In the 14th century a German settlement called Hanshof existed in the area. The Church of the Assumption of Holy Mary and St. Michael's Archangel in Haczów (Poland), the oldest wooden Gothic temple in Europe, was erected in the 14th century and was added to the UNESCO list of World Heritage Sites in 2003.


Germans settled in the territory of the Kingdom of Poland (territory of present-day Subcarpathian Voivodeship and eastern part of Lesser Poland) from the 14th to 16th centuries ("see Ostsiedlung"), mostly after the region returned to Polish sphere of influence in 1340, when Casimir III of Poland took the Czerwień towns.


Marcin Bielski states that Bolesław I Chrobry settled some Germans in the region to defend the borders against Hungary and Kievan Rus' but the arrivals were ill-suited to their task and turned to farming. Maciej Stryjkowski mentions German peasants near Przeworsk, Przemyśl, Sanok, and Jarosław, describing them as good farmers.


Some Germans were attracted by kings seeking specialists in various trades, such as craftsmen and miners. They usually settled in newer market and mining settlements. The main settlement areas were in the vicinity of Krosno and some language islands in the Pits and the Rzeszów regions. The settlers in the Pits region were known as "Uplander Sachsen". Until approximately the 15th century, the ruling classes of most cities in present-day Beskidian Piedmont consisted almost exclusively of Germans.


The Beskidian Germans underwent Polonization in the latter half of the 17th and the beginning of the 18th century.


Important cities of this region include Pilzno, Brzostek, Biecz, Gorlice, Ropczyce, Wielopole Skrzyńskie, Frysztak, Jasło, Krosno, Czudec, Rzeszów, Łańcut, Tyczyn, Brzozów, Jaćmierz, Rymanów, Przeworsk, Jarosław, Kańczuga, Przemyśl, Dynów, Brzozów, and Sanok.


The name "Galicia" is the Latinized form of Halych, a principality of the medieval Ruthenia. "Lodomeria" is also a Latinized form of Volodymyr-Volynskyi, that was founded in the 10th century by Vladimir the Great and until the partitions of Poland was known simply as Volodymyr (). King of Galicia and Lodomeria was a medieval title which King Andrew II of Hungary adopted during his conquest of the region in the 12th century.


This historical region in Eastern Europe is divided today between Poland and Ukraine. The nucleus of historic Galicia consists of the modern Lviv, Ternopil, and Ivano-Frankivsk regions of western Ukraine.


The name of the Kingdom in its ceremonial form, in , existed in all languages spoken there including ; ; , transliterated: "Korolivstvo Halychyny ta Volodymyrii z velykym kniazivstvom Krakivskym i kniazivstvamy Osventsyma i Zatoru", and .


In 1815, as a result of decisions of the Congress of Vienna, the Lublin area and surrounding regions (most of the New or West Galicia) were ceded by the Austrian Empire to Congress Poland (Kingdom of Poland), which was ruled by the Tsar, and the Ternopil Region, including the historical region of Southern Podolia, was returned to the Austrian Empire by Russia, which had held it since 1809. The large city of Kraków and surrounding territory, formerly also part of New or West Galicia, became the semi-autonomous Free City of Kraków under supervision of the three powers sharing rule over Poland (i. e., Austria, Russia, and Prussia).


In the same period, a sense of national awakening began to develop among the Ruthenians in the eastern part of Galicia. A circle of activists, primarily Greek Catholic seminarians, affected by the romantic movement in Europe and the example of fellow Slavs elsewhere, especially in eastern Ukraine under the Russians, began to turn their attention to the common folk and their language. In 1837, the so-called Ruthenian Triad led by Markiian Shashkevych, published "Rusalka Dnistrovaia" (The Nymph of the Dniester")", a collection of folksongs and other materials in vernacular Ukrainian (then called "rusynska", Ruthenian). Alarmed by such democratism, the Austrian authorities and the Greek Catholic Metropolitan banned the book.


In 1848, revolutionary actions broke out in Vienna and other parts of the Austrian Empire. In Lviv, a Polish National Council, and then later, a Ukrainian, or Ruthenian Supreme Council were formed. Even before Vienna had acted, the remnants of serfdom were abolished by the Governor, Franz Stadion, in an attempt to thwart the revolutionaries. Moreover, Polish demands for Galician autonomy were countered by Ruthenian demands for national equality and for a partition of the province into an Eastern, Ruthenian part, and a Western, Polish part. Eventually, Lviv was bombarded by imperial troops and the revolution put down completely.


A decade of renewed absolutism followed, but to placate the Poles, Count Agenor Goluchowski, a conservative representative of the eastern Galician aristocracy, the so-called Podolians, was appointed Viceroy. He began to Polonize the local administration and managed to have Ruthenian ideas of partitioning the province shelved. He was unsuccessful, however, in forcing the Greek Catholic Church to shift to the use of the western or Gregorian calendar, or among Ruthenians generally, to replace the Cyrillic alphabet with the Latin alphabet.


By 1863, open revolt broke out in Russian Poland and from 1864 to 1865 the Austro-Hungarian government declared a state of siege in Galicia, temporarily suspending civil liberties.


The year 1865 brought a return to federal ideas along the lines suggested by Goluchowski and negotiations on autonomy between the Polish aristocracy and Vienna began once again.


Meanwhile, the Ruthenians felt more and more abandoned by Vienna and among the Old Ruthenians grouped around the Greek Catholic Cathedral of Saint George, there occurred a turn towards Russia. The more extreme supporters of this orientation came to be known as Russophiles. At the same time, influenced by the Ukrainian language poetry of the eastern Ukrainian writer, Taras Shevchenko, a Ukrainophile movement arose which published literature in the Ukrainian/Ruthenian vernacular and eventually established a network of reading halls. Supporters of this orientation came to be known as Populists, and later, simply as Ukrainians. Almost all Ruthenians, however, still hoped for national equality and for an administrative division of Galicia along ethnic lines.


In 1866, following the Battle of Sadova and the Austrian defeat in the Austro-Prussian War, the Austro-Hungarian empire began to experience increased internal problems. In an effort to shore up support for the monarchy, Emperor Franz Joseph began negotiations for a compromise with the Magyar nobility to ensure their support. Some members of the government, such as the Austro-Hungarian prime minister Count Belcredi, advised the Emperor to make a more comprehensive constitutional deal with all of the nationalities that would have created a federal structure. Belcredi worried that an accommodation with the Magyar interests would alienate the other nationalities. However, Franz Joseph was unable to ignore the power of the Magyar nobility, and they would not accept anything less than dualism between themselves and the traditional Austrian élites.


Finally, after the so-called Ausgleich of February 1867, the Austrian Empire was reformed into a dualist Austria-Hungary. Although the Polish and Czech plans for their parts of the monarchy to be included in the federal structure failed, a slow yet steady process of liberalisation of Austrian rule in Galicia started. Representatives of the Polish aristocracy and intelligentsia addressed the Emperor asking for greater autonomy for Galicia. Their demands were not accepted outright, but over the course of the next several years a number of significant concessions were made toward the establishment of Galician autonomy.


From 1873, Galicia was de facto an autonomous province of Austria-Hungary with Polish and, to a much lesser degree, Ukrainian or Ruthenian, as official languages. The Germanisation had been halted and the censorship lifted as well. Galicia was subject to the Austrian part of the Dual Monarchy, but the Galician Sejm and provincial administration had extensive privileges and prerogatives, especially in education, culture, and local affairs.


Beginning in the 1880s, a mass emigration of the Galician peasantry occurred. The emigration started as a seasonal one to Germany (newly unified and economically dynamic) and then later became a Trans-Atlantic one with large-scale emigration to the United States, Brazil, and Canada.


A total of several hundred thousand people were involved in this Great Economic Emigration which grew steadily more intense until the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. The war put a temporary halt to the emigration which never again reached the same proportions. The Great Economic Emigration, especially the emigration to Brazil, the "Brazilian Fever" as it was called at the time, was described in contemporary literary works by the Polish poet Maria Konopnicka, the Ukrainian writer Ivan Franko, and many others. Some states in south of Brazil have a large percentage of their population formed by direct descendants of these Ruthenian/Ukrainian immigrants.


At the time these emigrations in the 1890s many Polish and Ukrainian liberals saw Galicia as a Galician Piedmont as a Polish Piedmont and a Ukrainian Piedmont. Because Italians had started their liberation from Austrian rule in the Italian Piedmont these Ukrainian and Polish nationalists felt that the liberation of their two countries would begin in Galicia.


In spite of almost 750,000 persons emigrating across the Atlantic from 1880 to 1914 Galicia's population increased by 45% between 1869 and 1910.


During the First World War Galicia saw heavy fighting between the forces of Russia and the Central Powers. The Russian forces overran most of the region in 1914 after defeating the Austro-Hungarian army in a chaotic frontier battle in the opening months of the war. They were in turn pushed out in the spring and summer of 1915 by a combined German and Austro-Hungarian offensive.


In late 1918 Eastern Galicia became a part of the restored Republic of Poland, which absorbed the Lemko-Rusyn Republic. The local Ukrainian population briefly declared the independence of Eastern Galicia as the West Ukrainian People's Republic. During the Polish-Soviet War the Soviets tried to establish the puppet-state of the Galician SSR in East Galicia, the government of which after couple of months was liquidated.


The fate of Galicia was settled by the Peace of Riga on March 18, 1921, giving all of Galicia to the Second Polish Republic. Although never accepted as legitimate by some Ukrainians, it was internationally recognized with significant French support on May 15, 1923. The French support for Polish rule of ethnically Ukrainian eastern Galicia and its oil resources in the Borysław-Drohobycz basin were rewarded by Warsaw allowing significant French investment to pour into the Polish oil industry. The Poles had convinced the French that since less than 25% of the ethnic Ukrainians were literate before the Great War and Ukrainians were novices in governing themselves, only the Poles, not the Ukrainians, would be able to administer eastern Galicia and its precious oil assets.


The Ukrainians of the former eastern Galicia and the neighbouring province of Volhynia made up about 12% of the population of the Second Polish Republic, and were its largest minority. As Polish government policies were unfriendly towards minorities, tensions between the Polish government and the Ukrainian population grew, eventually giving the rise to the militant underground Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists.


Soon the newly acquired Polish territories (see First Partition of Poland) which were known as Kreise (Voivodeship in Poland) were restructured in November 1773 into 59 Kreisdistriktes (Land districts), while kreises were abolished. Some former voivodeships were incorporated completely, while most of them only partially. Among them were the former voivodeships of Belz, Red Ruthenia, Cracow, Lublin, Sandomierz, and Podolie. Also during the Russo-Turkish War in 1769, the northwestern territory of Moldavia (renamed Bukovina) was occupied by the Russian Empire which ceded it in 1774 to the Austrian Empire as a "token of appreciation".


