The Mythos of Galicia

[kaima]

During the partition of Poland Galicia was the Austrian section, down in what is not South East Poland and Ukraiine. The Lemkos/Rusyn and Ukrainians and Jews lived in this area, leading to a sadly colorful and often violent history of wars and domination.



The Vienna Museum of History has a special display until August on
"The Myth of Galicia"
www.wienmuseum.at/en/exhibitions/detail/the-myth-of-galicia.html

I believe the "Myth" stems from the ethereal identity of Galicia as a place. It existed from about 1795 to 1918, created as a province of the Hapsburg Empire / Austria-Hungary. More precisely, Galicia was a province of Austria (NOT Hungary). Thus, if your ancestors emigrated from Galicia and identified as Poles or Ruthenian (Lemko/Rusyn/Ukrainian today), they may well and properly have listed "Austrian" as their nationality, just as a Puerto Rican, Hawaiian or Eskimo would list "American" today.

An exhibition in cooperation with International Cultural Centre (ICC) in Kraków

Galicia was nearly as big as present-day Austria; around 1900 its capital Lviv (Lemberg in German) was the fourth-largest city of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The geographical location of the region is hardly known at all today. But its name still conjures up fantasies: images of a land lost to the world, the very essence of remoteness; a core area of Eastern European Jewry, and the multi-cultural poorhouse of the Habsburg Empire.

The Austrian writer Joseph Roth, himself born in Brody, coined the term "in-between land" for Galicia. The western part of the region belongs to Poland today, the eastern half lies within the Ukrainian border. Politics and war have resulted in renewed discussions about the European identity of the region. Historically, it came into existence as an artificial creation of European power politics: the region began to be called "Galicia" after it had been annexed by Austria as a result of the 1772 partition of Poland – for Emperor Joseph II, it was a territory in need of being "civilised", and one that supplied mineral resources and soldiers to the Empire. Galicia was a country of linguistic, ethnic and religious diversity: its inhabitants were Roman or Eastern Catholics and Jews speaking Polish, Ukrainian and Yiddish.

This exhibition is the first to focus on the different Polish, Ukrainian, Austrian and Jewish perspectives in light of the historical facts. The myth of poverty and backwardness contrasted with the myth of progress and development. Around 1900, Galicia's rich oil deposits turned it into "Austria's Texas". After partial autonomy was granted to the region in 1867, the myth of the "good Emperor" Franz Joseph was born. Galicia, a multi-ethnic Arcadia? At the same time, social and national tensions mounted. "Galicia in Vienna" is the heading of one section of the exhibition which discusses migration flows from the region to Vienna. From 1880 onwards, Jewish migrants, including artists and intellectuals, flocked to the capital of the Empire. The final section deals with "Galicia after Galicia": After the collapse of the Habsburg monarchy in 1918, Galicia vanished from the maps, but its myth was reborn after 1989. The exhibition, which was designed in cooperation with the International Cultural Centre in Kraków, was on show there from 9 October 2014 to 8 March 2015.

[pieter]

Lwów

In the Galician city of Lwów (Lviv today in Ukraine, in the Habsburg Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, it was known as Lemberg), there was a multi-cultural population of Poles, Ukrainians, jews, Armenians, Germans and Ruthenians.

Within the 14-15th centuries the city acted as a major German handicraft centre. Since the 16th century German-speaking population become polonised and Lviv turned to important Polish and also a Jewish cultural centre, with Poles and Jews comprising a demographic majority of the city until the outbreak of the Second World War, and the Holocaust, and the population transfers of Poles that followed.

On 27 July 1944 it was captured by the Soviet Red Army. According to the agreements of the Yalta Conference, Lwów was transferred to the Ukrainian SSR, most of the Poles living in Lwów were deported into lands newly acquired from Germany under terms of the Potsdam Agreement (officially termed Recovered Territories in Poland), and the city became the main centre of the western part of Soviet Ukraine, inhabited predominantly by Ukrainians with a significant Russian minority.

Poles

Many Poles moved to Lviv after the city was conquered by King Casimir in 1349. It became a major Polish cultural centre and this continued after the partitions of Poland.

