Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations (88 page)

Most museologists would recognize here the clutch of problems that centre on the near-universal idea of the ‘excluded past’. They struggle to find ways of reintroducing topics that for one reason or another have been neglected or actively suppressed.
¹⁰⁸
In the United States, for example, the Native American heritage and the history of slavery long suffered from official denial, and it is only recently that the omissions have been rectified.
¹⁰⁹
In Australia, it was the appalling history of the near-extermination of the Aborigines. In Russia, despite the efforts of the Memorial Association, the crimes of the Soviet regime largely escape attention; there is certainly no museum recording the history of its victims. In most countries, including Britain, the histories of women, of children, of the poor, have not been expounded with enthusiasm. In Poland and Ukraine, the successor states to Galicia, a great deal remains to be done if Galicia’s memory is not to fall into oblivion.

A step in the right direction was taken in 1995 when a new
Muzeum Galicja
opened in the Kazimierz district of Kraków. It has won many plaudits for its innovatory methods of recovering ‘The Traces of Memory’. Its basic collection has been assembled round photographs by the late Chris Schwarz, who travelled far and wide to record ‘what could still be recorded of a lost civilisation’. Yet, as its English name indicates, the Galicia Jewish Museum was conceived as a tribute to Jewish life in the former Galicia, not to Galician life as a whole. There are five sections:

• Jewish Life in Ruins.

• Jewish Culture as it once was.

• Sites of Massacre and Destruction.

• How the Past is being remembered.

• People Making Memory.

In 2008, three additional exhibitions were on view: ‘Fighting with Dignity: Jewish Resistance in Kraków, 1939–45’, ‘March ‘68 in the Kraków Press’, and ‘Polish Heroes: those who rescued Jews’.
Muzeum Galicja
is an admirable antidote both to the effects of the Holocaust and to the lamentable tendency to bypass the age-old Jewish presence, yet it too presents something short of the full story.
¹¹⁰
The fact remains that the sum total of current memory-making leaves much to be desired. The rich, multi-layered legacy of Galicia stays in the shadows. The kingdom ‘as it really was’ remains at best half-forgotten or half-remembered.

One ray of hope in this regard may well be found beyond the territory of the former Galicia, in Silesia. Contacts between the Ossolineum Institute, relocated to Wrocław in 1946, and its sister institution in L’viv, were all but eliminated. After 1991, however, it reorganized itself as a private foundation, and secured legal ownership of its most important possessions,
¹¹¹
and now has an explicit mission to bridge the gap between Poland and Ukraine. Rehoused in the former German Gymnasium of St Matthias, and magnificently refurbished, it operates in an environment where international reconciliation is an everyday issue, and where knowledge of Polish-German issues may assist in the handling of Polish-Ukrainian issues. Since German Breslau, like Austrian Galicia, possessed a strong Jewish presence, it may help to reintegrate Jewish memory, too. The Stefanyk Library in L’viv, less accustomed to the new opportunities and more strapped for cash, adapted more slowly,
¹¹²
but practical co-operation and a measure of trust are being re-established. New vistas are opening up in the new era of digitization and of exhibition-sharing. In the twenty-first century this L’viv–Wrocław axis offers one of the best prospects for resuscitating Galician heritage.

Another positive development of a completely different type is located in the town of Nowy Sa˛cz, not far from Krynica, where an open-air ethnographic museum admirably illustrates the difficulties of adapting to a new political environment and of recovering comprehensive memories. The exhibits consist mainly of rural buildings, transported from their original sites and carefully reassembled. The most interesting aspect, though, is that in Galician times the surrounding district straddled the divide between predominantly Polish and predominantly Ukrainian settlement; the adjoining township of Stary Sa˛cz was home to a vibrant Jewish community.

When the museum was first conceived in the 1960s, the cultural authorities of the Polish People’s Republic were eager to promote a strange mixture of Marxist historical materialism and old-fashioned ‘Blood and Soil’ nationalism. It was judged essential to pretend that the territory of the Republic coincided exactly with Poland’s immemorial ‘historic lands’. Talk of ‘ethnic minorities’ was suppressed; all museums were subject to rigorous state censorship; and any deviation risked punishment. It was not possible, for example, to let it be known that the area south-east of Nowy Sa˛cz had been inhabited until recently by people of Ruthenian/Ukrainian descent. And any hint of the ethnic cleansing undertaken by the Communist regime during ‘Operation Vistula’ would have been construed as a criminal offence.

In the museum’s early days, therefore, nothing was said directly about Poles, Ukrainians or Jews. Instead, the exhibition space was divided into four sectors, each devoted to one of four ‘ethnographic groups’ –
Pogórzanie
(Hill People),
Górale
(Highlanders)
Lemkos
and
Lachy
. Each of the groups, it was explained, enjoyed their own dress, customs, dialects and socio-economic organization. The use of the term
Lachy
is particularly curious. It is the standard Ukrainian word for Poles, and it was presumably chosen to avoid explaining that the neighbouring Lemkos were a branch of the Ukrainians. In all probability it referred to the Polish peasants of the mid-Galician plain, who practised arable farming as opposed to the pastoral economy of the hill and mountain groups.

