Galician Trails: The Forgotten Story of One Family Read online

  Even a brief study of the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria reveals an abundance of stories about its vibrant culture; so it might come as a surprise to the reader that it was a sparsely populated territory. A large majority of its people lived in the countryside, where arable soil was under the control of local gentry who had received ancient land titles from Polish kings and later from Austrian monarchs.5

  At first, Galicia was one of the poorest of all the provinces of the Austrian Empire; rural church registers and land-census documents display the names of impoverished nobility mixed with those of free peasants and serfs. There were reports of an appallingly low life expectancy, in some places averaging below 30 years of age, although these are difficult to verify. Yet in spite of some reluctance toward dealing with this newly absorbed land and its problems, the Habsburg monarchy became a catalyst that made Galicia an even greater mixture of cultures than in the past. This place would continue to be the fascinating, though often unacknowledged, “melting pot” of Europe.

  Soon after taking over Galicia, Empress Maria Theresa of Austria opened its borders to artisans and merchants who were willing to move there in return for a generous, six-year exemption from taxation. Not only Catholics but Protestants were encouraged to settle there, with guaranteed freedom of worship. Although Jews were not explicitly forbidden, they were tellingly omitted from the empress’s decree, a sign that the enlightenment of the crown went only so far.6 Interestingly, the first request for permission to settle in the east came from the Calvinist Swiss, who had petitioned the Austrian government about this as early as 1775. Those early steps were followed by fundamental settlement laws (patents) issued by Maria Theresa’s son, the emperor Joseph II, soon after he became sole emperor of Austria in 1780. This led to waves of foreigners moving to the province. Emigration from the south of Germany was especially encouraged, becoming easier with the 1782 Toleranzpatent, which proclaimed full religious tolerance for Protestants in Catholic Austria.7

  Galician coins with the Austrian eagle.

  Many ethnic Germans from Bohemia and Moravia (now part of the Czech Republic) also moved to Galicia with a stream of newcomers that continued until 1820. The trip was quite arduous: They traveled down the Danube River or overland through Prague to Vienna, where they were given final permission and money for travel. Upon entering Galicia from the west over the few available roads, most of them continued to the east. There they were offered generous tax deferments, parcels of former Polish crown lands, and other available farmland. Some of these newcomers settled in existing villages such as Horocholina, which we will visit later in this story; more often, they found homes in newly laid-out agricultural communities.

  As part of a grand scheme by Joseph II and his government, such German settlers were welcomed in eastern Galicia in an attempt to modernize the remote, sparsely populated territory. The few maps that have survived show special emigrants’ villages (colonias) with houses neatly surrounding central points, such as churches or schools. The exact number of emigrant settlers (colonistas) is not known, but some have estimated that close to 3,000 families—about 18,000 people—moved to Galicia between the end of the eighteenth century and the early years of the nineteenth. Soon German-named new settlements, like Landestreu, Ugartsthal, and Königsau, started to appear next to Slavic-sounding Galician villages.8 Other newcomers included soldiers from the Austrian army. Among these were Mathias Lösch and his son, who will become an important part of this story; they too would quickly put down roots in Galicia, adding to its diversity.

  Newcomers to this land encountered clear differences between the western and eastern parts. The former was predominantly Polish and Roman Catholic, with pockets of Jewish residents in the cities. The latter had particularly large Ruthenian and Jewish communities coexisting with smaller Polish, Armenian, Slovak, and German groups. Although Ruthenians were the majority in eastern Galicia (with the exception of the capital, Lvov), many more lived beyond Galicia’s borders in the Russian Empire.9 However, the lives of these two populations could not have been more different. For quite a long time to come, Ruthenians living in Russia would have no sense of their own identity, language, or religion, often being labeled with the derogatory term little Russians. In contrast, their cousins who lived under Austrian rule were receiving official support to form their own organizations and schools; to counterbalance the influence of the Poles, they were recognized as a separate nationality.