The Kingdom was split into numerous counties (powiats) which in 1914 were about 75. Besides Lviv (Lwów in Polish) being the capital of the Kingdom, Kraków was considered as the unofficial capital of the western part of Galicia and the second most important city in the region.


West Galicia was part of the Kingdom from 1795 to 1809, until 1803 as a separate administrative unit.


Bukovina was part of the Kingdom from 1775 to 1849 (after 1849: Duchy of Bukovina).


Kraków was a condominium with Prussia and Russia from 1815 to 1846, part of the Kingdom from 1846.


After the partition of Poland the region was government by an appointed governor, later a vice-regent. During the war time the office of vice-regent was supplemented by a military-governor. In 1861 a regional assembly was established, the Sejm of the Land, which initially due to lack of adequate administrative building was located in the building of the Skarbek Theatre until 1890.


In 1773, Galicia had about 2.6 million inhabitants in 280 cities and markets and approx. 5,500 villages. There were nearly 19,000 noble families with 95,000 members (about 3% of the population). The "non-free" accounted for 1.86 million, more than 70% of the population. A small number were full farmers, but by far the overwhelming number (84%) had only smallholdings or no possessions.


No country of the Austrian monarchy had such a varied ethnic mix as Galicia: Poles, Ruthenians, Germans (Galician Germans), Armenians, Jews, Hungarians, Romani people, Lipowaner, etc. The Poles were mainly in the west, with the Ruthenians (Ukrainians) predominant in the eastern region (Ruthenia).


The Jews of Galicia had immigrated in the Middle Ages from Germany and mostly spoke Yiddish as their first language. German-speaking people were more commonly referred to as "Saxons" or "Swabians", even though most of them did not come from Saxony or Swabia (cf. Transylvanian Saxons and Danube Swabians). There were also some Mennonites who mostly came originally from Switzerland, but spoke a dialect of Palatine German which is close to Pennsylvania German. With inhabitants who had a clear difference in language such as with the Saxons or the Roma identification was less problematic, but widespread multilingualness blurred the borders again.


The average life expectancy was 27 years for men and 28.5 years for women, as compared to 33 and 37 in Bohemia, 39 and 41 in France and 40 and 42 in England. Also the quality of life was much lower as Galicia was the poorest province in the Austrian empire. The yearly consumption of meat did not exceed per capita, as compared to in Hungary and 33 in Germany. This was mostly due to much lower average income. In 2014, "The Economist" reported: "Poverty in Galicia in the 19th century was so extreme that it had become proverbial—the region was called Golicja and Glodomeria, a play on the official name (Galicja i Lodomeria) and "goly" (naked) and "glodny" (hungry)."


In 1888 Galicia extended over and had a population of about 6.4 million people, including 4.8 million peasants (75% of the whole population). The population density, at 81 people per square kilometre, was higher than that of France (71 inhabitants/km2) or Germany. The population rose to 7.3 million in 1900 and to 8 million in 1910.


Galicia was economically the least developed part of Austria and received considerable transfer payments from the Vienna government. Its level of development was comparable to or higher than that of Russia and the Balkans, but well behind Western Europe.


The first detailed description of the economic situation of the region was prepared by Stanislaw Szczepanowski (1846–1900), a Polish lawyer, economist and chemist who in 1873 published the first version of his report titled "Nędza galicyjska w cyfrach" ("The Galician Poverty in Numbers"). Based on his own experience as a worker in the India Office, as well as his work on development of the oil industry in the region of Borysław and the official census data published by the Austro-Hungarian government, he described Galicia as one of the poorest regions in Europe.


All in all, the region was used by the Austro-Hungarian government mostly as a reservoir of cheap workforce and recruits for the army, as well as a buffer zone against Russia. It was not until early in the 20th century that heavy industry started to be developed, which would be comparable to much of Russia and the Balkans. Even then it was mostly connected to war production. The biggest state investments in the region were the railways and the fortresses in Przemyśl, Kraków and other cities. Industrial development was mostly connected to the private oil industry started by Ignacy Łukasiewicz and to the Wieliczka salt mines, operational since at least the Middle Ages.


In 1880, industry in Galicia was at a low level. In 1857 Galicia had 102,189 persons or 2.2% of the population worked in industry. By 1870 that number had risen to 179,626, or 3.3% of the population.


Galicia was the Central Powers' only major domestic source of oil during the Great War.


Until 1849, Galicia and Lodomeria was a single province with Bukovina and used the blue-red flag (consisting of two horizontal stripes: the upper one was blue, the lower one was red).


In 1849, Bukovina was given an independent status from that of Galicia-Lodomeria and kept the blue-red flag. Galicia was given a new flag consisting of three horizontal stripes being blue, red and yellow.


That flag remained in use until 1890, when Galicia-Lodomeria received a new flag consisting of two horizontal stripes being red and white. It remained in use until the dissolution of the Kingdom of Galicia-Lodomeria in 1918 and is displayed in Ströhl's "Oesterreichisch-ungarische Wappenrolle" (1898).


The Kingdom was divided into three major military districts centered in Kraków, Lviv, and Przemyśl. Local military used a specialized language for communication known as Army Slav. One of the major army units was the 1st Army consisting of 1st (Kraków), 5th (Pressburg), and 10th (Przemyśl) Corps.


Eight out of 11 Lancer regiments were located in Galicia (see Uhlan)


The Lendians () were a Lechitic tribe who lived in the area of East Lesser Poland and Cherven Towns between the 7th and 11th centuries. Since they were documented primarily by foreign authors whose knowledge of Central and East Europe geography was often vague, they were recorded by different names, which include "Lendzanenoi", "Lendzaninoi", "Lz’njn", "Lachy", "Landzaneh", "Lendizi", "Licicaviki" and "Litziki".


In Latin historiography the Bavarian Geographer (generally dated to the mid-9th century) attests that "Lendizi habent civitates XCVIII", that is, that the "Lendizi" had 98 gords, or settlements. The Lendians are mentioned, among others, by "De administrando imperio" (c. 959, as Λενζανηνοί), by Josippon (c. 953, as "Lz’njn"), by the "Primary Chronicle" (c. 981, as ляхи), by Ali al-Masudi (c. 940, as "Landzaneh").


They are also identified to the "Licicaviki" from the 10th-century chronicle "Res gestae saxonicae sive annalium libri tres" by Widukind of Corvey, who recorded that Mieszko I of Poland (960–992) ruled over the "Sclavi" tribe. The same name is additionally considered to be related to the oral tradition of Michael of Zahumlje from "DAI" that his family originates from the unbaptized inhabitants of the river Vistula called as "Litziki", and the recount by Thomas the Archdeacon in his "Historia Salonitana" (13th century), where seven or eight tribes of nobles, who he called "Lingones", arrived from Poland and settled in Croatia under Totila's leadership.


The name "Lędzianie" (*lęd-jan-inъ) derives from the Proto-Slavic and Old Polish word "lęda", meaning "field". In modern Polish, the word "ląd" means "land". The Lędzianie tribe's name comes from their use of slash-and-burn agriculture, which involved cutting and burning of forests or woodlands to create fields. Accordingly, in this meaning Lendians were a woodland-burning farmers, or "inhabitants of fields". Several European nations source their ethnonym for Poles, and hence Poland, from the name of Lendians: Lithuanians ("lenkai", "Lenkija") and Hungarians ("Lengyelország").


Lendians are often considered to be a tribe that the Ruthenian chronicles referred to as Liakhy (Лѧховѣ). The Hypatian Codex however states the following:


Which translates as: "The Slavs who came and settled along Wisla and were called "Liakhove" from whom descended Lechitic Polans, Lutici, Masovians, and Pomeranians."


After the Polish Piast dynasty united many West Slavic tribes, the ethnonym Liakhy was used to refer to all those tribes and subsequently to the newly established Polish people. It was mainly an exonym — rarely used by Poles themselves in historic times, with the exception of the Lachy Sadeckie — though one of the Old Czech Chronicles states that a legendary person named Lech was the founder of Poland (see Lech, Čech, and Rus).


In pre-Slavic times the region was populated by the Lugii and Anarti, associated with the Przeworsk and Puchov cultures. They were followed by East Germanic tribes, the Goths, and Vandals. After these vacated the territory, the West Slavs (Lendians and Vistulans) moved in. Around 833 the land of the Lendians was incorporated into the Great Moravian state. Upon the invasion of the Hungarian tribes into the heart of Central Europe around 899, the Lendians submitted to their authority (Masudi). In the first half of the 10th century, they paid tribute to Igor I of Kiev (Constantine VII).


The Free, Independent, and Strictly Neutral City of Cracow with its Territory (), more commonly known as either the Free City of Cracow or the Republic of Cracow (, ), was a city republic created by the Congress of Vienna in 1815, which included the city of Kraków and its surrounding areas.


It was jointly controlled by its three neighbours (Russia, Prussia, and Austria), and was a centre of agitation for an independent Poland. In 1846, in the aftermath of the unsuccessful Kraków Uprising, the Free City of Cracow was annexed by the Austrian Empire. It was a remnant of the Duchy of Warsaw, which was partitioned between the three states in 1815.


The Free City of Cracow was an overwhelmingly Polish-speaking city-state; of its population 85% were Catholics, 14% were Jews while other religions comprised less than 1%. The city of Kraków itself had a Jewish population reaching nearly 40%, while the rest were almost exclusively Polish-speaking Catholics.


The Free City was approved and guaranteed by of the of 3 May 1815. The statelet received an at the same time, revised and expanded in 1818, establishing significant autonomy for the city. The Jagiellonian University could accept students from the partitioned territory of Poland. The Free City thus became a centre of Polish political activity on the territories of partitioned Poland.


During the November Uprising of 1830–31, Kraków was a base for the smuggling of arms into the Russian-controlled Kingdom of Poland. After the end of the uprising the autonomy of the Free City was severely restricted. The police were controlled by Austria and the election of the president had to be approved by all three powers. Kraków was subsequently occupied by the Austrian army from 1836 to 1841. After the unsuccessful Kraków uprising of 1846, the Free City was annexed by Austria on 16 November 1846 as the Grand Duchy of Cracow.


