Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations (83 page)

In Galicia’s early days, German was less developed as a governmental and literary medium than Polish. (It was only starting to develop in those roles in Prussia.) As a result, the Habsburg bureaucrats of Lemberg cultivated a highly stilted and artificial style of their own. Galician Polish, too, was relatively archaic. The nobles held forth in forms filled with third-person titles, rhetorical flourishes and elaborate courtesies. The peasants used the second-person form, and were given to rural idioms, popular proverbs and down-to-earth vocabulary. Ruthenian, that is, Galician
ruski
, which would be classified nowadays as Old West Ukrainian, was the language of illiterate serfs and their descendants, and of the Greek Catholic clergy who served them; it shared many of the characteristics of White Ruthenian
ruski
in the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania (see p.
243
). Its vocabulary had been subjected to a tidal wave of Polonisms, and its orthography long wavered between the Latin and the Cyrillic alphabets. In the mountain districts, it fragmented into numerous local dialects.

Historically, the native language of Galicia’s Jews was Yiddish; they prayed and studied in Hebrew. As the nineteenth century wore on, however, the trend towards assimilation in secular matters led to the widespread adoption either of German or, especially in Kraków, of Polish. Jews in the country towns also needed to understand the language of the surrounding peasantry. Trilingualism or quadrilingualism was not uncommon.

The depth of the cultural gulf which separated town from country, and class from class, can be gleaned from the exceptional memoirs of Jan Słomka, that is, ‘Jack Straw’ (1848–1929), who was born in a village near De˛bica in western Galicia in the last year of serfdom. As an illiterate farmboy, he writes, he had no conception of being Polish. The peasants of his district called themselves ‘Mazury’, having migrated from further north in Mazovia many generations earlier. The label of ‘Pole’ was reserved for nobles. Only when he learned to read and write in his twenties did he realize that he belonged to the same Polish nation as Prince Sapieha or Adam Mickiewicz.
²⁶

Galicia’s linguistic diversity was nicely demonstrated in the singing of the imperial anthem, which was adopted in 1795 with words by Lorenz Leopold Haschka and melody by Joseph Haydn:

Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser,

Unsern guten Kaiser Franz,

Hoch als Herrscher, hoch als Weiser,

Steht er in des Ruhmes Glanz…
²⁷

(The music was to be adopted later by the German Empire, and sung to ‘
Deutschland, Deutschland über alles
’.) After 1848, however, the practice spread whereby the anthem could be sung by each of the emperor’s subjects in their own language. In Galicia, the Polish version competed mainly with Ruthenian:

(‘God assist and God protect / our Emperor and our land! / Guard his rule with the shield of faith / and hold his state in Thy hand!’) The text was also available in Yiddish and Hebrew, and if necessary in Friulian.
²⁸

By the turn of the century, each of the Empire’s nationalities was singing their own national anthem alongside, or even in place of the imperial one. The Poles of Galicia did not favour Da˛browski’s ‘
Mazurek
’ or the ‘
Warszawianka
’ that were popular across the Russian frontier. Instead, they preferred the lugubrious choral hymn composed by Kornel Ujejski in shock from the Galician
Rabacja
:

Z dymem poz˙arów, z kurzem krwi bratniej

Do Ciebie, Panie, bije ten głos…

Through fiery smoke, through brothers’ blood and ashes,

To Thee, O Lord, our fearful prayers ring out

In terrible lamentation, like the Last Shout.

Our hair grows grey from these entreaties.

Our songs are filled with sorrow’s invocation.

Our brows are pierced by crowns of rooted thorn.

Our outstretched hands are raised in supplication,

Like monuments to Thy wrath, eternally forlorn.
²⁹

The Ruthenians, for their part, adopted a song that was first printed in Lemberg in 1863. Appropriately composed by a lyricist from Kiev and a musical cleric from Peremyshl, it embodied the spiritual link between the Ukrainian national movement in the Russian Empire and the Ruthenians of Galicia, and was destined to become the national anthem of Ukraine. Its first line parodied the first line of Da˛browski’s ‘
Mazurek
’: ‘Poland has not perished yet’. The pro-Ukrainian Ruthenians sang ‘
Shche ne vmerla Ukraina
’, ‘So far Ukraine has not perished’.

The Zionist anthem ‘
Hatikvah
’, though rarely heard in conservative Galicia, was predictably composed by a Galician Jew.
³⁰

Galicia’s religious culture was traditional, compartmentalized and very demanding. It was designed for people who craved guidance and solace in hard, uncertain lives and who rarely questioned either the strict observances or the unbending authority of their religious leaders. Piety both in public and in private marked a way of life accepted by Christians and Jews alike.

The main branches of the Catholic faith, Roman and Greek, operated throughout the kingdom. The Roman Catholic Church was closely associated both with the Habsburg establishment and with the Polish community. In western Galicia it provided the religion of all classes: in the east, of the gentry.