  Ruthenians (Ukrainians) of eastern Galicia. The countrymen typically wore straw hats and shirttails. In summer months, the women often walked barefoot. (Photograph taken during World War I.)

  The Ruthenians of Galicia were mostly peasants who belonged to the “Uniate” Church, which followed the Eastern Orthodox liturgy but recognized the supremacy of the pope. Under the Habsburgs, their church was renamed the Greek Catholic Church, and the government provided education and seminaries to its clergy to offset the more aggressive Roman Catholic Church attended by Poles. Small, wooden Greek Catholic churches would become a fixture of rural regions in the eastern part of Galicia.

  Galician Amazon. Hutsul women from the mountainous regions were excellent horseback riders. (Maynard Owen Williams/National Geographic Stock.)

  In mountainous areas, travelers through Galicia could encounter enclaves of smaller ethnic groups with exotic-sounding names.10 In the southeast, beyond the towns of Stanislawow and Bohorodczany, which we will soon visit, lived highlanders called the Hutsuls. The name “Hutsul” is thought to be derived from the word outlaw in Romanian. Their tongue was similar to the Ruthenian language, but their origin was the stuff of many legends. The Hutsuls’ main occupations were forestry, and sheep and cattle breeding. Their small, sturdy ponies were well-suited for riding through mountainous terrain. Hutsul men and women could often be seen smoking thin, curved pipes; men wore sheepskin jackets and women’s garb was adorned with decorative pom-poms.

  The story of Galicia is also the story of Jews, who were an important part of Galicia’s human mosaic and will be a recurring subject in our journey through time. Their growth in numbers and in contributions to Galician society continued under the Austrian monarchy. High birth rates and waves of immigration from the east, as Jews escaped pogroms in the Russian Empire, outpaced significant Jewish emigration to other parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.11 But the relationship between Vienna and the Jewish population was complex and frequently changing. The government’s official instructions to its provincial administrators shifted back and forth from “enlightened” attempts to forcefully integrate Jews into the larger society, to erecting barriers that blocked their full participation. On some occasions, the Jewish population was used to drive wedges between other ethnic groups in Galicia, or blamed for various ills of the society. Importantly, imperial decrees issued between 1781 and 1789 recognized Jews as a free religious minority and members of a civil community. This positive step, however, was quickly contradicted by special taxes levied on Jews, including abusive taxes on Sabbath candles and kosher meat. Starting in 1787, Jews were required to adopt fixed and hereditary surnames; and their congregations were to keep records of births, marriages, and deaths, although not many of these have survived. Other administrative reforms included the division of Jewish Galicia into 140 congregations, each governed by a “kahal” of elders that would represent their communities in dealings with local authorities.

  The early nineteenth century brought a step backward in the Habsburgs’ policies toward Jews. An imperial decree in 1810 prohibited marriages until the couple had passed a religious examination based on an officially sanctioned Jewish catechism. This was less of an issue for German-speaking Jews living in Austria or Bohemia, but the problem for the Jews of Galicia was that only a few could read German. Then there were other laws regulating marriages among the Jewish communities of Galicia. Suddenly, in the eyes of the law, many Jewish children were proclaimed to have been bor
n out of wedlock when the marriages of their parents, conducted without the purchase of costly licenses, were deemed illegal.

  Orthodox Jews from Galicia on the Sabbath, wearing the traditional clothes, including black satin coats and fur-trimmed velvet hats. (Dorothy Hosmer Lee Collection, UCR Sweeney Art Gallery, University of California, Riverside.)

  Finally, in 1867, after decades of passing contradictorily liberal and discriminatory laws, the Austro-Hungarian Empire granted all of its citizens equal rights. From that time on, Jews were able to occupy any public position and had the right to purchase real estate. My paternal Jewish ancestors, the Hübner family (whose multigenerational story I am yet to fully discover), were among the recipients of these newly gained rights.12 Many Galician towns, some of which we will visit on this journey, had clear Jewish majorities. Their vibrant businesses and (often non-monolithic) communities enriched local culture and added important voices to the commonly noisy local politics.