The Free City of Cracow was created from the southwest part of the Duchy of Warsaw (part of the former Kraków Department on the left bank of the Vistula river). The territory of the city was at its least 1164–1234 km² (sources vary). It bordered the Russian Empire, the Kingdom of Prussia and the Austrian Empire. It comprised the city of Kraków and its environs; the other settlements in the area administered by the Free City included 224 villages and three towns (Chrzanów, Trzebinia and Nowa Góra).


In 1815, its population was 95,000; as of 1843, it had a population of 146,000. 85% of them were Catholics, 14% Jews, while other religions comprised 1%. The most notable szlachta family was the Potocki family of magnates, who had a mansion in Krzeszowice.


The Free City was a duty-free area, allowed to trade with Russia, Prussia and Austria. In addition to no duties, it had very low taxes, and various economic privileges were granted by the neighbouring powers. As such, it became one of the European centres of economic liberalism and supporters of laissez-faire, attracting new enterprises and immigrants, which resulted in impressive growth of the city. Weavers from Prussian Silesia had often used the Free City as a contraband outlet to avoid tariff barriers along the borders of Austria and the Kingdom of Poland, but with Austria's annexation of the Free City came a significant drop in Prussian textile exports.


The statelet received an initial constitution in 1815 which had mainly been devised by Prince Adam Jerzy Czartoryski. The constitution was revised and expanded in 1818, establishing significant autonomy for the city. Legislative power was vested in the Assembly of Representatives ("Izba Reprezentantów"), and the executive power was given to a Governing Senate.


In 1833, in the aftermath of the November Uprising and the foiled plan by some Polish activists to start an uprising in Kraków, the partitioning powers issued a new, much more restrictive constitution: the number of senators and deputies was lowered and their competences limited, while the commissars of the partitioning powers had their competences expanded. Freedom of the press was also curtailed. In 1835 a secret treaty between the three partitioning powers presented a plan in which in case of additional Polish unrest, Austria was given the right to occupy and annex the city. That would take place after the Kraków Uprising of 1846.


The law was based on the Napoleonic civil code and French commercial and criminal law. The official language was Polish. In 1836 the local police force was disbanded and replaced by Austrian police; in 1837 the partitioning powers curtailed the competences of the local courts which refused to bow down to their demands.


The Free City of Kraków was the first purely republican government in the history of Poland.


The Museum of Nowa Huta is a branch of the Historical Museum of Kraków. This department was opened on 26 April 2005 by the Mayor of Krakow, Jacek Majchrowski. It contains temporary exhibitions related to the history and monuments of Nowa Huta, the youngest district of Krakow. This branch arranges lessons, lectures and organizes academic conferences related to this district. The museum is located on the ground floor in a 4-floor apartment building. The scouts' supply depot has been adapted to the needs of this branch and a modern audio-visual and exhibition room has been created.


Almanach cracoviense ad annum 1474 (Cracovian Almanac for the Year 1474) is a broadside astronomical wall calendar for the year 1474, and Poland's oldest known print. This single-sheet incunable, known also as the Calendarium cracoviense (Cracovian Calendar), was published at Kraków in 1473 by Kasper Straube, an itinerant Bavarian printer who worked in Kraków between 1473 and 1476.


Like other almanacs and calendars of its day, the "Almanach" lists Church holidays and astronomical data, including planetary oppositions and conjunctions. It also provides medical advice, listing the best days for bloodletting, depending on the age and illness of the patient. The "Almanach"'s text is in Latin.


At the time of its publication, the technology of printing with movable type was just 20 years old and remained almost entirely confined to Germans, who in the 1470s spread it widely through Europe. Printing appeared early in that decade in France and the Netherlands, and after 1473 in England and Spain.


The only surviving copy of "Almanach cracoviense" measures 37 cm by 26.2 cm, and is in the collections of the Jagiellonian University.


The Kasina Wielka witch trial occurred in 1634 in the small rural village of Prąmnik in Kraków, Poland. Zofia Konstancja and Agnieszka Michałowska were convicted of witchcraft. Konstancia was burned at the stake on 11 August 1634, and Michałowska was burned on 5 September 1634.


The two women were accused of using witchcraft against the Pramnik Mill belonging to the Dominican monastery in Kraków, which resulted in damage to the Prąmnicki fields, and of causing harm to one of the monks, i.e. the Protas factor.


This is the only rural witchcraft trial that resulted in a death sentence in Poland, and one of a few in Europe. The story of this accusation resembles the folk tale Mowing-Devil.


The Pramnik Mill still stands in Prądnik Czerwony in Kraków on Dominikana Street, a historic example of a medieval watermill.


The Prussian Homage or Prussian Tribute (; ) was the formal investment of Albert of Prussia as duke of the Polish fief of Ducal Prussia.


As a symbol of vassalage, Albert received a standard with the Prussian coat of arms from the Polish king. The black Prussian eagle on the flag was augmented with a letter "S" (for Sigismundus) and had a crown placed around its neck as a symbol of submission to Poland.


Homages of Grand Masters of the Teutonic Knights.


The tradition of "Prussian Homages" dates back to the year 1469, when, after the Thirteen Years' War, and the Second Peace of Thorn, all Grand Masters of the Teutonic Knights were obliged to pay homage to Polish rulers within six months of their election. Some Grand Masters refused to do so, claiming that the Teutonic Knights were under Papal sovereignty. Among those who refused were Martin Truchseß von Wetzhausen, Frederick of Saxony (who referred the matter to the 1495 Imperial Diet), as well as Duke Albert.


The Duchy of Prussia was created in 1525, and the homage of Duke Albert of Prussia took place on 10 April 1525 at Kraków. The last homage took place on 6 October 1641 in front of the Warsaw's Royal Castle. Following the Treaty of Bromberg (1657), Prussian rulers were no longer regarded as vassals of Polish kings.


Sodalitas Litterarum Vistulana ("Literary Sodality of the Vistula") was an international academic society modelled after the Roman Academy, founded around 1488 in Cracow by Conrad Celtes, a German humanist scholar who in other areas founded several similar societies.


The society was active in the fields of mathematics, astronomy and the natural sciences. Notable members, besides Conrad Celtes, were Albert Brudzewski, Filip Callimachus, Laurentius Corvinus.


The General Government of Galicia and Bukovina () was a temporary Imperial Russian military administration of eastern parts of the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria captured from Austria-Hungary during World War I.


The administration was established after the Russian victory in the Battle of Galicia, led by the commander-in-chief Nikolai Ivanov in the late summer of 1914. It did not last long and by mid-1915 Russians retreated, following the Gorlice–Tarnów Offensive led by the Central Powers overall commander August von Mackensen. During the later stages of the war, the Russian forces tried to reclaim the territory during the military operations of Brusilov and Kerensky.


There were four governments ("guberniya") that were divided into counties ("uyezdy", locally - "powiats").


The Priestly Society of Saint Josaphat Kuntsevych (SSJK) is a society of traditionalist priests and seminarians originating from the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church which is led by the excommunicated priest Basil Kovpak. It is based in Riasne, Lviv, Western Ukraine. In Lviv, the society maintains a seminary, at which currently thirty students reside, and takes care of a small convent of Basilian sisters. The SSJK is affiliated with the Society of St. Pius X and Holy Orders are conferred by the latter society's bishops in the Roman Rite. The SSJK clergymen, however, exclusively follow a version of Slavonic Byzantine Rite in the Ruthenian recension.


The seminary of the SSJK is dedicated to the Immaculate Heart of Our Lady and currently is attended by thirty seminarians. The seminary, the society says, is intended to be a modest support in the conversion to Catholicism not only of Ukraine, but of Russia as well. Devotion to Our Lady of Fatima and fidelity to traditional Catholic theology (with an emphasis on pre-conciliar theological emphases) are considered important.


Relations with the "sui iuris" Ukrainian Catholic Church and the Holy See.


The SSJK rejects the de-Latinization reforms currently being strongly enforced within the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, which is in full communion with Rome. These reforms began with the 1930s corrections of the liturgical books by Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky. According to his biographer Cyril Korolevsky, however, Metropolitan Andrey opposed the use of force against liturgical Latinizers. He expressed fear that any attempt to do so would lead to a Greek Catholic equivalent of the 1666 Schism in the Russian Orthodox Church.


The de-Latinisation of the UGCC gained further momentum with the 1964 decree "Orientalium Ecclesiarum" of the Second Vatican Council) and several subsequent documents. This resulted in the Latinisations being discarded within the Ukrainian diaspora. The Soviet occupation of Western Ukraine had meanwhile forced Byzantine Catholics into a clandestine existence and the Latinizations continued to be used in the underground. After the prescription against the UGCC was lifted in 1989, numerous UGCC priests and hierarchs arrive from the diaspora and attempted to enforce liturgical conformity.


In his memoir "Persecuted Tradition", Basil Kovpak has accused the UGCC hierarchy of using intense psychological pressure against priests who are reluctant or unwilling to de-Latinize. He alleges that numerous laity, who have been attached to the Latinizations since the days of the underground, would prefer to stay home on Sunday rather than attend a de-Latinized liturgy.


The SSJK for instance opposes the removal of the stations of the cross, the rosary, and the monstrance from the liturgy and parishes of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. In rejecting these reforms, they also reject the right of the Church authorities to make these reforms; thus who controls the formate of liturgy becomes an important point of debate.


Critics of the SSJK point out that their liturgical practice favours severely abbreviated services and imported Roman Rite devotions over the traditional and authentic practices and ancient devotions of Eastern Tradition and particularly the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. Proponents counter that these "Latin" symbols and rituals, borrowed from their Latin Catholic Polish neighbours, have long been practised by Ukrainian Greek Catholics, in some cases for centuries, and that to suppress them is to deprive the Ukrainian Catholic faithful of a part of their own sacred heritage. The central point in the dispute is over what constitutes 'organic development'.


The Holy See, however, has argued since before the Second Vatican Council that Latinization was not an organic development. Frequently cited examples of this are Pope Leo XIII's 1894 encyclical "Orientalium dignitas" and Saint Pius X's instructions that the priests of the Russian Catholic Church should offer the Liturgy, "No More, No Less, and No Different," than the Orthodox and Old Ritualist clergy.


The SSJK also opposes the abandonment of Church Slavonic, the traditional liturgical language of the Slavic Churches (both Orthodox and Greek-Catholic) in favour of the modern Ukrainian in the Liturgy of the Ukrainian Catholic Church. The society holds that Church Slavonic is essential to stress necessary Catholic unity among all Slavic peoples, and to avoid nationalism which has for a long time divided Slavic Christians.


