Article:2.5.1

Ethno-Linguistic Composition of Austrian Galicia

     Ethno-Linguistic Composition of Austrian Galicia

Paul Robert Magocsi

       Topics
       Jews and Their SurroundingLanguages

       Period
       1772-1914

       Region
       Galicia

       NLI Code
       997013604471505171

Related Entries

• Article:2.5.2
• Article:2.1.1

Map

• Ethnolinguistic Boundaries in Austrian Galicia

In 1772, as a result of the First Partition of Poland, Habsburg-ruled Austria acquired what officially became known as the Kingdom of Galicia-Lodomeria (German: Königreich Galizien und Lodomerien). The name was chosen deliberately by the Habsburg imperial authorities because of concern for historical precedent.

The kingdom in question referred to the medieval Rus’ principalities of Galicia and Volhynia, which in 1199 were brought under the rule of the Volhynian prince Roman (r. 1197-1205). Roman’s son and successor Danylo (r. 1238-1264), as ruler of the joint principalities, accepted from the pope a royal crown and the title, King of Rus’ (rex Russiae), whereby he was recognized as a fully legitimate monarch in the context of the western European feudal order. Even before that event, Galicia’s rulers had invited Hungary to assist them in maintaining control of their realm. In the wake of one of several military campaigns north of the Carpathians, in 1189 the ruler of Hungary assumed the title King of Galicia and Lodomeria.

The Hungarian claim proved to be nominal, and Galicia-Volhynia managed to survive as a sovereign entity until the second half of the 14^th century. At that time the Kingdom of Poland, as part of its own expansion eastward, annexed (1340) and then fully incorporated (1387) into its realm all of Galicia and part of Volhynia. For the next four centuries, Poland ruled the former Rus’ principality of Galicia, which it called by various names: the Rus’ Land (Polish: Ziemia Ruska), Red Rus’ (Ruś Czerwona), the Rus’ palatinate (Województwo Ruskie), Galician Rus’ (Ruś Halicka), or simply Galicia (Galicja).

Meanwhile, the Ottoman Turks invaded the Hungarian Kingdom (1526) and annexed most of its territory. A few decades later the kingdom’s royal title passed to Austria’s Habsburg rulers. After Austria drove the Ottomans out of Hungary (1669), it was as the king of Hungary that the Habsburg monarch, Maria Theresa (r. 1740-1780), justified the “return” in 1772 of medieval Galicia-Volhynia to the Kingdom of Hungary after four centuries of Polish “occupation.”

The core area of the Austrian acquisition was the Galician Rus’ palatinate to which were added other former Polish-ruled territories west of the San River. The new Austrian province, or crownland (German: Land)—generally called for short Galicia (German: Galizien; Polish: Galicja; Ukrainian: Halychyna)—was bounded by the upper Vistula River in the northwest, the Zbruch River in the east, and the crest of the Carpathian Mountains in the south.

At the time of Austria’s acquisition, Galicia comprised 81,900 square kilometers, with a population numbering over 2.6 million inhabitants. Initially, from 1772 to 1809, the new province included a slice of land to the north around the city of Zamość, and from 1787 the land called Bukovina, which Austria had a decade earlier (1774) annexed from the Ottoman Empire. Also for a while during this early period, Galicia included a small area located in the far west, just north of the Vistula River between the cities of Kraków and Chrzanów. Austria annexed that area in 1795 but lost it in 1809 during the Napoleonic Wars. Subsequently, the contested territory functioned for three decades (1815-1846) as a mini-state, known as the Republic of Kraków (Polish: Rzeczpospolita Krakowska), under the protection of the three surrounding empires: Russia, Prussia, and Austria.

The boundaries of Galicia expanded and contracted during the first half of the 19^th century. Among the changes were the loss of the area around Zamość (1809), the addition of the Kraków Republic (1846), and the detachment of Bukovina to form a separate Austrian province (1849). After Galicia’s boundaries were stabilized (1849-1914) its territory comprised 78,500 square kilometers.