  By the 1880s, Galicia’s officially recognized religions included the Roman and Greek Catholic, Russian Orthodox, Protestant, and Jewish faiths (with Jews traditionally referred to as Israelites). This ethnic and religious diversity explains not only the Slavic but also many of the non-Slavic names that we will encounter in this story, invariably raising the question, Where did these people come from, and when?

  Greek Catholic church in eastern Galicia. (Dorothy Hosmer Lee Collection, UCR Sweeney Art Gallery, University of California, Riverside.)

  When the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria was established under the Austrian monarchy, many trade links were suddenly severed. Borders to the north and west were effectively closed by high fees and taxes. Commerce from the east to other parts of Europe no longer had to pass through Galicia, as the expansion of the Russian Empire further to the north provided more convenient trade routes. From the perspective of Vienna, Galicia was at the periphery of the country, and the province’s residents were effectively trapped behind the rugged Carpathian Mountains. Despite a few roads heading southwest from Cracow toward the center of Austria, Galicia was not only isolated from the rest of Europe; its western and eastern parts were cut off from each other.

  The arrival of railroads was seen as a modernizing force everywhere in the world. Not surprisingly, for Galicia, railroads had an even greater emotional and physical impact, lessening—if not eliminating—its long isolation. As we will see, the railways also influenced the lives of individuals who will play key parts in our story. I remember hearing snippets of my grandmother’s childhood memories that were linked to the railroads in Galicia; to those we will return later.

  The first attempts to help Galicia escape its isolation, in connecting different parts of the province and the empire by rail, were painfully slow and not very effective. In 1836, the Austrian emperor Ferdinand granted imperial permission to construct the first steam railway from Vienna to the western part of Galicia. The company and the line were named the Emperor Ferdinand Northern Railway (der Keiser Ferdinand Nordbahn). The town of Bochnia was chosen as the terminal point because of nearby commercially attractive salt mines. The project progressed slowly, and the route would never reach Bochnia. Even Cracow, the largest city in the western part of Galicia, had to await the arrival of the railroad for years. Until the late 1850s, when an additional link connected Cracow with the Nordbahn, travel from Galicia to the capital of the empire continued to be difficult.13

  The steam locomotive Austria was the first model that operated on the Emperor Ferdinand Northern Railway, starting in 1847.

  The Emperor Ferdinand Northern Railway, however, only increased people’s appetite for more rail lines. Since it reached only the western part of Galicia, it provided almost no relief for the isolation of the capital, Lvov, and the inconvenience of traveling there. An intense campaign was begun by Galician politicians and intellectuals to press for an eastern extension of the railroad. Patrician Prince Leon Sapieha and the famous playwright Alexander Fredro formed an unlikely alliance, and both men apparently became engrossed in studying maps and planning the route. When these efforts did not advance the cause, Archduke Ferdinand d’Este, the supreme governor of Galicia, was petitioned for permission to form a civic organization in support of the east-west line. Delegations were sent to Vienna and, as in modern times, they lobbied not only politicians but the financial powers of the day, including the influential Salomon Myer von Rothschild.

  The breakthrough came in 1858, when the Austrian emperor Franz Joseph granted Prince Sapieha a license for extending the railway.14 In 1861, at long last, the Imperial Royal Galician Railway of Archduke Charles Louis (k.k. priv. Galizische Carl Ludwig Bahn), linking Cracow in the west to Lvov in the east, was opened. For years, it would be considered the most profitable line in Galicia.

  The steam locomotive Krakow operated on the Charles Louis Railway, linking Cracow and Lvov.

  Other lines further to the south followed, including the Galician Transversal Railway (Galizische Transversalbahn), which opened in 1884. This was a state-owned enterprise that ran just north of the Carpathian Mountains. It traversed Galicia from the west to the southeast, through many towns that we will visit on this journey, including Mszana Dolna, Nowy Sacz, Jaslo, and Stanislawow.15 Not by coincidence, the life of my great-grandfather, Joseph Regiec, became connected with these places that were now linked by the new railway. Soon, the east-west lines were joined by a number of extensions, forming additional, shorter links to the north and south, criss-crossing Galicia and reaching beyond its borders. By the end of the nineteenth century, there were seven main routes connecting cities within Galicia and branching further south toward the Kingdom of Hungary and southeast toward the Duchy of Bukovina.