However, critics claim that the essence of Eastern liturgical practice is to pray in a language which is understood by the people, and that Church Slavonic has ceased to be such a language, becoming a pale imitation of the Western practice of using Latin to promote unity. The Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church has a large presence in many non-Slavic countries, with numerous eparchies and parishes in the diaspora, exacerbating the problem of parishioners not understanding what is being celebrated as well as raising issues of assimilation.


The Society of Saint Josaphat condemns ecumenism with the Orthodox currently practised by both the Holy See and the Ukrainian Catholic Church. Instead the society promotes Catholic missionary activities among the Orthodox, who are not in communion with the Holy See. In "Persecuted Tradition", Basil Kovpak cites numerous examples of the UGCC turning away Orthodox clergy and laity who wish to convert. In many cases, he alleges, this is because the converts are not ethnically Ukrainian.


In 2003, Cardinal Lubomyr Husar excommunicated SSJK superior Kovpak from the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. Kovpak appealed this punishment at the Roman Rota in Vatican City and the excommunication was declared null and void by reason of a lack of canonical form.


On 22 November 2006, Bishop Richard Williamson who was then a member of the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX), illicitly ordained two priests and seven deacons in Warsaw, Poland, for the SSJK, in violation of canon 1015 §2, and of canons 1021 and 1331 §2 of the Code of Canon Law, and the corresponding canons of the Code of Canons of the Eastern Churches. An SSPX priest who was present remarked, "We were all very edified by their piety, and I myself was astonished by the resemblance of the atmosphere amongst the seminarians with that which I knew in the seminary – this in spite of the difference of language, nationality and even rite."


Archbishop Ihor Vozniak of Lviv (the archdiocese in which Kovpak is incardinated) denounced Williamson's action as a "criminal act" and condemned Kovpak's participation in the ceremony. He stressed that the two priests that Williamson had ordained would not receive faculties within the archeparchy. Officials of the Lviv archdiocese said that Kovpak could face [[excommunication]], and that "'he deceives the church by declaring that he is a Greek (Byzantine) Catholic priest,' while supporting a group [SSPX] that uses the old Latin liturgy exclusively, eschewing the Byzantine tradition, and does not maintain allegiance to the Holy See." Accordingly, Kovpak's excommunication process was restarted by the hierarchy of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church and confirmed by the [[Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith]] on 23 November 2007.


John Jenkins, a member of the Society of St. Pius X, said in 2006 that the new archbishop of Lviv declared that his main task for the following year was to eradicate the "Lefebvrists" from his territory.


Although the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, with the backing of the Holy See, had thus declared Kovpak excommunicated and the Society of St. Josaphat lacking faculties for a ministry within the Catholic Church, they themselves maintain that, though they are in dispute with Lubomyr and, presumably, with his successor, [[Sviatoslav Shevchuk]], and through their association with the Society of St Pius X, indirectly in dispute with the church hierarchy, they are loyal to the [[Pope]] and the [[Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church]], and are merely resisting what they consider to be [[Modernism (Roman Catholicism)|modernism]], [[indifferentism]], and [[liberalism]].


Unlike in the case of their ethnic Polish counterparts, the Ukrainian nobility in Galicia (Galician Rusyns) as a class played a marginal role in western Ukrainian society, which came to be dominated by Ukrainian priestly families, who formed a tight-knit hereditary caste that constituted the wealthiest and most highly educated group within the Ukrainian population. There was considerable overlap between priests and nobles however, with many priestly families also belonging to the nobility. During the late nineteenth century until the 1930s more than half of the Ukrainian priestly families in western Ukraine had noble origins. Such families tended to identify themselves primarily as priests rather than as nobles. The focus of this article is on those ethnic Ukrainians in western Ukraine whose primary social orientation was as nobles.


The territory of western Ukraine was part of the medieval state of Kievan Rus. After the collapse of Kieven Rus, the westernmost part of that state formed the independent Kingdom of Galicia-Volhynia. By the end off the fourteenth century, this territory had become part of Poland. Over the following centuries, most of the wealthy native landowning nobility eventually adopted the dominant Polish nationality and Roman Catholic religion, and completely assimilated into Polish society.


The nobility in western Ukraine that retained its non-Polish identity was generally poorer and developed as a social class in the fourteenth century.


In the 1930s the Polish government attempted to assimilate western Ukrainian nobles into Polish culture. At that time, Polish researchers claimed that the Ukrainian nobles were descended from poor Polish nobles who became assimilated into Ukrainian culture by adopting the Ukrainian language and Orthodox religion of the peasants among whom they lived. They noted that the period of Polish rule involved the settlement of newly acquired Ukrainian territories by Poles, and that the Ukrainian nobility's speech frequently used Polish words and expressions. The Polish historians also pointed out that in the early 19th century western Ukrainian nobles tended to ally themselves with Polish rather than East Slavic or Ukrainian causes politically. This was seen as a vestige of their originally Polish roots.


During the times when western Ukraine was part of Poland, the nobles had a duty to defend the Polish state. Accordingly, they were obligated to participate in regular military reviews where they presented themselves and their weapons. The relative poverty of the Ukrainian nobility was evident in the fact that few owned armor, very few could afford to come on horseback, and they were typically armed only with sabers, muskets or even small caliber bird-hunting rifles.


Under Austria-Hungary and into the twentieth century.


Abolition of serfdom and loss of status.


In one of the two regions with a large concentration of Ukrainian nobles, western Podilia, the loss of special noble legal privileges and elimination of peasant serfdom led to the assimilation of most of the western Ukrainian nobility into the Ukrainian peasantry and to the disappearance of the nobility as a social group. In contrast, nobles from southern Galicia would retain their distinct self-identity well into the twentieth century.


Because the western Ukrainian nobles had not owned estates or serfs, unlike the Polish nobility they were not hated by the peasants. Conversely, because they themselves had never been enserfed, the Ukrainian nobility did not share the peasants' animosity towards the Polish nobility, and indeed felt a class solidarity with them.


During and After the First World War.


On the eve of World War I, many Ukrainian nobles joined the Ukrainian Sich Riflemen, a patriotic Ukrainian unit within the Austro-Hungarian Army. Dmytro Vitovsky and Myron Tarnavsky, two of the supreme commanders of the Ukrainian Galician Army which fought against Poland for Ukrainian independence after World War I, were noblemen. Yevhen Petrushevych, president of the West Ukrainian People's Republic was from a family of noble priests who traced their origins to Galician boyars. In a survey given to members of the Ukrainian National Council, the legislative body of the Western Ukrainian People's Republic, although 2.4% listed their primary social origin as nobility several of those who listed their origin as clergy also came from noble families.


During the period of Polish rule over Western Ukraine between the world wars, efforts by the Polish government in the 1930s to split the Ukrainian nobility from other Ukrainians (through the formation of "Kola Szlacheckie") were unsuccessful. Such efforts backfired, resulting in many nobles rejecting and even concealing their status as nobles in order to avoid possible association with the Polish nation and in order to emphasize their solidarity with the Ukrainian people, most of whom were the descendants of peasants.


In the early 21st century an attempt was made to revive the Association of Ruthenian Gentry. Based in the traditional heartland of western Ukrainian nobility, the town of Sambir, its first head was the priest Petro Sas-Pohoretsky.


The earliest recorded observations noted that western Ukrainian nobles spoke the East Slavic Ukrainian (or Ruthenian) language, rather than Polish. Although they spoke the same language as the Ukrainian peasants, they maintained their own particular traditions. Nobles tended to be more likely to be literate than were peasants. The nobility tended to use the literary Ukrainian language rather than local village dialects. Reflecting some exposure to education, noble speech was also differentiated from that of the peasants by the frequent use of Polish and Latin words and expressions.


The western Ukrainian nobility often used as surnames the names of the villages where they lived. For example, the nobles of Terlo adopted the name Terletsky, and those of Kulchytsi adopted the name Kulchytsky. Surnames ending in -ich (-ич) or -ik (-ик) were also used. They usually gave their children Ukrainian names but on occasion gave them Polish versions of Ukrainian names.


Villages populated primarily by nobles generally had no central planning, with the nobles building their homes wherever they liked on their properties. Western Ukrainian nobles typically lived in small one or two room houses with straw roofs whose interiors were in most ways indistinguishable from those of the peasants. Noble homes differed from those of peasants primarily by their outward appearance. Noble homes had front porches, with columns, and larger windows than did peasant homes.


Those nobles who were not also priests usually worked as farmers and, after the abolition of serfdom in 1848, had lifestyles very similar to those of the Ukrainian peasants. When possible, the nobility sought to use common fields and forests that were different from those used by peasants. A minor difference between peasants and nobles was the peasants tended to use oxen for plowing, while the nobility favored the use of horses for such work. This tradition was likely a vestige of earlier times when the nobles' ancestors were obligated to occasionally use horses for military activities and as scouts.


The nobles amused themselves by dancing and visiting each other in their homes; they tended to segregate themselves from peasants when doing so. Among their favorite dances were the same ones beloved by non-noble Ukrainians, such as the Kolomyjka and the Kozak. The Mazurka, popular among Poles, was shunned by Ukrainian nobles.


The peasants had mixed feelings about the nobility. On the one hand, peasant songs mentioned noble laziness and shoddy workmanship. Despite nobles' feelings of superiority, during the late nineteenth century the western Ukrainian nobility had a reputation among the peasants of being poorer than peasants because they did not work as hard. Due to the nobility's material poverty, the peasants sometimes viewed the nobles' proclamations of their status and expressions of superiority as ridiculous. On the other hand, it was considered a great honor in a peasant household if someone married a noble.


The western Ukrainian poet Ivan Franko, whose mother was a noblewoman, supported the peasants and in his writings frequently mocked the Ukrainian nobility's feelings of superiority.


A western Ukrainian nobleman serves as a protagonist in the story "Der Don Juan von Kolomea" (The Don Juan of Kolomiya) written by Austrian writer Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, whose mother was from the western Ukrainian nobility.


The Muczne massacre of 16 August 1944 was the massacre of Polish civilians committed by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UIA) in village Muczne located in Bieszczady County in Poland.


Among the Poles were mainly refugees after the repression of the population in Volhynia and retreating in front of - 70 Poles were murdered. They were residents of nearby villages such as foresters, priests and children. Members of the UPA murdered Poles with axes, pitchforks and scythes.


In place of the murder in 2010 the memorial and a wooden cross was erected.


The Huta Pieniacka massacre was a massacre of the Polish inhabitants of the village Huta Pieniacka, located in modern-day Ukraine, which took place on February 28, 1944. Estimates of the number of victims range from 500, to 1,200.


