quaker physician Thomas Dimsdale, who was subsequently recalled to Russia to inoculate Catherine's grandsons.
Nineteenth century When
Tsar Alexander I visited England in 1814 as one of the victors over
Napoleonic France; the Quakers sought out the ruler as they had Peter I. Alexander's evangelical faith was not dissimilar to that of then-contemporary Friends: he "received them warmly, prayed with them, 'fully assented' to their peace testimony, and attended meetings for worship". He also invited Friends to visit his Empire, and subsequently welcomed Quaker visitors, notably William Allen, who worked in Russia to promote education and prison reform, and travelled among the many dissenting religious groups of Southern Russia. In 1817, the Russian government wished to drain marshlands near
St Petersburg, and Alexander sent a request for a suitable specialist to the Society of Friends in Britain. Quakers Daniel Wheeler and his family responded to this call; they spent some thirty years reclaiming land near St Petersburg and introducing modern farming techniques. Daniel's wife Jane Wheeler died in Russia in 1832, and her daughter in 1837. In recognition of the Wheelers' services the Imperial government granted them in perpetuity the land in which the dead had been buried: the Quaker burial ground still exists at
Shushary, close to the city. In 1854, British Friends sent a mission to
Emperor Nicholas I seeking, unsuccessfully, to avert the
Crimean War. Later they worked with the great novelist and pacifist
Leo Tolstoy and his followers. Tolstoy's daughter-in-law became a member of the Society. An important facet of Quaker involvement with Russia which began at this time was war and famine relief, first carried out in the Russian
Grand Duchy of Finland in the 1850s. This became a major area of work, and British and American Friends gave considerable help during the
Volga famine of the 1890s.
Nineteenth century culture The image of the Pietist "good Quaker" lingered in the Russian cultural imagination well into the nineteenth century and became especially noticeable in the second half of the reign of
Alexander I, when the emperor was increasingly involved in mysticism. The view of the "good Quaker" marked a religious awakening, fully manifested in Russian
Martinism, it found increased development in the 1820s. Onegin, the protagonist of
Alexander Pushkin's 1823 novel
Eugene Onegin refers to the Quakers as one of a multitude of social guises he may adopt: 'Has he grown tame at last, and mellow? / Or does he follow his old bent / And as of yore play the odd fellow? / Pray whom now does he represent? / Would he be Melmoth or Childe Harold, / Or as a Quaker go appareled, / A bigot seem – a patriot – / A cosmopolitan – or what?'
Nikolai Leskov had an English Quaker aunt, who raised him until he was sixteen. Academics have remarked that Leskov's later adoption of
Russian Orthodoxy was marked by a distinct
rationalist ethics which can be attributed to his early Quakerism.
Twentieth century During and after
World War I, the revolutions and the
Russian Civil War, Quakers worked with refugees and other victims of harvest failures, wars, and relocations to create feeding centres, hospitals, orphanages, schools, and cottage industries. Perhaps the best-known example of Quaker relief work in Russia was Friends' participation in the international response to the
famine of 1921. In that year alone, British and American Friends fed 212,000 people. The small Quaker office set up in Moscow in connection with these activities managed to maintain cooperation with the new Soviet authorities in the field of health through the 1920s, and survived until 1931. It became the last representative of any Western religious organisation in Moscow as
Stalin tightened his grip on the
Soviet Union. Under Stalin, Friends were able to make formal visits to the Soviet Union in 1930, 1948 and 1949; otherwise contacts were limited to a few unusual and energetic individuals. After
World War II, from 1950 onwards, the British Friends' East-West Committee and the American Friends' Service Committee tried to expand links, with some success, especially under
Khrushchev. With the advent of
Perestroika contact became easier.
Serbia In 2017, there were 50 Serbian Quakers in two worship groups, one being in
Belgrade. Well-known Swedish Quakers include
Emilia Fogelklou,
Jeanna Oterdahl,
Elin Wägner,
Per Sundberg (sv), and
Gunnar Sundberg (sv). In 2017 there were 130 Friends in the Sweden Yearly Meeting. Well-known Swiss Quakers include:
Pierre Ceresole,
Adolphe Ferrière,
Edmond Privat,
Elisabeth Rotten, and
Theophilus Waldmeier. There were 181 Friends in the
Switzerland Yearly Meeting in 2017.
Ukraine In 2017 there were only 10 Friends in
Ukraine divided up between three meetings, one being in
Kyiv. ==Pan-European Quaker Organisation==