Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations (87 page)

The Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria had died in 1918. Thirty years later, the community of ex-Galicians had effectively been broken up and dispersed. Their multinational homeland had been completely ground to pieces. In the end, ex-Galician society fell victim to the two great totalitarian monsters of the twentieth century. But clearly it also harboured elements within its own make-up that could be driven to ugly, murderous violence. Some of its Ruthenians/Ukrainians had voluntarily joined the Nazi service, and some in the wartime countryside had engaged in Nazi-style crimes against Poles. Some of its Poles and Jews had joined Stalin’s cause, and became complicit in Soviet crimes, especially in 1939–41. Seventy years after the event, revelations are emerging only now about shameful crimes perpetrated by Polish peasants against fugitive Jews.
⁹⁷
Observers will be tempted to ask whether the Galicians, if left to their own devices, might not have descended to the sort of intercommunal atrocities that broke out, for example, in Yugoslavia. The question is unhistorical, and the answer can never be known – though it can be easily asked by people whose country has never been occupied or subjected to the sort of apocalypse which struck the former Galicia.

III

Museums are an established feature of contemporary cultural, social and intellectual life. They are the conscious product of attempts to keep in touch with the past, and sometimes to reconstruct it systematically. Traditionally, they have displayed a strong material emphasis – on the collection, preservation, analysis and display of historical objects – and a tendency, perhaps inevitable, to reflect the priorities of their paymasters. Few museums set out to be completely impartial or inclusive, and none succeed in being so.
⁹⁸

Modern museums have grown from a very long tradition that goes back to ancient Greece. The
Mouseion
or ‘Seat of the Muses’ at Alexandria, which housed the famous Library, was the prototype of many later institutions. During the Renaissance a
cabinet de curiosités
or
Raritätenkammer
became essential for self-respecting rulers and aristocrats. The collections of Cosimo I de’ Medici in Florence and Rudolf II in Prague were unsurpassed. Claims to be Europe’s oldest public museum are disputed between the Grimani Collection in Venice (1523), the Ole Worm Collection in Copenhagen (1654) and the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford (1677). Europe’s leading state museums include the Vatican’s Capitoline Museum (1734), the British Museum in London (1759), the Prado in Madrid (1784), the Louvre in Paris (1793) and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam (1800). The theory and practice behind museums used to be called museography, but nowadays museology, or museum studies, is more common.
⁹⁹
Not everyone, though, is impressed. ‘A museum’, said Pablo Picasso, ‘is just a collection of lies.’
¹⁰⁰

The Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria flourished in an era when state and national museums were becoming a fixture of every major European capital. The complex of Royal Museums in Berlin (see pp.
390–91
) was particularly imposing. Not to be outdone, Emperor Franz-Joseph opened two grand museums on adjacent sites in Vienna in 1891 to form his own
Museumviertel
or ‘Museum Quarter’. One, the
Kunsthistorisches Museum
, was devoted to art history; the other, the
Naturhistorisches
, to natural science. The older Germanic National Museum at Nuremberg, which was launched in 1853 by patrons linked to the movement for German unification, had a consciously national and non-dynastic purpose. So too did the magnificent Szépmu˝vészeti Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest (1906). These were the benchmarks to which all Central European museum creators aspired.

Galicia possessed its own more modest array of museums. In Lemberg, the oldest, the Ossolineum, was founded in 1817 by (and named after) a local landowner and literary patron. Its origins and contents were later described in a popular guidebook:

At Ossoliński Street 2, in an extensive park, stands the Ossolineum (The National Ossoliński Institute). It consists of two parts: the Library founded by Count Jozef Maksymilian Ossoliński… and the Museum initiated in 1823 by a grant from Prince Henryk Lubomirski. The collections are located in a former Carmelite Convent, which was once… a military cookhouse. [Before] 1869… they were subjected to all sorts of governmental interference. The Library consists of 142,000 books, 5,000 manuscripts, 5,300 autographs and 1,700 documents. The Lubomirski Museum… [that merged] in 1870 with the rest of the collections… has since grown enormously.
¹⁰¹

In addition to books and documents, the collection contained historical paintings, costumes, coins, flags, armour and assorted militaria. The Dzieduszycki Museum, founded in 1855, was devoted primarily to ornithology and ethnography. Its prize exhibit was a prehistoric hairy rhinoceros unearthed near Stanisławów.
¹⁰²
A small Ruthenian exhibition was a distinctly poor relation.