Polish and Ukrainian historians disagree over the responsibility for the Huta Pienacka massacre. According to the Polish Institute of National Remembrance, the action was committed by the 14th subunit of the 14th SS Volunteer Division "Galizien" of the Waffen-SS. Polish witnesses testified that the orders were given by German officers. According to witness accounts and scholarly publications, SS Galizien were accompanied by a paramilitary unit of Ukrainian nationalists under Włodzimierz Czerniawski's command, including members of the UPA and inhabitants of local villages who intended to seize property found in the households of the murdered. According to Ukrainian historians, the massacre was committed by SS Police regiments.


The Warsaw division of the "Commission for the punishment of crimes against the Polish people" launched an investigation in July 2001.


Huta Pieniacka was a village of about 1,000 ethnically Polish inhabitants in 200 houses, located in the Tarnopol Voivodeship, Poland (today Ternopil Oblast in Ukraine). In 1939, following joint German and Soviet attack on Poland, the voivodeship was annexed by the Soviet Union, becoming part of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic. After the 1941 German attack on the Soviet Union, it fell under German occupation.


The village was a major Polish resistance centre, fighting against German forces and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army. As a result, the Ukrainians wanted to eliminate this Polish stronghold. Polish inhabitants of the village co-operated with Soviet partisans, active in the area. In January and February 1944, Soviet troops were frequent visitors, and this was noticed by both the Ukrainians and the Germans. An armed stronghold, Huta Pieniacka had fought off several attacks in 1943 and early 1944.


Early in the morning of February 28, 1944, a mixed force of Ukrainian SS and German soldiers surrounded Huta Pieniacka. There were some 600–800 soldiers and it has been established that Kazimierz Wojciechowski (who was burnt alive that day), commandant of Polish forces in the village, had been informed of the approaching enemy around two hours before the attack. The Poles however, had too little time to prepare a defense or to escape.


The village was shelled by artillery. Some time around noon a mixed force of Ukrainian SS and German soldiers and a strong contingent from the SS Freiwilligen Division "Galizien" surrounded Huta Pieniacka and herded the villagers into their barns. The attackers set fire to the village and it burned all day. According to Bogusława Marcinkowska, a historian from Kraków's office of the Institute of National Remembrance, the Ukrainians threw infants against walls and cut open the stomachs of pregnant women. The murderers left at night. Many of them were drunk and singing songs. Only four houses remained, and on the next day a mass funeral took place. Those who survived escaped to Zloczow and other towns, never to return.


Witnesses interrogated by the Polish prosecutors of "The Head Commission for the Prosecution of Crimes against the Polish Nation" described the details of crimes committed against women, children and newborn babies. After murdering the inhabitants of Huta Pieniacka, the local Ukrainian population looted the remaining property of the murdered, loading everything on horse-drawn carts that had been prepared beforehand. According to those Poles who survived, the Germans did not participate in the massacre itself.


In the April 9, 2008 issue of the "Gazeta Polska" weekly, an article about the massacre appeared. According to those persons who survived (four of whom were cited), the murderers were Ukrainians of the SS Galizien Division. All those who recollected the massacre (Emilia Bernacka, then 10; Filomena Franczukowska, then 20; Jozefa Orlowska, then 16; and Regina Wroblewska, then 6) claimed that the village was attacked by the Ukrainian troops, who murdered all Poles they managed to catch, including infants. The mentioned persons survived because somebody managed to open the rear door of a village church in which the murderers were massacring the Polish civilians.


The weekly publication of the Polish Home Army – the "Biuletyn Ziemi Czerwienskiej" ("Land of Czerwien Bulletin") for March 26, 1944 (№ 12) [216, p. 8] stated that during the Battle at Pidkamin and Brody, Soviet forces took a couple of hundred soldiers of the SS Galizien division prisoner. All were immediately shot in the Zbarazh castle on the basis that two weeks earlier they had apparently taken part in the killing of the Polish inhabitants of Huta Pienacka, and as a result could not be categorized as prisoners of war.


The Warsaw branch of the Polish Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) started an investigation into the massacre in November 1992. The investigation was subsequently suspended between 1997 and 2001, and as of 2008 is being conducted by the Kraków branch of the Institute.


The Institute of History of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences investigated the events at Huta Pienicka and concluded that the 4th and 5th SS Police regiments did indeed kill the civilians within the village. It noted that at the time of the massacre the police regiments were not under 14th division command but rather under German police command (specifically, under German Sicherheitsdienst and SS command of the General Government). During this time, these units enjoyed a close relationship with local UPA units.


After the massacre, some local AK commanders forbade Polish strongholds from sheltering Soviet partisans in order to minimize the risk of those self-defence posts' destruction.


In the late 1940s, some 8,000 soldiers of the SS Galizien division were allowed to come to Britain, allegedly including members of the unit that massacred inhabitants of Huta Pieniacka. Most of them were not questioned about their activities, and successive British governments refused requests by lobby groups as well as American authorities to investigate their backgrounds. However, a 2001 television documentary, "The SS in Britain", initiated a police investigation after uncovering evidence suggesting that former members of the SS Galizien division living in Britain had participated in massacres in Poland.


The documentary, however, made numerous factual mistakes. The statement that the 4th and 5th regiments of the SS Galizien Division took part in the massacre was inaccurate, as the division had at that time been normalized to 3 regiments; there were no 4th or 5th regiments. The division also was at that time still in the process of formation, which was completed two months later in May 1944 near the Polish town of Dębica.


On February 28, 1989 a memorial was built on the site of the previous village, but was soon destroyed. A new monument commemorating the victims was erected in 2005 and unveiled on October 21, 2005. During the unveiling the consul put the blame of the massacre on the Ukrainians in his speech, stating, "On 28 February 1944, when the 'SS Galizien' together with other Ukrainian nationalists did horrible things as told by a contemporary, they shot mothers, children and murdered..."


Ukraine sent a note of protest regarding the fact that the Polish consul had ignored the Ukrainian government completely when opening the monument, that the new monument did not adhere to "Ukrainian laws" and was erected without the "necessary permits".


As a result of actions by the parliamentarian Oleh Tyahnybok, a note of protest regarding the "illegal erection" of the monument was sent out and the Polish consul was declared a "persona non-grata" for "degrading the national dignity of the Ukrainian people".


On February 28, 2007 a new monument was unveiled to the Poles who had been killed in the atrocities at Huta Peniacka. A delegation from Poland led by the vice consul of Culture for the Polish consulate in Lviv, Marcin Zieniewicz, stated that the occasion marked one of the most tragic pages in the history of not only the Polish people, but also of the Ukrainian people. On February 28, 2009 the presidents of Ukraine and Poland met at the monument to commemorate the massacre.


The village of Huta Pieniacka no longer exists. Most of the houses were burned during the massacre and only the school and a Roman Catholic church remained. Both of these buildings were demolished after the war, and in the area of the village there is a pasture for cattle. There is a post with a Ukrainian inscription "Center of the former village", but it does not mention the name of the village.


January 2017: Monument to Polish WWII massacre victims desecrated with fascist symbols in Ukraine. A cross made of stone was blown up, while two tables with the names of the Poles killed in the 1944 massacre were damaged. The Polish Foreign Ministry has condemned the attack on the monument. In a statement published on its website, it called for an "immediate" investigation, saying those behind it must be punished. Incidents like this threaten relations between the two nations, the statement added. The monument was rebuilt on behalf of local Ukrainian community and unveiled on February 26, 2017.


The Palikrowy massacre was a war crime committed by made up of Ukrainian soldiers of the SS-Galizien who were removed from the SS-Galizien at the time of the massacre and placed under German police command, Ukrainian SVK ("Self-defence", Ukrainian: Samoobronni Kuszczowi Widdiły) forces and Ukrainian Insurgent Army on Poles in the village of Palikrowy (since 1945 Palykorovy), which took place on 12 March 1944. A total of 385 Poles were killed.


Palikrowy was an ethnically mixed village, with 70% Polish population. In 1944, the population was about 1880, with about 360 houses. The action in Palikrowy was coordinated with the attack on nearby Pidkamin including the monastery in Pidkamin, where some of inhabitants from Palikrowy were hiding during the massacre of Poles in Volhynia.


All the inhabitants of Palikrowy were gathered on a meadow near village. The Ukrainian inhabitants of the village were released. Then the Poles were killed by two heavy machine guns. Only a few wounded people survived. Polish houses were burned down and hiding Polish civilians were murdered, and their property stolen.


The Pidkamin massacre or the Podkamień massacre of 12 March 1944 was the massacre of Polish civilians committed by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) under the command of Maksym Skorupsky (Maks), in cooperation with a unit of the 14th SS-Volunteer Division "Galician". The victims were ethnic Polish residents of the Eastern Galician village of Podkamień in the occupied Second Polish Republic's Tarnopol Voivodeship (now Pidkamin, Brody Raion, Ukraine). During the war the area was administratively part of the Nazi German "Reichskommissariat Ukraine" (now Ternopil Oblast). Estimates of victims include 150, more than 250 and up to 1000.


During World War II Pidkamin, (), was a shelter for Poles from the neighbouring province of Volhynia, who had escaped the Massacres of Poles in Volhynia and sought refuge in the local Dominican monastery. The complex was surrounded by walls and was located on a hill that dominated the surrounding area and as a result provided a relatively safe haven for refugees. Around 2,000 people were living at Podkamin town and the monastery when it was attacked in March 1944, by the UIA in cooperation with 14th SS Division.


On the first day of the attack it was repelled by a small self-defence group, and that night some of the inhabitants managed to escape. The next day the UIA promised to spare the inhabitants lives in exchange for the surrender of the monastery. While the monastery was being evacuated the UIA opened fire and entered the monastery complex, and massacred a number of people, including the clergy. The bodies of the dead were then thrown into the well. Afterwards the UIA camped in the nearby town of Pidkamin, and between the 12–16 March repeatedly attacked people hiding in the villages. On 16 March, as the Soviet Red Army approached, the UIA withdrew from the area.


Approximately 100 ethnic Poles were murdered in the monastery, and additional 500 were killed in the town of Pidkamen itself. In the nearby village of Palikrowy, 365 Poles were killed. Armed Ukrainian groups destroyed the monastery, stealing all the valuables, except for the monastery's crowned icon. Tadeusz Piotrowski who based his findings on the Home Army or German Police sources, estimates that the number of victims in the monastery and adjacent villages numbered 1000. Among the survivors was the renowned writer and painter, Leopold Buczkowski.


