The Myth of Galicia [EN]

What do we know about Galicia? What is Galicia today? What values do we attach to it – positive or negative? Galicia felix or Galicia miserabilis? The beloved good Emperor or a conservative bureaucrat? Arcadia or periphery and “semi-Asia”? “Galician poverty” or progress against all odds? Country of liberal legislation or the proverbial “Galician elections”? A place of happy coexistence or of national and social conflicts?

The photo book accompanying an exhibition or under the same title attempts to answer the questions asked above. An attempt at looking at a Galicia that is no longer there, and yet, despite both the world wars, and both the totalitarianisms that made their brunt on this part of Europe, it is still present as a mythical place, an imagined space. An endeavour at telling a tale of a shared territory of memory for Poles, Ukrainians, Austrians, Jews nowadays separated by borders.

Despite the existence of the imagined, universal Galicia, its historical area in real life is intersected by the border of Schengen Zone being at the same time the border of the European Union, clearly separating the western Polish Galicia from Eastern Galicia – the Ukrainian Halychyna. Yet “the Galician experience” of Western Ukraine became one of the most important arguments for the “European drive” that came to prominence in Kyiv’s Maidan. Therefore, the phenomenon of Galicia is not only the question of a surviving memory, but primarily a proof of reality-influencing power that a myth can have.

Over 300 works and documents from Polish, Ukrainian, and Austrian collections are reproduced in the book, and the history and myth of Galicia have been investigated by the most eminent experts of Galicia questions from Europe and overseas: Matthias Beitl, Emil Brix, Patrice M. Dabrowski, Katrin Ecker, Jarosław Hrycak, Kerstin S. Jobst, Klemens Kaps, Maria Kłańska, Żanna Komar, Wolfgang Kos, Börries Kuzmany, Waldemar Łazuga, Hans-Christian Maner, Martin Pollack, Jurko Prochaśko, Jacek Purchla, Mykola Riabchuk, Jan Rydel, Monika Rydiger, Werner Michael Schwarz, Joshua Shanes, Telse Hartmann, Alois Woldan, Larry Wolff, Taras Wozniak, and Krzysztof Zamorski.

The offer is valid only for individual clients.