The twin stars of Kraków’s museums were the Czartoryski and the
Narodowe
or ‘National’. Set up within a year of each other in 1878–9, the former originated in a private aristocratic collection. The latter was launched by a municipal committee determined to display the grandiose canvases of the Polish National School.

Princess Izabella Czartoryska (1746–1835) née Fleming was as rich as she was patriotic as she was debauched. At a juncture when one of her sons was the leading minister of the tsar, she set out to collect everything and anything that would help preserve the memory of the late Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and much else besides. Her estate at Puławy near Lublin had just been incorporated into ‘New Galicia’, and she created two collections there, one in the Temple of the Sibyl (1801) and the other in the Galician House (1803). Within a few years, however, Puławy found itself again under Russian control. Exhibitions of Polish patriotism were not tolerated, and the remnants of the plundered contents were transferred, after many peripatations, to Kraków, where in the late nineteenth century visitors could admire them in peace. By then, the husband rather than the wife was being given the credit:

The Museum of the Princes Czartoryski
represents first-class scientific and artistic value… Its origins go back to the end of the XVIII Century, when General Adam Czartoryski… began to collect souvenirs of the past in Puławy… After the catastrophe of [the November Rising] in 1831, [important sections] were lost. But others survived in Paris [and elsewhere]… Only
c.
1880 were they reassembled by Prince Władysław Czartoryski in Kraków, in the former Piarist Monastery… The pearls of the collection are a Marble Venus from Naples, the Etruscan Ware, Egyptian antiquities, 12th Century enameled Limoges crosses, 7000 pieces of armour, 4000 coins and medals, 500 paintings and miniatures, 20,000 prints and drawings… and the grand standard of the Russian Tsar captured [in 1610] by [Hetman] Z˙ółkiewski.
¹⁰³

These Galician museums stayed intact until the Second World War. But in 1939–45, state-backed looting was only one of many disasters to befall them. The Czartoryski Museum eventually recovered its Leonardo,
Lady with an Ermine
, but not its Raphael,
Portrait of a Young Man
. The Ossolineum lost its Dürers, presumably to Nazi looters, before the institution was broken up by Soviet decree. One half was to remain in L’viv to form part of a purely Ukrainian complex. The other half, including the original manuscript of Mickiewicz’s
Pan Tadeusz
, was to be shipped to Wrocław in Silesia, where, following post-war frontier changes, the Polish collection was to be resurrected.

In the Soviet-run world, however, no museum managers would have dared to celebrate the Galician heritage as such. Their focus lay instead on Communist class themes or on exclusively national stories. Soviet Ukraine cultivated a uniquely hostile vision of the former Galicia. All ills were attributed to Polish class oppression; the oppressors were Poles, and all the oppressed were Ukrainians. Galicia’s multinational panorama was equally unwelcome to officials of the post-war Polish People’s Republic. Poland’s historic link with the eastern part of the kingdom, and with L’viv, was a taboo subject, where numerous blank spots were kept deliberately blank. At the same time, Communist cultural policy recognized the importance of museums as instruments of educational and social control, which ensured they were completely subordinated to ideology and to current political goals.

By the time the Soviet bloc disintegrated in 1989–91, Galicia had been seventy years in the grave. Both the museologists and the public at large had grown accustomed to a highly selective view of the past. Henceforth the Marxist approach was condemned, but nationalist assumptions persisted. Financial resources and new ideas were in short supply. Change came slowly.