Massacres of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia


The massacres of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia (, literally: "Volhynian slaughter"; , "Volyn tragedy"), were carried out in German-occupied Poland by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, or the UPA, with the support of parts of the local Ukrainian population against the Polish minority in Volhynia, Eastern Galicia, parts of Polesia and Lublin region from 1943 to 1945. The peak of the massacres took place in July and August 1943. Most of the victims were women and children. The UPA's actions resulted in between 50,000 and 100,000 deaths.


According to Timothy Snyder, the ethnic cleansing was a Ukrainian attempt to prevent the post-war Polish state from asserting its sovereignty over Ukrainian-majority areas that had been part of the prewar Polish state. Henryk Komański and Szczepan Siekierka write that the killings were directly linked to the policies of Stepan Bandera's faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B) and its military arm, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, whose goal as specified at the Second Conference of the OUN-B on 17–23 February 1943 (March 1943 in some sources) was to purge all non-Ukrainians from the future Ukrainian state. The massacres led to a wider conflict between Polish and Ukrainian forces in the German-occupied territories, with the Polish Home Army in Volhynia responding to the Ukrainian attacks.


In 2008, the massacres which were committed by the Ukrainian nationalists against the Poles in Volhynia and Galicia were described by Poland's Institute of National Remembrance as bearing the distinct characteristics of a genocide, and on 22 July 2016, the Parliament of Poland passed a resolution recognizing the massacres as genocide. This classification is disputed by Ukraine and non-Polish historians. According to a 2016 article in "Slavic Review", there is a "scholarly consensus that this was a case of ethnic cleansing as opposed to genocide".


Just before the Soviet invasion of 1939, Volhynia had been part of the Second Polish Republic. According to the historian Timothy Snyder, between 1928 and 1938, Volhynia was "the site of one of eastern Europe's most ambitious policies of toleration". Through supporting Ukrainian culture, religious autonomy and the Ukrainization of the Orthodox Church, Józef Piłsudski and his allies wanted to achieve Ukrainian loyalty to the Polish state and to minimise Soviet influences in the borderline region. That approach was gradually abandoned after Piłsudski's death in 1935 as a consequence of an increase in radical Ukrainian nationalism.


In 1929, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) was formed in Vienna, Austria, and was the result of a union between radical nationalist and extreme right-wing organisations, including the Union of Ukrainian Fascists. The organization initiated a terrorist campaign in Poland, which included the assassination of prominent Polish politicians, such as Interior Minister Bronisław Pieracki, and Polish and Ukrainian moderates, such as Tadeusz Hołówko.


The terror campaign and civil unrest in the Galician countryside resulted in Polish police exacting a policy of collective responsibility on local Ukrainians in an effort to "pacify" the region, demolishing Ukrainian community centers and libraries, confiscating property and produce, and beating protesters. Ukrainian parliamentarians were placed under house arrest to prevent them from participating in elections, with their constituents terrorized into voting for Polish candidates. The Ukrainian plight, protests and pacification received the attention of the League of Nations as 'an international cause célèbre', with Poland receiving condemnation from European politicians. The ongoing policies of Poland led to the deepening of ethnic cleavages in the area.


Volhynia was a place of increasingly-violent conflict, with Polish police on one side and Western Ukrainian communists supported by many dissatisfied Ukrainian peasants on the other. The communists organized strikes, killed at least 31 suspected police informers in 1935–1936 and began to assassinate local Ukrainian officials for "collaboration" with the Polish state. The police conducted mass arrests, reported the killing 18 communists in 1935 and killed at least 31 people in gunfights and during arrests over the course of 1936.


Beginning in 1937, the Polish government in Volhynia initiated an active campaign to use religion as a tool for Polonization and to convert the Orthodox population to Roman Catholicism. Over 190 Orthodox churches were destroyed and 150 converted to Roman Catholic churches. The remaining Orthodox churches were forced to use the Polish language in their sermons. In August 1939, the last remaining Orthodox church in the Volhynian capital of Lutsk was converted to a Roman Catholic church by a decree of the Polish government.


Harsh policies implemented by the Second Polish Republic were often provoked by OUN-B violence but contributed to a further deterioration of relations between the two ethnic groups. Between 1934 and 1938, a series of violent and sometimes-deadly attacks against Ukrainians were conducted in other parts of Poland.


Also in Wołyń Voivodeship, some of the new policies were implemented, resulting in the suppression of the Ukrainian language, culture and religion, and the antagonism escalated. Although around 68% of the voivodeship's population spoke Ukrainian as their first language (see table), practically all government and administrative positions, including the police, were assigned to Poles.


Jeffrey Burds of Northeastern University believes that the buildup towards the ethnic cleansing of Poles, which erupted during the Second World War in Galicia and Volhynia, had its roots in that period.


The Ukrainian population was outraged by the Polish government policies. A Polish report on the popular mood in Volhynia recorded a comment of a young Ukrainian from October 1938: "we will decorate our pillars with you and our trees with your wives".


By the beginning of the Second World War, the membership of OUN had risen to 20,000 active members, and the number of supporters was many times as many.


On June 22, 1941, the territories of eastern Poland which were occupied by the Soviet Union were attacked by German, Slovak and Hungarian forces. In Volhynia the Red Army was only able to resist the attack for a couple of days. On June 30, 1941, the Soviets withdrew eastward and Volhynia was overrun by the Germans, with support from Ukrainian nationalists, who carried out acts of sabotage. The OUN organized the Ukrainian People's Militia, which staged pogroms and helped the Germans round up and execute Poles, Jews and those who were deemed to be communist or Soviet activists, most notably in Lwów, Stanisławów, Korosten and Sokal.


In 1941, two brothers of the Ukrainian leader Stepan Bandera were murdered, while they were imprisoned in Auschwitz, by Volksdeutsche kapos. In the Chełm region, 394 Ukrainian community leaders were killed by the Poles on the grounds of collaboration with the German authorities.


During the first year of the German occupation, the OUN urged its members to join German police units. They were trained in the use of weapons so they could assist the German SS in the murder of approximately 200,000 Volhynian Jews. While the Ukrainian police's share in the actual killings of Jews was small because it primarily played a supporting role, the Ukrainian police learned how to make use of genocidal techniques from the Germans: detailed and advanced planning and careful site selection, giving phony assurances to local populations prior to their annihilation, and sudden encirclement and mass killing. The training which the UPA received in 1942 explains how it was able to efficiently kill Poles in 1943.


The decisions leading to the massacre of Poles in Volhynia and their implementation can be primarily attributed to the extremist Bandera faction of OUN (OUN-B), not to other Ukrainian political or military groups. The OUN-B had an ideology involving the following ideas: integral nationalism, with a pure national state and language being desired goals; glorification of violence and armed struggle of nation versus nation; and totalitarianism in which the nation must be ruled by one person and one political party. While the moderate Melnyk faction of OUN admired aspects of Mussolini's fascism, the more extreme Bandera faction of OUN admired aspects of Nazism.


At the time of OUN's founding, the most popular political party among Ukrainians was the Ukrainian National Democratic Alliance, which was opposed to Polish rule but called for peaceful and democratic means to achieve independence from Poland. The OUN, on the other hand, was originally a fringe movement in western Ukraine and was condemned for its violence by figures from mainstream Ukrainian society such as the head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, Metropolitan Andriy Sheptytsky, who wrote of the OUN's leadership that "whoever demoralizes our youth is a criminal and an enemy of our people". Several factors contributed to OUN-B's increase in popularity and ultimately monopoly of power within Ukrainian society, conditions that were necessary for the massacres to occur.


Only one group of Ukrainian nationalists, OUN-B under Mykola Lebed and then Roman Shukhevych, intended the ethnic cleansing of Volhynia. Taras Bulba-Borovets, the founder of the Ukrainian People's Revolutionary Army, rejected the idea and condemned the anti-Polish massacres when they started. The OUN-M leadership did not believe that such an operation was advantageous in 1943.


After Hitler's attack on the Soviet Union, both the Polish government-in-exile and the Ukrainian OUN-B considered the possibility that in the event of mutually-exhaustive attrition warfare between Germany and the Soviet Union, the region would become a scene of conflict between Poles and Ukrainians. The Polish government-in-exile, which wanted the region to return to Poland, planned for a swift armed takeover of the territory, as part of its overall plan for a future anti-German uprising. That view was compounded by OUN's prior collaboration with the Nazis and so by 1943 no understanding between the Polish Home Army and the OUN was possible.


Between 1939 and 1943, Volhynian Poles had been already reduced to some 8% of the region's population (around 200,000 people). They were dispersed around the countryside and deprived of their elites by Soviet deportations, with no local partisan army of their own or state authority (except the Germans) to protect them.


On February 9, 1943, a UPA group, commanded by Hryhory Perehyniak, pretended to be Soviet partisans and assaulted the Parośle settlement in Sarny County. It is considered a prelude to the massacres and is recognized as the first mass murder committed by the UPA in the area. Estimates of the number of victims range from 149 to 173.


In 1943, the massacres were organized westward and started in March in Kostopol and Sarny Counties. In April, they moved to the area of Krzemieniec, Rivne, Dubno and Lutsk. The UPA killed approximately 7,000 unarmed men, women and children in late March and early April 1943.


On the night of April 22–23, Ukrainian groups, commanded by Ivan Lytwynchuk (aka "Dubovy"), attacked the settlement of Janowa Dolina, killing 600 people and burning down the entire village. The few who survived were mostly people who had found refuge with friendly Ukrainian families. In one of the massacres, in the village of Lipniki, almost the entire family of Mirosław Hermaszewski, Poland's only cosmonaut, was murdered along with about 180 inhabitants. The attackers murdered the grandparents of the composer Krzesimir Dębski, whose parents engaged during the Ukrainian attack on Kisielin. Dębski's parents survived by taking refuge with a friendly Ukrainian family.


In another massacre, according to the UPA reports, the Polish colonies of Kuty, in the Szumski region, and Nowa Nowica, in the Webski region, were liquidated for co-operation with the Gestapo and the other German authorities. According to Polish sources, the Kuty self-defense unit managed to repel a UPA assault, but at least 53 Poles were murdered. The rest of the inhabitants decided to abandon the village and were escorted by the Germans who arrived at Kuty, alerted by the glow of fire and the sound of gunfire. Maksym Skorupskyi, one of the UPA commanders, wrote in his diary: "Starting from our action on Kuty, day by day after sunset, the sky was bathing in the glow of conflagration. Polish villages were burning".


By June 1943, the attacks had spread to Kowel, Włodzimierz Wołyński and Horochów Counties and in August to Luboml County. The Soviet victory at Kursk acted as a stimulus for the escalation of massacres in June and August 1943, when the ethnic cleansing reached its peak. In June 1943, Dmytro Klyachkivsky, head-commander of the UPA-North, issued a secret directive saying:


We should make a large action of the liquidation of the Polish element. As the German armies withdraw, we should take advantage of this convenient moment for liquidating the entire male population in the age from 16 up to 60 years. We cannot lose this fight, and it is necessary at all costs to weaken Polish forces. Villages and settlements lying next to the massive forests, should disappear from the face of the earth.


However, most of the victims were women and children. In mid-1943, after a wave of killings of Polish civilians, the Poles tried to initiate negotiations with the UPA. Two delegates of the Polish government-in-exile and the Home Army, Zygmunt Rumel and Krzysztof Markiewicz, attempted to negotiate with the UPA leaders, but they were captured and murdered on July 10, 1943 in the village of Kustycze. Some sources claim that they were tortured before their death.


In August 1943, the Polish village of Gaj, near Kovel, was burned and some 600 people were massacred, in the village of Wola Ostrowiecka 529 people were killed, including 220 children under 14, and 438 people were killed, including 246 children, in Ostrowki. In September 1992, exhumations were carried out in those villages and confirmed the number of dead.


The same month, the UPA placed notices in every Polish village: "in 48 hours leave beyond the Bug River or the San river- otherwise Death". Ukrainian attackers limited their actions to villages and settlements and did not strike towns or cities.


The killings were opposed by the Ukrainian Central Committee under Volodymyr Kubiyovych. In response, UPA units murdered Ukrainian Central Committee representatives and a Ukrainian Catholic priest who had read an appeal by the Ukrainian Central Committee from his pulpit.


The Polish historian Władysław Filar, who witnessed the massacres, cites numerous statements made by Ukrainian officers when they reported their actions to the leaders of the UPA-OUN. For example, in late September 1943, the commandant "Lysyi" wrote to the OUN headquarters: "On September 29, 1943, I carried out the action in the villages of Wola Ostrowiecka (see Massacre of Wola Ostrowiecka), and Ostrivky (see Massacre of Ostrówki). I have liquidated all Poles, starting from the youngest ones. Afterwards, all buildings were burned and all goods were confiscated". On that day in Wola Ostrowiecka, 529 Poles were murdered (including 220 children under 14), and in Ostrówki, the Ukrainians killed 438 people (including 246 children).


Father Kamiński claimed that in Koropiec, where no Poles were actually murdered, a local Greek Catholic priest, in reference to mixed Polish-Ukrainian families, proclaimed from the pulpit: "Mother, you're suckling an enemy – strangle it." Among the scores of Polish villages whose inhabitants were murdered and all buildings burned are places like Berezowica, near Zbaraz; Ihrowica, near Ternopil; Plotych, near Ternopil; Podkamien, near Brody; and Hanachiv and Hanachivka, near Przemyślany.


Roman Shukhevych, a UPA commander, stated in his order from 25 February 1944: "In view of the success of the Soviet forces it is necessary to speed up the liquidation of the Poles, they must be totally wiped out, their villages burned... only the Polish population must be destroyed".


A military journal of the Ukrainian 14th SS Division condemned the killing of Poles. In a March 2, 1944 article directed to the Ukrainian youth, which was written by military leaders, Soviet partisans were blamed for the murders of Poles and Ukrainians, and the authors stated, "If God forbid, among those who committed such inhuman acts, a Ukrainian hand was found, it will be forever excluded from the Ukrainian national community". Some historians deny the role of the Ukrainian 14th SS Division in the killings and attribute them entirely to German units, but others disagree. According to Yale historian Timothy Snyder, the Ukrainian 14th SS Division's role in the ethnic cleansing of Poles from western Ukraine was marginal.


By the end of the summer, mass acts of terror aimed at Poles were taking place in Eastern Galicia to force Poles to settle on the western bank of the San River under the slogan "Poles behind the San". Snyder estimates that 25,000 Poles were killed in Galicia alone, and Grzegorz Motyka estimated the number of victims at 30,000–40,000.


The slaughter did not stop after the Red Army entered the areas, with massacres taking place in 1945 in such places as Czerwonogrod (Ukrainian: Irkiv), where 60 Poles were murdered on February 2, 1945, the day before they were scheduled to depart for the Recovered Territories.


By Autumn 1944, anti-Polish actions stopped, and terror was used only against those who co-operated with the NKVD, but in late 1944-early 1945, the UPA performed a last massive anti-Polish action in Ternopil region. On the night of February 5–6, 1945, Ukrainian groups attacked the Polish village of Barysz, near Buchach; 126 Poles were massacred, including women and children. A few days later, on February 12–13, a local group of OUN under Petro Khamchuk attacked the Polish settlement of Puźniki, killed around 100 people and burned houses. Most of those who survived moved to Niemysłowice, Gmina Prudnik.


Approximately 150–366 Ukrainian and a few Polish inhabitants of Pawłokoma were killed on March 3, 1945 by a former Polish Home Army unit, aided by Polish self-defense groups from nearby villages. The massacre is believed to be an act of retaliation for earlier alleged murders by Ukrainian Insurgent Army of 9 or 11 Poles in Pawłokoma and unspecified number of Poles killed by of the UPA in the neighboring villages.


Attacks on Poles during the massacres in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia were marked with extreme sadism and brutality. Rape, torture and mutilation were commonplace. Poles were burned alive, flayed, impaled, crucified, disembowelled, dismembered and beheaded. Women were gang raped and had their breasts sliced off, children were hacked to pieces with axes, babies were impaled on bayonets and pitchforks or bashed against trees.


The atrocities were carried out indiscriminately and without restraint. The victims, regardless of their age or gender, were routinely tortured to death. Norman Davies in "No Simple Victory" gives a short but shocking description of the massacres:


An OUN order from early 1944 stated:


UPA commander's order of 6 April 1944 stated: "Fight them [the Poles] unmercifully. No one is to be spared, even in case of mixed marriages".


Timothy Snyder describes the murders: "Ukrainian partisans burned homes, shot or forced back inside those who tried to flee, and used sickles and pitchforks to kill those they captured outside. In some cases, beheaded, crucified, dismembered, or disemboweled bodies were displayed, in order to encourage remaining Poles to flee". A similar account has been presented by Niall Ferguson, who wrote: "Whole villages were wiped out, men beaten to death, women raped and mutilated, babies bayoneted". The Ukrainian historian Yuryi Kirichuk described the conflict as similar to medieval peasant uprisings.


Even though it may be an exaggeration to say that the massacres enjoyed the general support of the Ukrainians, it has been suggested that without wide support from local Ukrainians, they would have been impossible. The Ukrainian peasants who took part in the killings created their own groups, the SKV or "Samoboronni Kushtchovi Viddily" (Самооборонні Кущові Відділи, СКВ). Many of their victims who were perceived as Poles, even despite not knowingly the Polish language, were murdered by СКВ along with the others.


The violence reached its peak on July 11, 1943 known to many Poles as “Bloody Sunday” when the UPA carried out attacks on 100 Polish villages in Volhynia burning them to the ground and slaughtering some 8,000 Polish men, women and children including patients and nurses at a hospital. These attacks as well as others could have been stopped at anytime by the Germans who in some cases were stationed in garrisons in or near the villages that were attacked. German soldiers however were given orders not to intervene. In some cases individual German soldiers and officers made deals with the UPA to give weapons and other materials to them in exchange for a share of the loot taken from Poles.


In Polish-Ukrainian families, one common UPA instruction was to kill one's Polish spouse and children born of that marriage. People who refused to carry such an order were often murdered, together with their entire family.


According to Ukrainian sources, in October 1943 the Volhynian delegation of the Polish government estimated the number of Polish casualties in of Sarny, Kostopol, Równe and Zdołbunów Counties to exceed 15,000. Timothy Snyder estimates that in July 1943, the UPA actions resulted in the deaths of at least 40,000 Polish civilians in Volhynia (in March 1944, another 10,000 were killed in Galicia), causing additional 200,000 Poles to flee west before September 1944 and 800,000 afterward.


The massacres prompted Poles in April 1943 to begin to organize in self-defence, 100 of such organizations being formed in Volhynia in 1943. Sometimes, self-defence organizations obtained arms from the Germans, but other times, the Germans confiscated their weapons and arrested the leaders. Many of the organizations could not withstand the pressure of the UPA and were destroyed. Only the largest self-defense organizations, whkch were able to obtain help from the Home Army or Soviet partisans, were able to survive. Kazimierz Bąbiński, commander of the Union for Armed Struggle-Home Army Wołyń in his order to AK partisan units stated:


The Home Army on 20 July 1943 called upon Polish self-defense units to place themselves under its command. Ten days later, it declared itself for Ukrainian independence on territories without Polish populations, and it called for an end to the killings of civilians.


Polish self-defence organizations started to take part in revenge massacres of Ukrainian civilians in the summer of 1943, when Ukrainian villagers who had nothing to do with the massacres suffered at the hands of Polish partisan forces. Evidence includes a letter dated 26 August 1943 to the local Polish self-defence in which the AK commander Kazimierz Bąbiński criticized the burning of neighboring Ukrainian villages, the killing of any Ukrainian who crossed its path and the robbing of Ukrainians of their material possessions. The total number of Ukrainian civilians murdered in Volyn in retaliatory acts by Poles is estimated at 2,000–3,000.


The 27th Home Army Infantry Division was formed in January 1944 and tasked to fight the UPA and then the Wehrmacht.


While Germans actively encouraged the conflict, they tried not to get directly involved. Special German units formed from the collaborationist Ukrainian and later the Polish auxiliary police were deployed in pacification actions in Volhynia, and some of their crimes were attributed to the Home Army or to the UPA.


According to Yuriy Kirichuk the Germans actively prodded both sides of the conflict against each other. Erich Koch once said: "We have to do everything possible so that a Pole meeting a Ukrainian, would be willing to kill him and conversely, a Ukrainian would be willing to kill a Pole". Kirichuk quotes a German commissioner from Sarny who responded to the Polish complaints: "You want Sikorski, the Ukrainians want Bandera. Fight each other".


On August 25, 1943, the German authorities ordered all Poles to leave the villages and settlements and to move to larger towns.


Soviet partisan units in the area were aware of the massacres. On May 25, 1943, the commander of the Soviet partisan forces of the Rivne area stressed in his report to the headquarters that Ukrainian nationalists did not shoot the Poles but cut them dead with knives and axes, with no consideration for age or gender.