Lviv was depolonised mainly through Soviet-arranged population exchange from 1944–46. Those that remained found themselves having lost their state status and becoming an ethnic minority. By 1959 Poles made up only 4% of the population after Ukrainians, Russians and Jews. The Polish population underwent significant assimilation; in 1989 40% considered Ukrainian as their mother tongue, 15% Russian. During Soviet times two Polish schools continued to function: № 10 (with 8 grades) and № 24 (with 10 grades).

In the 1980s the process of uniting groups into ethnic associations was allowed. In 1988 a Polish language newspaper was allowed (Gazeta Lwowska). The Polish population of the city continues to use the dialect of the Polish language known as Lwów dialect (Polish: gwara lwowska).

[Jaga]

Kai, good map. It is interesting that the shape of Galicia is also similar to Austrian, not just the size. I wonder what really Galicia means since the same term is used for Spanish Galicia.

Interesting story of the myth.... Galicia was backward and very poor specially in the countryside, thus people were leaving Galicia for America more than any other partition. Big cities like Krakow or Lvov were easier to live in and felt probably more autonomous.

Pieter - Lvov was actually a capital of Galicia during Austrian occupation. Krakow was less prominent than Lvov, probably due to the fact that Krakow was considered too Polish

[kaima]

Jaga, to fill in with too much information, people can brouse through the following selections. It remains alive in many family histories and lore, and a special feeling of place that once existed, and today is going off into mythology along side Camelot.

Galicia or Halychyna .... a historical and geographic region in Eastern Europe,once a small kingdom, finally resurrected as a province of Austria, the land currently straddles the border between Poland and Ukraine. The area, which is named after the mediaeval city of Halych.

Note the fun aspect of the H and the G being interchanged, as when one switches between Polish and Ukrainian. To Americans, the G and the H are equivalent; to some Europeans it is probably cause for throat slitting.





There is also quite a bit on Jewish Galicia, where modern Orthodxy started, I believe.











en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galicia_%28Eastern_Europe%29
www.halgal.com/galicia.html
www.personal.ceu.hu/students/97/Roman_Zakharii/galicia.htm

[JustJohn or JJ]

Ron, 

     Years ago, when I was knee high to a grasshopper, my now deceased mother used to ask me a question.

Was I a Galiciak or a Grodzieniak. I believed at the time she was trying to see where my sympathies lie. With my father or my mother.

Since her home village was outside of Grodno, I can understand the Grodzieniak remark.

However, my fathers village was Cwiklin and I can't understand the correlation to Galiciak.

[pieter]

The population of Galicia (Eastern Europe)

Galicia had arguably the most ethnically diverse population of all the countries in the Austrian monarchy, consisting mainly of Poles and "Ruthenians"; the peoples known later as Ukrainians and Rusyns, as well as ethnic Jews, Germans, Armenians, Czechs, Slovaks, Hungarians, Roma and others. In Galicia as a whole, the population in 1910 was estimated to be 45.4% Polish, 42.9% Ukrainian, 10.9% Jewish, and 8% German. This population was not evenly distributed. The Poles lived mainly in the west, with the Ukrainians predominant in the eastern region ("Ruthenia"). At the turn of the twentieth century, Poles constituted 78.7% of the whole population of Western Galicia, Ukrainians 13.2%, Jews 7.6%, Germans 0.3%, and others 0.2%. The respective data for Eastern Galicia show the following numbers: Ukrainians 64.5%, Poles 21.0%, Jews 13.7%, Germans 0.3%, and others 0.5%. Of the 44 administrative divisions of Austrian eastern Galicia, Lviv (Polish: Lwów, German/Yiddish/Dutch: Lemberg) was the only one in which Poles made up a majority of the population.

Linguistically, the Polish language was predominant in Galicia. According to the 1910 census 58.6% of the combined population of both western and eastern Galicia spoke Polish as its mother tongue compared to 40.2% who spoke the Ukrainian language.

The number of Polish-speakers may have been inflated because Jews were not given the option of listing Yiddish as their language.

Source: Wikipedia

[pieter]

[pieter]