Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations (81 page)

II

The Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria was created in 1773 from the acquisitions of the Austrian Empire during the First Partition of Poland, and was destroyed in October 1918 at the end of the First World War. Throughout its existence of 145 years, it was designated as a
Kronland
, one of the Empire’s ‘Crownlands’, and the kingdom’s crown was vested from start to finish in the imperial monarchs of the House of Habsburg. In all, there were seven of them:

Maria Theresa (r. 1740–80)

Joseph II (r. 1780–90)

Leopold II (r. 1790–92)

Francis II (r. 1792–1835)

Ferdinand I (r. 1835–48)

Franz-Joseph (r. 1848–1916)

Charles (r. 1916–18)

The kingdom’s name was invented by Maria Theresa’s advisers in Vienna in accordance with a complicated historical conceit. Many centuries earlier – before their annexation by medieval Poland – the districts of Halicz (Galicia) and Volodymyr (Lodomeria) had briefly belonged to the kings of Hungary, who had thereon assumed the title of ‘dukes of Galicia and Lodomeria’. Four hundred years later, since the empress was also queen of Hungary, her advisers decided to revive the ancient ducal title, upgrade it to royal status, and apply it to a much wider area.

The kingdom’s territory was increased and diminished on various occasions, but was never inconsiderable. The core area established in 1773 covered
c
. 30,000 square miles, similar in size to Scotland or Bavaria, and consisted of two distinct parts. Western Galicia coincided in large measure with the historic Polish province of Małopolska (Lesser Poland), whose roots went back to the eleventh century, occupying a broad tract of land between the upper valley of the Vistula and the Carpathian ridge. Eastern Galicia, beyond the River San, largely coincided with the former palatinate of Ruthenia, a province which had been annexed by Poland in the fourteenth century. Its chief city – L’viv – which the Austrians renamed Lemberg, became the kingdom’s seat of government.

The kingdom’s population, which was to grow dramatically during the nineteenth century, numbered some 3 million in 1773. It was mainly composed of three ethnic groups, each associated with a different religion. The Polish-speaking Poles were predominantly Roman Catholic. The Ruthenians, who spoke
ruski
, a form of old Ukrainian, were predominantly Greek Catholic Uniates (see p.
277
). The Jews, if not assimilated into Polish society, mainly spoke Yiddish, and were divided between the adherents of Orthodox Judaism and of Chassidism (see below, p.
463
). The population was overwhelmingly rural. With the exception of Lemberg itself, the towns were small; the villages were numerous. In western Galicia, Poles and Jews lived cheek by jowl. In eastern Galicia, Polish nobles lived in their country houses, while Ruthenian peasants tilled the soil, and Jews formed a strong majority in their
shtetln
or ‘little towns’.

The kingdom’s history can be divided into three periods. During its first twenty years Galicia was deeply influenced by the enlightened reforms of Joseph II. In the next twenty, which were dominated by the Napoleonic Wars, it experienced successive bouts of political instability and territorial transformation. Only after 1815 did it settle down to the more stable but less optimistic existence which persisted until the end. One mid-century change, however, was important. In 1846 Poland’s ancient capital, Kraków, which the 1815 Congress of Vienna had turned into a city-republic, lost its sovereign status and was merged with Galicia. From then on Kraków and Lemberg were rival centres.

The kingdom’s character escapes easy categorization. It was determined by its artificial creation, by its geopolitical location and by its legendary poverty. Far from Vienna but close to the Empire’s most vulnerable frontiers, life in Galicia was full of pains and problems. Its citizens were never in full control of their destiny, developing a strong sense of fatalism combined with a famous brand of humour. At some point, some Galician wag made play on the kingdom’s name. Since
goły
means ‘naked’ and
głód
means ‘hunger’, it didn’t take much to adapt the kingdom’s name to ‘Golicia and Glodomeria’ – ‘Kingdom of the Naked and Starving’.
⁵