  Railway travel in Galicia was considered cheaper than in other parts of Europe. Nonetheless, the trip from faraway eastern Galicia to Vienna cost 30 florins (about 15 kronen) and could be afforded by only a few.16 There were three and sometimes even four classes available. First-class carriages were lined with velvet and offered the most space, and second class was equipped with spring seats that were considered excellent by visiting English tourists. The third-class travelers were described as “quiet and respectable, and the carriages tolerably clean,” whereas the infrequently found fourth class had standing room only. The trains traveled at an amazing speed of up to 25 miles per hour, with stops at railway stations where more affluent travelers could have meals in restaurants.17

  IN THE MID-NINETEENTH CENTURY, the Austrian Empire was shaken by a crisis that seriously threatened its survival. Hungarians’ quest for independence almost split the country in response to real and sometimes imaginary historical claims. This time, however, the crisis was averted with the Compromise Act, reached in 1867. The concept of a dual monarchy made it possible to preserve the old order under the new name of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Under this act, the Austrian emperor Franz Joseph was crowned king of Hungary, but his empire was divided into two separately governed parts, one under Austrian rule (Cisleithania) and the other under Hungarian rule (Transleithania). The symbol of a constitutional monarch with only three joint imperial and royal governmental ministries kept the large country together. Galicia continued to be in the Austrian part of the empire, but changes were clearly palpable there as well. Galicia’s Imperial Royal (k.k.) supreme governors, who represented the emperor, changed from the foreign-sounding Christian Wurmser, Prince Ferdinand Würthemberg, and Archduke Ferdinand d’Este to the Polish-sounding Count Agenor Goluchowski, Count Dr. Alfred Potocki, and Dr. Michal Bobrzynski, to mention just a few.

  The coat of arms of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, formed in 1867. The symbol of the Austrian Empire (Cisleithania), on the left, is joined with the symbol of the Kingdom of Hungary (Transleithania).

  So what kept this mosaic of lands and diverse people together? Certainly, it was not a language or unifying customs. Paradoxically, it could have been the vast civil administration and judiciary that expanded in response to the industrial revolution of the ni
neteenth century. As a result, some stated, “For almost all educated people in Galicia, Vienna became a source of promotion, career, favor and honor.”18

  Polish aristocrat Agenor Goluchowski, a governor of Galicia who became a state minister in Vienna and a confidante of the emperor, had the idea of providing a large degree of autonomy to the different lands of the empire. But for years, Count Goluchowski walked a fine line. He was often mistrusted by his nationalistic compatriots, who saw him more as an Austrian than as a Polish statesman; and he was not exactly welcomed with open arms by Viennese bureaucrats, who feared a loss of control. Goluchowski realized that to reform the system, he would have to work from the inside. Appointed Galicia’s governor for a record three times, Goluchowski slowly but steadily replaced the province’s top administrators with native talent. This was a remarkable initiative, one needed to secure Galicia’s much-desired autonomy in a few years’ time. But it was not immediately recognized by many Galicians, who were preoccupied with unrealistic dreams of full independence from Austria.

  In October of 1860, while serving as state minister in Vienna, Goluchowski issued a directive that would grant broad autonomy to the crown lands of the Austrian Empire. But implementation of these federalist arrangements was not straightforward. An internal power struggle ensued over the best way of moving from absolute rule to a more participatory system. In its wake, Goluchowski was forced to resign. Not surprisingly, the idea of self-government for faraway provinces such as the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria faced stiff opposition from some corners of Vienna. What’s more, German-speaking officials feared that they would lose influence if the proposed equality of native languages took hold. The reforms were stalled for a few years, but the seeds of change had clearly been planted, and they bore fruit in a few years’ time.