The death toll among civilians murdered during the Volhynia Massacre is still being researched. At least 10% of ethnic Poles in Volhynia were killed by the UPA. Accordingly, "Polish casualties comprised about 1% of the prewar population of Poles on territories where the UPA was active and 0.2% of the entire ethnically Polish population in Ukraine and Poland". Łossowski emphasizes that documentation is far from conclusive, as in numerous cases, no survivors were later able to testify.


The Soviet and German invasions of prewar eastern Poland, the UPA massacres, and the postwar Soviet expulsions of Poles contributed to the virtual elimination of a Polish presence in the region. Those who remained left Volhynia, mostly for the neighbouring province of Lublin. After the war, the survivors moved further west to the territories of Lower Silesia. Polish orphans from Volhynia were kept in several orphanages, with the largest of them around Kraków. Several former Polish villages in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia no longer exist, and those that remain are in ruins.


The historian Timothy Snyder considers it likely that the UPA killed as many Ukrainians as it killed Poles, because local Ukrainians who did not adhere to its form of nationalism were considered traitors. Within a month of the beginning of the massacres, Polish self-defense units responded in kind. All conflicts resulted in Poles taking revenge on Ukrainian civilians. According to Motyka, the number of Ukrainian victims is 2,000–3,000 in Volhynia, and 10,000-15,000 in all of the territories covered by the conflict. G. Rossolinski-Liebe puts the number of Ukrainians, both OUN-UPA members and civilians, killed by Poles during and after World War II to be 10,000–20,000.


Ukrainian casualties which were caused by Polish retribution are estimated to have numbered 2,000–3,000 in Volhynia. Together with those killed in other areas, the Ukrainian casualties were between 10,000 and 12,000, with the bulk of them occurring in Eastern Galicia and present-day Poland. According to Kataryna Wolczuk for all of the areas affected by conflict, the Ukrainian casualties are estimated as from 10,000 to 30,000 between 1943 and 1947. According to Motyka, the author of a fundamental monograph about the UPA, estimations of 30,000 Ukrainian casualties are unsupported.


The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), of which the Ukrainian Insurgent Army had become the armed wing, promoted the removal, by force if necessary, of non-Ukrainians from the social and economic spheres of a future Ukrainian state.


The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists adopted in 1929 the "Ten Commandments of the Ukrainian Nationalists" to which all of its members were expected to adhere. They stated, "Do not hesitate to carry out the most dangerous deeds" and "Treat the enemies of your nation with hatred and ruthlessness".


Ethnic violence was exacerbated with the circulation of posters and leaflets inciting the Ukrainian population to murder Poles and "Judeo-Muscovites" alike.


Taras Bulba-Borovets, the founder of the UPA, criticized the attacks as soon as they began:


According to prosecutor Piotr Zając, the Polish Institute of National Remembrance in 2003 considered three different versions of the events in its investigation:


The IPN concluded that the second version to be the most likely.


According to , much of the study of the massacres is done in an "ethnohistorical paradigm". He argues that nationalism is responsible for myths and misconceptions about the events.


According to Ukrainian historian Andrii Portnov the classification as genocide has been strongly supported by Poles who were expelled from the east and by parts of the Polish right-wing politics. Some Polish writers have labeled the Ukrainian crimes worse than Nazi or Soviet atrocities; others, including Waldemar Rezmer, use the word "Zagłada", originally applied to the Final Solution, to describe them.


The Institute of National Remembrance investigated the crimes committed by the UPA against the Poles in Volhynia, Galicia and prewar Lublin Voivodeship and collected over 10,000 pages of documents and protocols. The massacres were described by the commission's prosecutor, Piotr Zając, as bearing the characteristics of a genocide: "there is no doubt that the crimes committed against the people of Polish nationality have the character of genocide". Also, the Institute of National Remembrance in a published paper stated:


The Volhynian massacres have all the traits of genocide listed in the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which defines genocide as an act "committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such."


On 15 July 2009, the Sejm of the Republic of Poland unanimously adopted a resolution regarding "the tragic fate of Poles in Eastern Borderlands". The text of the resolution states that July 2009 marks the 66th anniversary "of the beginning of anti-Polish actions by the Organization of Ukrainian nationalists and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army on Polish Eastern territories – mass murders characterised by ethnic cleansing with marks of genocide". On 22 July 2016, the Sejm passed a resolution declaring 11 July a National Day of Remembrance to honor the Polish victims murdered in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia by Ukrainian nationalists and formally called the massacres a genocide.


In Ukraine, the events are called "Volyn tragedy". Coverage in textbooks may be brief and/or euphemistic. Some Ukrainian historians accept the genocide classification, but argue that it was a "bilateral genocide" and that the Home Army was responsible for crimes against Ukrainian civilians that were equivalent in nature.


Many Ukrainians perceived the 2016 resolution as an "anti-Ukrainian gesture" in the context of Vladimir Putin's attempts to use the Volhynia issue to divide Poland and Ukraine in the context of the Russian–Ukrainian war. In September 2016, the Verkhovna Rada passed a resolution condemning "the one-sided political assessment of the historical events" in Poland.


In 2009, a Polish historical documentary film "Było sobie miasteczko..." was produced by Adam Kruk for Telewizja Polska which tells the story of the Kisielin massacre.


The massacre of Poles in Volhynia was depicted in the 2016 movie "Volhynia", which was directed by the Polish screenwriter and film director Wojciech Smarzowski.


[[Category:Massacres of Poles in Eastern Galicia| ]]


[[Category:Wartime sexual violence in World War II]]


The Galician Soviet Socialist Republic (, Г.С.С.Р.) was a short-lived, self-declared Bolshevik political entity that existed from 15 July to formally 21 September 1920. The communist state was established during a successful counter-offensive of the Red Army in the summer of 1920 as part of the Polish-Soviet War and in the course of which the Polish-Ukrainian joint military force (Polish Ukrainian Front) was forced to retreat from its positions along the Dnieper that it secured earlier in 1920 all the way to the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains.


The republic became a buffer zone of the ongoing conflict within the area of the South-Western front of the Red Army. Due to the successful offensive in July 1920, the Soviet government also created the Polrevkom and had intentions of creating the Polish Socialist Soviet Republic. A similar, but less elaborate activity, of the communist Polrevkom, was related to the North-Western front of the Red Army (the "government" was seated in Białystok).


The Galician SSR was established on 15 July 1920 when the Galician Revolutionary Committee (Halrevkom), a "revkom" (provisional government) headed by Volodymyr Zatonsky (Vladimir Zatonsky) and created on 8 July in Kyiv under the auspices of the Communist Party of Bolsheviks of Ukraine (CP(b)U), issued its declaration.


The communist government moved to Tarnopol (today Ternopil) in Eastern Galicia on 1 August 1920 upon occupation of the region by the Red Army. The same day the Halrevkom adopted a decree "About establishing of Soviet power in Galicia". The national languages (of equal status) were declared to be Polish, Ukrainian and Yiddish. With its decrees, the communist government abolished private ownership of the means of production, established an eight-hour workday, separated church from state and nationalised church estates, established a single labour school with seven-year education, and nationalised the land. By the end of August, the Halrevkom tried to conduct elections to establish a permanent Soviet government and convene the All-Galician Congress of Soviets.


With the Polish offensive on 15 September, those plans failed and the Halrevkom withdrew from Tarnopol. On 21 September 1920, the republic was officially abolished and its revolutionary committee was transformed into the Galician Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine. With the signing of the Peace of Riga in March 1921, the bureau was liquidated.


Halrevkom did not control the most important area of East Galicia: the Lviv area with its oilfields of Boryslav and Drohobych.


Red Ruthenia or Red Rus' (; ""; ; ; ; ) is a term used since the Middle Ages for the south-western principalities of the Kievan Rus', namely the Principality of Peremyshl and the Principality of Belz. Nowadays the region comprises parts of western Ukraine and adjoining parts of south-eastern Poland. It has also sometimes included parts of Lesser Poland, Podolia, "Right-bank Ukraine" and Volhynia. Centred on Przemyśl (Peremyshl) and Belz, it has included major cities such as: Chełm, Zamość, Rzeszów, Krosno and Sanok (now all in Poland), as well as Lviv and Ternopil (in Ukraine).


First mentioned by that name in a Polish chronicle of 1321, Red Ruthenia was the portion of Ruthenia incorporated into Poland by Casimir the Great during the 14th century. The disintegration of Rus', Red Ruthenia was contested by the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (the Gediminids), the Kingdom of Poland (the Piasts), the Kingdom of Hungary and the Kingdom of Ruthenia. After the Galicia–Volhynia Wars, for about 400 years most of Red Ruthenia became part of Poland as the Ruthenian Voivodeship.


A minority of ethnic Poles have lived since the beginning of the second Millennium in northern parts of Red Ruthenia. The exonym "Ruthenians" usually refers to members of the Rusyn and/or Ukrainian ethnicity.


The first known inhabitants of northern Red Ruthenia were Lendians and White Croats, while subgroups of Rusyns, such as Boykos and Lemkos, lived in the south.


Later Walddeutsche ("Forest Germans"), Jews, Armenians and Poles also made up part of the population. According to Marcin Bielski, although Bolesław I Chrobry settled Germans in the region to defend the borders against Hungary and Kievan Rus' the settlers became farmers. Maciej Stryjkowski described German peasants near Rzeszów, Przemyśl, Sanok, and Jarosław as good farmers. Casimir the Great settled German citizens on the borders of Lesser Poland and Red Ruthenia to join the acquired territory with the rest of his kingdom. In determining the population of late medieval Poland, colonisation and Polish migration to Red Ruthenia, Spiš and Podlachia (whom the Ukrainians called "Mazury"—poor peasant migrants, chiefly from Mazowsze) should be considered.


During the second half of the 14th century, the Vlachs arrived from the southeastern Carpathians and quickly settled across southern Red Ruthenia. Although during the 15th century the Ruthenians gained a foothold, it was not until the 16th century that the Wallachian population in the Bieszczady Mountains and the Lower Beskids was Ruthenized. From the 14th to the 16th centuries Red Ruthenia underwent rapid urbanization, resulting in over 200 new towns built on the German model (virtually unknown before 1340, when Red Ruthenia was the independent Kingdom of Halych).


During the early Middle Ages, the region was part of Kievan Rus' and, from 1199, the independent Kingdom of Galicia–Volhynia.


It came under Polish control in 1340, when Casimir the Great acquired it. During his reign from 1333 to 1370, Casimir the Great founded several cities, urbanizing the rural province.