To be fair, the museum’s initial
raison d’être
was to provide a record of traditional rural life, which was fast disappearing under the pressures of industrialization. Care was taken, in good Marxist style, to distinguish between the primitive cabins of landless labourers and the more substantial dwellings of richer owners. Even so, there were glaring omissions. There was no church, no manor house, and not a single reminder of the Jewish presence.
¹¹³

Since 1989 the contents of the museum have evolved in several directions. First, the updated guidebook now speaks of three ‘ethnic minorities’ – Germans, Jews and Roma – alongside the four ‘ethnographic groups’, and exhibits have been added relating to each of them. Secondly, a number of rural churches and chapels have been introduced. There are fine examples of wooden sacral architecture, Roman Catholic, Uniate, Orthodox and Lutheran, but as yet no sign of a synagogue. Thirdly, with assistance from European Union funds, a separate area has been set aside to reconstruct a typical
miasteczko galicyjskie
or ‘Galician townlet’. As of 2009, when building works were still incomplete, the Yiddish word of
shtetl
was not being used, but it would be very surprising if the overall Jewish accent were not considerably strengthened. For the time being, visitors are greeted with a photographic exhibition of Jewish sites and cemeteries in Galicia, and also with a klezmer concert and an introduction to Jewish cooking.
¹¹⁴

A stroll round the museum takes two or three hours, or more if the richly furnished interiors are properly inspected. Over sixty buildings offer great variety, from a poor peasant’s cabin from Lipnica Wielka (
c
. 1850), to an early nineteenth-century linseed oil-mill from Słopnice; from a thatched cottage of a country labourer from Podegrod (1846), to a wooden Greek Catholic church of St Demetrius from Czarne (1786); from a Roma complex of two dwellings and a forge from Czarna, to an early eighteenth-century manor house from Rdzawa near Bochnia. For all its dilemmas, this collection of Galician rural architecture and folklore is more typical of the former Galicia, and is more inclusive, than are the art galleries and highbrow museums.
¹¹⁵
Yet it can never be complete. The ‘real’, the authentic, the ‘total Galicia’ remains tantalizingly out of reach.

The present challenge facing local historians and museologists would have been well understood by Galicians. In the wake of the latest political shift in 1989, the bearers of the Polish, Ukrainian and Jewish heritages are confronted, like their ancestors, by the need to find paths towards compromise and cohabitation. They have somehow to shelve their selfish interests, and to seek out themes of common concern. It is to be hoped that something can be achieved before the centenary of Galicia’s demise in 2018. A touch of Galician humour would help. So, too, would the old Habsburg motto: ‘
Viribus Unitis
’.

*
The
Warthegau
, i.e. the District of the River Warthe, was the Nazi name for Great Poland.

Etruria

French Snake in the Tuscan Grass

(1801–1814)

Etruria

French Snake in the Tuscan Grass

(1801–1814)

I

Florence – Firenze – the chief city of Tuscany and cradle of the Renaissance – is the Mecca of all art-seekers. They come in their millions from all over the world, gazing at the buildings, the paintings and the sculpture, walking the streets that were walked by Dante, Fra Angelico and Michelangelo, breathing the air inhaled by Giotto, by Leonardo and by Galileo. I myself was one of them, taken at a tender age to see the great masterpieces, and shortly afterwards to the gates of Paradise Lost at nearby Vall’Ombrosa, where John Milton imagined Satan’s legions as ‘Angel Forms’

who lay intrans’t,

Thick as Autumnal Leaves that strow the Brooks

In
Vallombrosa
, where th’
Etrurian
shades

High overarch’t imbowr;
¹

Milton was consciously writing in the epic tradition of Homer, Virgil and Dante. James Joyce, another literary pilgrim to Italy, described
Paradise Lost
as ‘a Puritan transcript of the Divine Comedy’.
²

Like all medieval cities, Florence has an ancient heart that covers just a couple of square miles. The only good way to see it is on foot. A stroll from the Ponte Vecchio, the ‘Old Bridge’, across the River Arno to the central Piazza della Signoria takes only a few minutes, and one can walk round the line of the medieval walls in a morning or an afternoon. On arriving in Florence, therefore, one is faced by a mass of adverts and agencies which offer the services of private guides and of guided tours. A typical enterprise offers six alternative tours: ‘Introduction to Florence’, ‘The Golden Age’, ‘The Medici Dynasty’, ‘Life in Medieval Florence’, ‘Unusual Florence’ and ‘Florence for Children’. The last of these options, it is promised, can be enjoyed no less by accompanying adults. The attractions include ‘climbing the Duomo tower’, ‘visiting a castle’, ‘how children lived’, ‘trying on period clothing’ and ‘watching artists at work.’
³

Most guidebooks recommend a one- or two-day tour in the company of an interpreter, followed by a lifetime of individual exploration. After all, one is entering a city that claims to possess one-fifth of all the world’s ‘Old Masters’: