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Galicia (Central Europe)
The Habsburg crown land along the Carpathians, now divided between Poland and Ukraine
For nearly 150 years a Habsburg province stretched from near Kraków to the Zbruch River on the edge of the Russian Empire, holding Polish nobles, Ukrainian peasants, and one of Europe's largest Jewish communities under a single provincial diet in Lemberg. This Galicia, named for the medieval town of Halych, is not Galicia in northwestern Spain, the Atlantic region around Santiago de Compostela, whose name comes from the ancient Gallaeci people. Central European Galicia vanished from the map in 1918, but its legacy lingers in the coffeehouses of Lviv and Kraków, in the strong regional identity of western Ukraine, and in the family histories of the millions of emigrants who left its villages for the Americas.
Galicia ran about 600 kilometers along the northern foot of the Carpathian Mountains and covered 78,497 square kilometers in 1910. The south was mountain and foothill, including the oil fields of Borysław, which by 1909 supplied most of Austria-Hungary's petroleum, and the north was fertile plain drained by the Vistula, San, and Dniester. The San River roughly divided Polish-majority western Galicia from Ukrainian-majority eastern Galicia. Today the western half lies in Poland, mainly in the Lesser Poland and Subcarpathian voivodeships around Kraków, Tarnów, and Rzeszów. The eastern half, the historic core, lies in Ukraine, in the Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk, and Ternopil oblasts. The border drawn in 1945 runs between Przemyśl, which stayed in Poland, and Lviv, which went to Soviet Ukraine.
Austria took the land in the First Partition of Poland in 1772, styled it the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria after medieval Ruthenian principalities, and added the Free City of Kraków in 1846. From 1867 the province had broad self-government under a Polish-led administration, and both Polish and Ukrainian national movements grew there. When the monarchy collapsed in 1918, Ukrainians proclaimed the West Ukrainian People's Republic in Lviv, Poland won the war that followed, and the Allied powers recognized Polish rule over eastern Galicia in 1923. The Soviet Union annexed the east in 1939, Germany occupied all of it from 1941 and murdered most of its Jews, and the 1945 settlement fixed the Polish–Ukrainian border close to the old ethnic divide, followed by forced population transfers in both directions.