The Greek Catholic (Uniate) Church, in contrast, served a Ruthenian community that was only slowly emerging from serfdom and from cultural isolation. It had retained the liturgy of its Byzantine roots, while adhering to the principle of papal supremacy. Being viewed with intense hostility by the Russian Orthodox Church across the eastern frontier, it blended well with Austria’s anti-Russian political stance. Its most outstanding hierarch was Andrei Sheptytskyi (Andrzej Szeptycki, 1865–1944), metropolitan of Lemberg-Halich, who was cousin to a Roman Catholic general and nephew to the dramatist Alexander Fredro. Scion of a leading landed family and a graduate of the Jagiellonian University, he chose a Ruthenian and Uniate identity of his own free will, and became the true shepherd of his flock, both politically and spiritually. In the Second World War he was one of the few churchmen to dare to denounce Nazi crimes from the pulpit.
³¹

The Russian Orthodox Church, despite (or perhaps because of) its dogged attempts to recruit Slav Christians, was not well viewed in Galicia. The so-called ‘Russophiles’ in the central Carpathian area were the only substantial group to embrace it.
³²
The old-established Armenian Church served a community of merchants and exiles who had fled Ottoman rule, and whose adherents were thoroughly Polonized in everyday life. But their cathedral in Lemberg preserved the rites and language of Christianity’s oldest denomination.
³³

The Protestants of Galicia were fish in the wrong sort of water. They were either German Lutherans, who had settled in a number of rural colonies, or Polish Evangelicals, who had spilled over the border from Austrian Silesia (where the Catholics were Czech and the Protestants Polish). They were strong in Lemberg, in Stanisławów and in Biała.

As defined by religious practice, the Jews formed over 10 per cent of Galicia’s population and were often an absolute majority in particular localities. Yet traditional Orthodox Judaism was strongly challenged by the rise of the Hassidic sects, who had started to proliferate in the late eighteenth century. The Hassids, or Chassids, meaning the ‘Pious’, rejected the rabbis and their teaching of the Talmud. They observed their own strict rules of dress and diet, and lived in separate communes, each headed by its
zaddik
or ‘guru’. Their emphasis lay on the mystical aspects of religion, on the practice of Cabbala and on their rapturous singing and dancing. They were especially resistant to assimilation and modernity, and increasingly set the tone for the
Galizianer
, the stereotypical ‘Galician Jew’. The Karaites, who also shunned Judaic Orthodoxy, were another minority within the minority.
³⁴

Monasteries had long been a feature of the Galician landscape, and they suited the kingdom’s conservative ethos. Many of the dissolutions enacted by Joseph II, therefore, were reversed; many ancient foundations, Roman Catholic and Uniate, continued to flourish. Here and there – in the Benedictine ruins of Tyniec near Kraków, or of the former Basilian cloister at Trembowla – there were reminders of hostile secular forces. But they were exceptions. The approaches to Kraków continued to be dominated by the towers of the Camaldulensian monastery at Bielany, and by the imposing battlements of the Salvator convent.

All denominations made public displays of their piety. Galician life was punctuated by a great variety of saints’ days, processions and pilgrimages. The Cracovian Feast of St Stanisław was celebrated in May with great pomp, while the Corpus Christi parade in June attracted still greater crowds. The annual pilgrimage in August to the Franciscan cloister at Kalwaria Zebrzydowska in west Galicia was attended by tens of thousands of peasants who dressed up in their finest clothes to camp out in the vicinity for days. (It was a central event in the peasants’ marriage market.)

The Jews, too, had their pilgrimages. At Passover in the spring or at Yom Kippur in the autumn visitors would congregate round prominent synagogues or at the homes of ‘miracle-working’
zaddiks
. Belz and Husiatyn were two of many favourite destinations.

Among the Catholics, the cult of the Virgin Mary was widely practised. Many Polish pilgrims headed across the frontier to Cze˛stochowa, to the shrine of the Black Madonna, who had long been revered as ‘Queen of Poland’. Attempts by the Austrian authorities to declare her ‘Queen of Galicia and Lodomeria’ did not meet with much success.

Galicia’s secular culture has to be divided into two parts: the folk culture of the peasant majority, which was rooted in immemorial customs; and the more intellectual activities of educated circles, which were the product of growing European interchanges in science and the arts.

Despite the age of its roots, Galician folk-culture cannot be regarded as static. After the abolition of serfdom, the speech, the costumes, the music, the legends, the songs and dances and the everyday practices of various regions all became badges of pride for the newly liberated rural class, and were standardized and formalized in new ways. They also attracted the attention of early ethnographers. František Rˇehorˇ (1857–99) was a Czech who was taken in his boyhood to a farm near Lemberg, and who spent a lifetime recording Ruthenian folklore.
³⁵
Semyon Ansky (1863–1920) was a Jewish socialist who made a now classic study of Galician Jewry during the First World War.
³⁶
Stanisław Vincenz (1888–1971) was a Pole born in Hutsul country who was to spend most of his life in exile. His famous analysis of Hutsul culture,
Na Wysokiej Połoninie
, ‘On the High Pasture’, was not published until the world of his youth had been destroyed.
³⁷

Education, of course, was the key to social advancement. But, despite many improvements, it remained the preserve of relatively few beneficiaries. Generally speaking, Jews who learned to read and write as a religious duty were better served than Christians, and enjoyed a distinct headstart on the route into the professions, commerce and the arts. In the early nineteenth century the provision of primary schools, largely by the Churches, was woefully inadequate. After the reign of Joseph II the Austrian state was interested in little other than the training of its German-speaking bureaucracy. From the 1860s onwards, however, important changes were made. First, though elementary education was never compulsory, the number of schools multiplied greatly. Secondly, both the secondary schools and the universities were largely taken over by Polish educators. By 1914 Galicia possessed sixty-one Polish
gymnasia
or grammar schools, but only six Ruthenian ones. The Jagiellonian University in Kraków, the University of Lemberg and the Lemberg
Politechnika
were all Polish institutions.