With regard to its internal administrative structure, in 1780 the Austrian government divided Galicia into 19 circuit districts (German: Kreis). The circuit structure functioned until 1867, when the province was redivided into 74 smaller districts (German: Bezirk; Polish powiat; Ruthenian: povit), whose number rose to 82 after 1906. Each district had its own administrative seat indicated on the accompanying map. From the very beginning of Austrian Habsburg rule in 1772, the city of Lviv (German: Lemberg; Polish: Lwów; Yiddish: Lemberik/Lvov) was designated as the administrative capital of the entire province of Galicia. 2.5.1-Ethno-Galicia-1

Another category of internal provincial division was the judicial district, which did not necessarily coincide with the administrative district discussed above. The entire province was divided into two judicial halves: West Galicia with its supreme crownland court (Polish: Wyższy Sąd Krajowy) in Kraków, and the much larger East Galicia (together with Bukovina) with its supreme crownland court in Lviv. The judicial division was what determined the line between West Galicia and East Galicia, even though that line does not coincide with the Polish-Ruthenian/Ukrainian ethnolinguistic boundary, or with the San River which is commonly referred to as the dividing line between the western and eastern parts of the province.

The overall population of Galicia grew steadily during the period of Austrian Habsburg rule—from 2,650,000 (1772) and 4,555,000 (1851) to 7,980,000 (1910). There was always an imbalance between the two halves of the province, with the territorially much larger East Galicia having about 60 percent of the population.

In terms of ethnolinguistic composition, Galicia’s numerically largest groups were Poles and Ruthenians/Ukrainians, each of which comprised 40 to 45 percent of the province’s inhabitants. By 1910 they, together with two other socioeconomically important groups, numbered:

Ethnic group	Population	Percentage of total population
Poles	3,629,000	45.5%
Ruthenians/Ukrainians	3,422,000	42.8%
Jews	872,000	10.9%
Austro-Germans	64,000	0.8%

Among the other smaller groups were Gypsies/Roma (16,000), Czechs (9,000), and Armenians (2,000). 2.5.1-Ethno-Galicia-2

In terms of geographic distribution, the majority of the 3.6 million Poles lived throughout rural and urban areas in West Galicia, 2.5.1-Ethno-Galicia-2a although by 1910 over one-third of them (1.3 million) lived in East Galicia. The high percentage of Poles in the east was the result of steady in-migration from West Galicia, with nearly 300,000 arriving during the last decades of the 19^th century. In East Galicia the large landowners were exclusively Poles, but they also represented a significant proportion of East Galicia’s urban inhabitants (Lviv—51.2%; Przemyśl —46.6%; Kolomyia —33.3%; Ternopil —28.5%; Stanyslaviv —29.7%) where they dominated the Austrian bureaucracy and educational institutions. Poles also lived in compact settlements where they formed a majority of the population in several rural villages between Przemyśl-Mostyska-Lviv, between Sambir-Drohobych-Stryi, and in the far east of the province along the Seret and Stryna rivers between Ternopil and Buchach.

Most of Galicia’s 3.4 million Ruthenians/Ukrainians lived in East Galicia, except for an area in the Carpathian foothills west of the San River (south of Grybów and Gorlice), where they were known by the ethnographic names Lemko and Boiko. 2.5.1-Ethno-Galicia-3 Image:2.5.1-Ethno-Galicia-3a 2.5.1-Ethno-Galicia-5

The Ruthenians/Ukrainians spoke several dialects of an East Slavic language that they called rus’kyi (Rusyn). The literary language, officially designated Ruthenian, was written in the Cyrillic alphabet, which was a symbolic outward sign of their adherence to Eastern-rite Christianity (mostly Greek Catholicism). From the common Rusyn linguistic base, members of the intelligentsia (priests, lawyers, teachers) spoke and wrote in cognate East Slavic languages, the choice being a reflection of their individual national orientation: the Ruthenian Slavonic language among the Old Ruthenians (Starorusyny), the Ukrainian language among the populist-Ukrainophiles, or the Russian language among the Russophiles. The vast majority of Ruthenians/Ukrainians (93.7 percent in 1910) were rural village dwellers engaged in agriculture, forestry, and related pursuits. 2.5.1-Ethno-Galicia-6

Among the smaller of Austrian Galicia’s ethnic groups were the Austro-Germans (64,000). They were the descendants of two waves of immigrants from Germanic lands in central Europe. The first wave, invited by Poland’s kings, came in the second half of the 13^th and the 14^th centuries and settled mostly in urban areas of West Galicia. By the 16^th century they had become largely assimilated to Polish culture. The second wave was connected with Austrian imperial policy, which after 1772 welcomed Germans from the Rhineland Palatinate and other southwest German states as well as from the Sudetenland of Austrian Bohemia and Moravia. A small number, among whom were many nationally assimilated Czechs, served as state functionaries in Galicia’s main cities, Lviv and Kraków. Most of these newer Germans settled in East Galicia, especially in smaller towns and in rural villages along a belt stretching from Kaminka Strumylova and Zhovkva in the north past Lviv to Drohobych, Boryslav, and Stryi in the south.

