Customer Reviews

Galicia: A Multicultured land

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Having embarked on a quest for a better understanding of my Ukrainian/Polish heritage, I found this collection to be a valuable resource. I have always been interested in my lineage beyond my nuclear family. It is a fact that on my Ukrainian side my Grandparents were Greek catholic, and on the Polish side Roman Catholic. That in itself is amazing to me and I am delighted to refer to myself and others as a "naturalized Galician"
Mssrs Hann and Magocsi have compiled an excellant work for those interested in the history of Galicia and its varied peoples. I would highly recommend for the researcher and non-researcher alike.

Outstanding quality of articles written by Scholars from diferentent nationalities on this european region.


Special Honors to the article written by Professor Stalisnaw Stepien.


A must for those interested on Western Ukraine and the territorios of The former Commonwealth of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.

Based on his own analysis of church and other records, Ukrainian-Canadian scholar Magocsi (pp. 7-8, 18) suggests that Poles constituted 25.3% of eastern Galicia's population in 1910. Let's fast forward to the 1930's. Considering the interim emigration of Ukrainians, influx of Poles, and re-nationalization of formerly Ukrainian-identifying local Poles, the Polish share of eastern Galicia population must have by then been substantially greater than 25%. Yet many Ukrainian "alternative censuses" (e. g., Kubiiovych) insist that the 1930's Polish share was less than 25%. Obviously, if Magocsi is correct, then these revisionists cannot be correct.

When citing church records, should it be assumed that almost no Ukrainians were Roman Catholics and certainly almost no Poles were Greek Catholics? Not necessarily. Nineteenth-century Poles and Ukrainians, at least in the Przemysl area, had often swapped linguistic and religious "markers". (Stepien, pp. 54-55; Hann, p. 220).

Ironic to the enmity of later Ukrainian nationalists against Poles, some nationally-conscious Ukrainians had seen their future in terms of a resurrected Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth. (pp. 64-65). In fact, nationally-conscious Ukrainians can be divided into Russophiles, Ukrainophiles, and Polonophiles. (pp. 103-104).

Poles had commonly contended that the Ukrainian national awakening had been firmly placed on an anti-Polish track by the Austrians (e. g., Count Stadion) following a DIVIDE ET IMPERA policy. Some Ukrainian scholars in this volume at least partly concur. (p. 14, 193).

German scholar Struve has a fascinating chapter on the 19th-century emergence of respective national consciousness among Galicia's Ukrainian and Polish peasants. Among Poles, the awakening was modeled after the Poznan Poles' experience, and, like its Ukrainian counterpart, it included the establishment of small village libraries and reading rooms. (p. 106). For Ukrainians the peasant national awakening was straightforward; for Poles it was complicated by the prior association of Polish patriotism with the oppressive nobility, and the emancipation of the serfs (in 1848) by an Austrian emperor. Yet: "...by 1894 something had changed. The idea that the LUD [populace] was the basis of Polish national existence, and that any hope for the nation's future lay not with the SZLACHTA [nobility] but rather with the LUD, had become predominant in the Polish public sphere." (p. 121). The painting of Kosciuszko at the Battle of Raclawice, including the fighting peasants (the kosynierzy--scythe-bearers), served as an inspiration. "The substantial degree of political and national mobilization reached among the peasantry by the eve of World War I is evident in the large number of Polish national celebrations in the villages." (p. 123).

WWI-era Poles tended to discount Ukrainian aspirations because of their recent appearance and because the Ukrainians were deemed too backward to be making credible national claims. Interestingly, Lviv Ukrainian scholar Yaroslav Hrytsak provides information that endows such attitudes with an element of validity: "In Galicia, a significant proportion of Ruthenians did not (or did not want to) define themselves in national terms for most of the nineteenth century. Their Polish opponents referred to them maliciously as POPY i CHLOPY (priests and peasants). Indeed, as late as 1910, not even 2 percent of Ruthenians were living in towns or cities. Moreover, 61 percent of them were illiterate, a proportion that in the Habsburg Empire was exceeded only by Serbs (61 per cent) and Croats (63 per cent)." (p. 192).