GALICIA: A Place that Shaped history
Most of The Days Before Tomorrow is set in what was once known as Galicia, now part of the Western Ukraine and Eastern Poland. Between World War I and World War II it was entirely within the eastern boundary of Poland. Its history of invasion, multiculturalism and shifting political control was a key back drop for the book.
This is what the book’s narrator says about Galicia.
There was a lot I didn’t know about my hometown while growing up, things I didn’t learn until much later. Important pieces of history lived inside all of us, invisible, but defining. Our sliver of Eastern Europe, known as the Kingdom of Galicia, had Europe’s most chaotic transition to modernity. Natural barriers, such as the Carpathian Mountains and the mighty Vistula River, sometimes defined its borders. More often, though, the succession of European powers whose armies gridlocked within Galicia’s borders just kept what they’d conquered until the next war, redrawing the boundaries of the region. Some confuse it with a Spanish state of the same name, but my Galicia had a unique and colorful history that, even though it never existed as a nation, played a defining role in shaping 20th Century Europe.
It was a cultural center, where writers, professors and philosophers considered important human questions — the nature of freedom, the horror of war and the beauty of love — and where a Jewish population thrived in the large cities, Krakow and L’viv, and in hundreds of small towns scattered through the countryside.
It was part of Poland until it was annexed by the Austro-Hungary Empire in 1772, but Polish influence continued to dominate everyday life and sparked a nationalist movement to unite Galicia with the Ukraine, the Russian-dominated territory to the east. When the Austrian Empire collapsed in World War I and Poland re-emerged as a distinct nation, the ill will and conflict between Galicians of Polish and Ukrainian descent escalated.
In the twenty-one years between the end of the first world war and the start of World War II, Galicia would be punished by the rise of Nazism to the west and the spread of Marxism to the east. It was the place where those ideologies confronted one another in 1941, when the German and Russian armies divided it, and Europe descended into its most horrible war. Those years shaped and then nearly destroyed my family. When I tell our story, those times can seem cruel, but I recall them as wondrous, too, because so much that was lost from then still lives in me.
Here are some great online sources of more information about Galicia.
This blog is a place to preserve and promote the rich architectural and cultural heritage of Lviv (Ger: Lemberg, Pol: Lwów, Yid: לעמבערג, Ukr: Львів), Galicia (Ger: Galizien, Pol: Galicja, Yid: גאַליציע, Ukr: Галичина) and the former Austrian Empire. The blogger is Areta Kovalska, who was born and raised in Chicago. In 2011, she returned to her ancestral home and now lives in Lviv, Ukraine.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/forgotten-ukraine-galicia
https://www.atlasobscura.com/things-to-do/ukraine
Travel guides to the region
A Medium post by Ukrainian-American author Oksana Kukurudza about how the history of Galicia shaped modern Ukraine and the war with Russia.
https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.3138/9781442682252/html
The Roots of Ukrainian Nationalism, by Paul Robert Magocsi, University of Toronto Press. This book, from an academic perspective, examines how 19th Century Galicia was the foundation for the modern Ukrainian state.