The Independent View: The Myth of Galicia

International Cultural Centre, Kraków, from 10 October 2014 to 8 March 2015

As a descendent of Ukraine, Lithuania, and 50% Galicia, I just came across this exhibit.

Galicia no longer exists. It disappeared from the map of Europe in 1918 together with the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, whose province it had been. Yet, it still lives as a imagined space in the collective imagination and memory. The Krakow exhibition seeks to answer the question about the source and contemporary condition of the myth, trying to find out why literature, visual arts, and film still refer to it, while Galicia itself is used as an attractive brand.

The exhibition confronts mythical images with historical facts and with the perspective of nations entangled in the history of Galicia. This confrontation reveals the partly shared and partly diverse meanings of Galicia for Poles, Ukrainians, Austrians, and Jews, suggesting how the myth of Galicia functions in collective imagination, culture, social and political life.

The exhibition presents Galicia as a land of paradoxes. On the one hand, it was a space of development of national identities and cultures, on the other, the ethnic differences between the groups locked within artificially created borders led to numerous tensions. With the development of the railway network and the discovery of oil reservoirs, Galicia, the poorest and the most backward province of the monarchy, suddenly experienced civilization leap and became the place where many fortunes were made.

The exhibition comes as a conclusion to the four-year-long research project that addressed the multi-national historic heritage of Galicia, which the International Cultural Centre realized in collaboration with the Institut für den Donauraum und Mitteleuropa in Vienna. The participants, experts on Galicia, historians, writers, and representatives of cultural institutions of the three countries – Austria, Poland, and Ukraine – traced the process of shaping of Galician myth and its contemporary reception and significance to use the research results to draft the script for the display. The exhibition was organized in collaboration with the Wien Museum, where it will be on show in 2015.

Galician Jews generally proudly identified themselves as Galitzianer distinct from other Jewish populations in eastern Europe. Outside Europe, it is the descendants of the 2m Galician emigrants to America in the 19th and early 20th century who are keeping the myth of Galicia alive.