2.5.1-Ethno-Galicia-8 2.5.1-Ethno-Galicia-8a Rural dwelling Austro-Germans, whether Roman Catholics or Evangelical Lutheran Protestants, spoke various dialects that derived from the areas of the central European Germanic lands from which they had originally emigrated. Civil servants and professionals living in urban environments spoke High German (Hochdeutsch) in its Austrian variant.

Galicia’s Gypsies/Roma (16,000) were dispersed throughout the southern regions of the province where they lived a semi-nomadic lifestyle and took up temporary residence on the outskirts of several Carpathian Mountain villages. 2.5.1-Ethno-Galicia-9 The Czechs (9,000) were in-migrants from the imperial Austrian provinces of Bohemia and Moravia who arrived in Galicia after 1772. They lived mainly in the larger towns and cities (Lviv, Kraków), where they worked as civil servants in the Austrian bureaucracy. They often spoke German instead of Czech, and they tended to assimilate and eventually became indistinguishable from Austro-Germans.

Galicia’s Armenians were descendants of refugees fleeing in the second half of the 14^th century from Ottoman rule over their homeland in far eastern Anatolia. They were welcomed by Poland’s medieval kings and given a wide range of privileges to carry out trade and commerce in the province’s gradually expanding cities. In this manner, Lviv and a few towns in southeastern Galicia (Stanyslaviv, Horodenka, Kuty) became home to vibrant Armenian communities. By the 17^th century most Armenians had assimilated to Polish culture, so that during the post-1772 era of Austrian rule their numbers were reduced drastically (2,000 in 1910). By then most lived in the so-called Pokuttia region of far southeastern Galicia in and near the town of Kuty. 2.5.1-Ethno-Galicia-10

In terms of religious affiliation, there was a generally accepted dividing line between Galicia’s two largest groups. Poles were invariably Roman-rite Catholics (3,618,000 in 1910). Ruthenians/Ukrainians were mostly Byzantine Greek-rite Catholics (3,141,000), although there were also adherents of Roman Catholicism (43,000 Ukrainianized Poles, the so-called Latynnyky) and a small number of former Greek Catholics who became Orthodox (2,800). Galicia’s 64,000 Austro-Germans were either Roman Catholics (36,000) or Protestants, mostly Evangelical Lutherans (27,000), with only a minimal number of Mennonites (497). The Armenians were divided between two ecclesiastical jurisdictions: most (1,392 in 1910) were Armenian Catholics; the remainder (266) were Armenian Apostolics—those who did not enter into union with Rome in the 17^th century.

The number of Galicia’s Jews increased dramatically during the second half of the 19^th century, from 449,000 in 1859 to 872,000 in 1910. The increase was due to a high birth rate and immigration from the neighboring Russian Empire, from which Jews fled pogroms that began in the 1880s and continued periodically for the next three decades. No less than three-quarters of Galicia’s Jews (660,000) lived in the province’s eastern districts, whether in cities and small towns (76%) or in surrounding countryside villages (24%). According to the last Austrian census of 1910, the cities with the greatest number of Jews were Kraków (32,300) in the far west and the provincial capital of Lviv (57,400) in the east. Of the 27 district centers where Jews accounted for more than half of the population, 17 were in East Galicia, with the highest percentages in Brody (70.5%), Zalishchyky (65%), Husiatyn (65%), and Pidhaitsi (62.5%), followed in the 50-percent-plus-range by Belz, Dobromyl, Buchach, Boryslav, Rava-Ruska, Peremyshliany, Mostyska, Cieszanów, Rudky, Skalat, Stanyslaviv, Horodenka, and Kalush. In yet another 45 district centers throughout West and East Galicia the Jewish population ranged from 25% to 49%. 2.5.1-Ethno-Galicia-11

Employment patterns among Jews were a reflection of their geographic distribution. Over three-quarters were shop owners and small-scale craftsmen (52.9%), or were engaged in industry, commerce, and banking (24.6%). Unlike other peoples in Galicia, there was no co-relation between language and ethnic identity. Informed sources estimate that nine-tenths of Galicia’s Jews spoke Yiddish, but that language was not recognized by the Austrian authorities. Hence, Jews were forced to choose on census reports an officially acceptable vernacular (Umgangsprache); the overwhelming majority chose the Polish language (92.7%) with the remaining divided between German (2.9%) and Ruthenian/Ukrainian (2.4%).

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