Given that Ukrainian L’viv had spent 145 years as the capital of the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, one might expect that the city’s museums would devote substantial space to the ‘Austrian Period’. Visitors soon discover that the expectation is misplaced. Contemporary L’viv betrays little interest either in Galicia as a whole or in the former realities of ‘Lemberg’. Two decades after the fall of Communism, no prominent exhibition in seven main museums addresses Habsburg times. In the L’viv Historical Museum on the central
Rynok
there is an exhibition on the ancient world, another on the medieval world and a third on ‘Literary L’viv in the early 20th Century’. A special department concentrates on everyday life in bygone ‘Halichyna’; and there are galleries displaying paintings, jewellery, porcelain, military orders and armour. A permanent exhibition celebrates ‘The Struggle of the Ukrainian People for National Independence’, but treats Austrian Galicia as just one of successive foreign occupations – in which ‘the people’ are assumed to be exclusively Ukrainian. One meets no awareness that ‘Halichyna’ and ‘Galicia’ are not quite the same thing.
¹⁰⁴

In Kraków, sometime chief city of western Galicia, one can encounter the same lack of interest. The focus here is Polish as opposed to Ukrainian, but the prevailing myopia is remarkably similar. The Muzeum Narodowe in Kraków, housed in the medieval Cloth Hall and splendidly renovated, cultivates the national strand of memory and little else – just like its counterpart in L’viv. In the main displays and in the principal buildings, the emphasis is on the nineteenth-century school of Polish art; the star exhibits are the colossal canvases, often on historical subjects, by painters such as Matejko, Chełmoński or Malczewski. As one enters, one still sees the inscription which announces that this is a shrine to the culture of the Polish nation. A certain indulgence towards late Austrian times when the Polish element had gained the upper hand can be sensed. Even so, the strength of the chosen perspective is striking. It was reinforced during the decades of the People’s Republic when officialdom was bent on promoting a sense of national identity among a distressed, displaced and often disaffected population.
¹⁰⁵

A visit to the Czartoryski Museum prompts different thoughts. Paintings and antiquities apart, the exhibits include a remarkable
cabinet de curiosités
. The original intention, one suspects, was to simply impress the multitude, though today’s viewers may find themselves wondering whether the identifications of the objects are true or false:

• The harp of Marie Leszczyńska, queen of France (1703–68).

• The violin of her father, Stanisław Leszczyński, king of Poland.

• The silver hat badge of King Stefan Batory (r. 1576–86).

• The knife and fork of Queen Barbara Radziwiłł (d. 1551).

• Jan Sobieski’s camp bed from the Siege of Vienna (1683).

• Voltaire’s quill.

• Rousseau’s briefcase.

• The Marshal’s tipstaff from the Diet of 3 May 1791.

• Kościuszko’s standard (1794).

The most dramatic exhibit of all, proudly displayed behind plate glass, is a half-gnawed, rock-solid, bright green chunk of mouldy bread. It was allegedly cast aside by the none-too-hungry Napoleon on the morning when he re-crossed the Berezina in December 1812, then picked up and preserved by his hungry but loyal soldiers. Like all holy relics, genuine or fake, it has immense powers of imaginatory stimulation. Above it, there hangs the inscription that once hung over the entrance to the Temple of the Sibyl in Puławy. It reads ‘PRZESZŁOŚć PRZYSZłOŚCI’, ‘The Past in the Service of the Future’.
¹⁰⁶

Whose past and whose future? one wonders. Two hundred years ago, the ‘Past’ for the Czartoryskis was that of the late Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and the ‘Future’ was the happy time when the Commonwealth was going to be restored. The collection was established before the Congress of Vienna dashed all hopes of a restoration, so its conceptual basis has stood still for two centuries. It is no place to learn about Galicia. The museum’s planned reorganization, which may return part of the holdings to Puławy, clearly offers opportunities for reflection.
¹⁰⁷