The reforms of Joseph II, an enlightened despot par excellence, were radical but mainly short-lived. A serious attempt was made, for example, to improve the lot of the illiterate, rural serfs. Taxes were imposed on landowners and numerous monasteries were dissolved to provide the income for a state-backed scheme of primary education. Yet the emperor’s centralizing policies underestimated both provincial particularities and the force of conservative opposition. At the end of his ten-year reign, in the shadow of the French Revolution, he was forced to rescind much of his reform programme.
⁶
The dissolution of monasteries did, however, have lasting effects. The social influence of the Roman Catholic Church was diminished, and former monastic lands were frequently used to attract German colonists and to settle them as free farmers. In several districts, compact German communities came to form a substantial minority.
⁷

Galicia’s fate during the French revolutionary wars was closely bound up with that of its Austrian masters. The Habsburgs, relatives of Marie-Antoinette, were viewed in Paris as the lords of reaction, and for twenty years after 1793 France and Austria were almost continually at war. Although the revolutionary armies never set foot in Galicia, they inspired the creation of the neighbouring Duchy of Warsaw, with which conflict was unavoidable. Throughout those two decades large numbers of Galician men were conscripted into the Austrian army, and the province was obliged to pay its tribute in blood and taxes.

Such was the setting for the romantic and tragic story of the three Polish Legions, which cut a dashing figure on many a battlefield. About 30,000 Galician soldiers, who had been taken to Italy by the Austrians, volunteered in 1797 to change sides and to fight for Napoleon. Their commander, General Jan Henryk Da˛browski (1755–1818), found favour with his men by pressing Napoleon to overthrow the Partitions of Poland (see pp.
285–90
). In the event, the Legions were employed everywhere except on the road to Poland, and deep disillusionment set in. Their last, desperate mission was to Haiti, where many of them changed sides for a second time to fight against French colonialism. Nonetheless, the ‘Song of the Legions’, set to the tune of a lively mazurka, long outlived the original singers:

Jeszcze Polska nie zgine˛ła, póki my
˙zyjemy,

Co nam obca przemoc wzie˛ła, sza˛bla˛ odbierzemy!

Marsz, marsz, Da˛browski, z ziemi włoskiej do Polski,

Pod Twoim przewodem, zła˛czym sie˛ z narodem.

(‘Poland has not perished yet so long as we still live. / That which foreign force has seized we’ll with sabres drawn retrieve! / March, march, Da˛browski, to Poland from the Italian land. / So let us join our nation, under Thy command’.)
⁸
Nearly a century would pass before these words could be freely sung in Galicia.

Having missed out on the Second Partition of Poland in 1793, the Austrian authorities participated in the Third two years later, accepting a large tract of land north of the Vistula containing both Kraków and Lublin. They renamed it ‘New Galicia’. Their acquisition provided one of the causes of the brief war of 1809 with the Napoleonic Duchy of Warsaw, but the expanded territorial arrangements did not survive the Napoleonic Wars; at the Congress of Vienna, New Galicia disappeared from the map.
⁹
Kraków was elevated to be a small independent republic; Lublin was given to Russia.

Prince Metternich, the Austrian chancellor from 1815 to 1846, famously remarked that ‘Asia begins at the Landstrasse’, a street in Vienna’s eastern suburbs. The Viennese were apt to regard anywhere and everywhere to the east of their magnificent city as backward and exotic, and they played a prominent role in launching the stereotype of ‘Eastern Europe’ as a reservoir of underdevelopment and inferiority. Travellers to Galicia habitually wrote of dirty inns, bad roads and savage peasants. After 1846, however, the
Kaiser-Ferdinands-Nordbahn
linked Vienna with Lemberg. The railway provided a convenient means whereby Austrians could discover Galicia, and Galicians the rest of the Empire. The author of one well-known travelogue called it
Aus Halbasien
: ‘Half-way to Asia’. ‘Anyone taking that line will die of boredom,’ he wrote, ‘if not of hunger.’
¹⁰

As the crow flies, Lemberg is some 340 miles north-east of Vienna, but the rail journey was considerably longer. The first stage crossed the provinces of Moravia and Austrian Silesia; the Galician frontier was reached either at Oświe˛cim (Auschwitz) or at Bielsko (Bielitz). Beyond Bielsko lay the lands of the medieval Duchy of Oświe˛cim and Zator. A short ride to the south lay the Habsburg castle of ˙Zywiec (Saybusch), seat of an imperial archduke and from 1856 home to an imperial brewery. To the left, one skirted the fertile valley of the Vistula; to the right the rolling Beskid Hills. At Ke˛ty stood the chapel of the Saint-Professor Johannes Cantius (1390–1473), patron of academic study. At Wadowice, the Austrians were to build a large barracks, and the garrison town would become the birthplace of a pope. At Kalwaria Lańckorońa one passed a hilltop Franciscan monastery, scene of a popular annual pilgrimage. In the early days the train did not cross the river into Kraków but stayed on the south bank at Franz-Jozef Stadt (Podgórze). From 1815 to 1846, the Vistula formed the frontier between the Austrian Empire and the Republic of Kraków.

Further east, as Galicia widened out, the railway left the Vistula and made for the San. Wieliczka and Bochnia possessed ancient salt mines, once the source of great wealth. Tarnów and Rzeszów were bishoprics. Travellers pausing for refreshment might have noticed that peasants coming from the villages in the wooded hill country to the south of the line were no longer speaking Polish. They were Ruthenian Lemkos – one of several distinct ethnic communities. Przemyśl (Peremyshl) on the River San commanded Galicia’s central crossroads, the dividing line between west and east. It was the site of the kingdom’s largest fortress, of two cathedrals, Roman Catholic and Greek Catholic, and of several synagogues.

Despite its historic origins in a Ruthenian principality, Lemberg had become an island of Polishness. As time passed, it also attracted a substantial Jewish community and an influential body of Austrian bureaucrats, many of them Germans from Bohemia. It was Galicia’s principal centre of urban life and of refined culture, and it developed a unique personality (see below). In due course, the railway was extended beyond Lemberg, in the first instance to join Galicia with the neighbouring province of Bukovina. Later on, it linked the Austrian Empire with the Russian port of Odessa. Galicia’s eastern frontier was passed at Sniatyń. In that district, locals still called the northern bank of the Dniester the ‘Polish side’, and the southern bank the ‘Turkish side’.

The landscape of Galicia was (and still is) extremely picturesque. The rivers flowing down from the snowbound Carpathian ridge are filled with broad, deep and powerful streams feeding numerous lakes and waterfalls, and range after range of hills are piled up against the ridge, creating row after row of valleys, great and small. The woods and forests were varied and extensive. The hilltops were often crowned with dense pinewoods, while high stands of beech stretched out below the rocky summits of the main ridge. The valley floors and broad plains were filled with farmland. Agriculture was traditional, not to say primitive. The peasants lived in wooden cabins, spun yarn for their own clothes, and tilled the fields by hand in timeless routine. They donned their colourful costumes on Sundays or for religious festivals, or to ride to the markets that were run by Jews. It was a land which tourists would increasingly seek to visit, and which peasants would increasingly want to leave.

Galicia’s mountain districts presented remarkable variety, both in their inhabitants and their scenery; they were to prove attractive for hikers, ethnographers, painters, poets and photographers, especially from Germany and Austria.
Podhale
, the ‘Land of the
Górale
’ or ‘Polish Highlanders’, snuggled among the subalpine peaks of the Tatra Mountains to the south of Kraków.
¹¹
It was famed for its wood-carving, its white felt clothing and its inimitably raucous music. Further east, the
Lemkivshchyna
or ‘Land of the Lemkos’ occupied both sides of the Carpathian ridge among the tree-clad Lower Beskid hills. The Greek Catholic Lemkos spoke a Ruthenian dialect quite different from the speech of the
Górale
, and were famed for their choral singing.
¹²
Beyond the San round Sambor lay the
Boykivshchyna
, the ‘Land of the Boykos’, another Ruthene group which included a substantial minority of Orthodox. Boyko villages were marked out by their unusual triple-domed, beehive churches.
¹³
The
Hutsulshchyna
or ‘Land of the Hutsuls’ backed onto the mountainous frontier with Hungary to the south-east of Lemberg.
¹⁴
The Hutsuls specialized in metalwork and horse-breeding, lived in widely scattered hamlets, and were said to be riddled with syphilis. All these districts boasted wild scenery, severe winters, remote pastoral homesteads, archaic dialects, vivid costumes and treasured folklore.