What's in the name?
"Ruthenia & Galicia", like my first novel "Night Trains", started with a dream.
I dreamed that I was looking at a colourful map of a large area of Eastern Europe roughly around the western Ukraine, east of the Polish border, but the geographical features of the map did not resemble those of the western Ukraine. How that was so I wouldn't be able to explain to you in any detail - I can't draw a map of the western Ukraine from memory - but I just somehow knew in my dream that the mountains, plains, rivers and cities on paper did not match the reality.
That was pretty much it. I woke up and I had this germ of an idea.
How would you have a large swathe of territory in what once used to be the eastern marches of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth that were different to the real topography of the area? Well, one option would be if somehow that land was and wasn't there at the same time. Kind of in that part of the world, but not quite of that part of the world.
That's it. That's all there is in the beginning; not the plot, not the characters, not the snatches of dialogue, but just the hook: an idea to hang everything else on.
But what to call this place, this not-quite western Ukraine?
There has been a fictional kingdom of Ruritania, the setting of novels by Anthony Hope, including such classics as "The Prisoner of Zenda". It has subsequently become a bit of an euphemism for a generic small and vaguely exotic - and exotically backward - Eastern European country. I did not want to borrow someone else's fictional universe, and in any case I've never read Hope and until recently I did not even realise he placed his Ruritania pretty much where I imagined my dream country to be.
As it happened, however, sometime around that time I was reading Timothy Garton Ash's collection, “History of the Present: Essays, Sketches and Despatches from Europe in the 1990s”, and I chanced upon this paragraph:
“Whence they come, no one can tell. No one knows exactly who, how many or where they are. They live in six states and in none. They are loyal to each of these states, and to none of them. Their language is written in five different versions; in the Cyrillic alphabet, but also in Latin. Some regard themselves as Ukrainians, others as Slovaks, others again as Poles. Or Romanians. Or Hungarians. Or Yugoslavs. But many insist they are ‘Rusyns’, or ‘Carpato-Rusyns’, or ‘rusnatsi’. Or they throw up their hands and give the ancient answer of the peasant from Europe’s Slavic borderlands: ‘We’re just from here’.”
Why try to come up with an invented name when the European history offers so many real names of regions, statelets and enclaves, some of which might have been administrative or linguistic or ethnic designations, and some might have once been political entities of some sort while others merely parts of bigger dynastic jigsaw puzzles in the ever-changing kaleidoscope of shifting borders and allegiances?
So there was Ruthenia, which covered (covers?) the Carpathian chain and piedmont of (the present day) south-eastern Poland, south-western Ukraine and eastern Slovakia. But I was also much more familiar with another name: Galicia, once a part of the historic Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth of Two Nations, and then, from the late 18th century to 1918, the northernmost part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, stretching roughly between the great cities of Krakow and Lwow (or Lvov or Lviv depending on who's talking). I was born in Krakow, but most of my family, or rather families, came from Lwow and anywhere in between. I might have been a second generation Cracovian, but I was a Galician from the time immemorial.
(the map above from this interesting modern travelogue)
Or if you want to be particularly confused about one point in time in 1918 when the old empires were collapsing and new nations were being born (or, in the case of Poland, reborn), this little map courtesy of Wikipedia:
Truth be told, Ruthenia and Galicia is really a mix of all Eastern and South-Eastern European countries, most of them Slavic (with the chief exceptions of Hungary and Romania) and most of which have at one point in another have been in the Russian/Soviet/Russian orbit. My Kingdom of Ruthenia & Galicia has managed to avoid falling victim to either Nazism or communism, or for that matter most of the political and dynastic storms over the centuries (here's to the splendid magical isolation!) but apart from that it's the usual melange of historical influences and fault-lines: Catholicism and Orthodoxy, East and West, Rome and Byzantium, with a generous admixture of other elements - German, Jewish, Gypsy - which have contributed to the cultural richness of the "other" Europe.
If you have traveled around Europe in the past, you are likely to have visited Ruthenia & Galicia, even if you did not realise it at the time. "Any resemblance etc." might be unintended but is also unavoidable. So welcome back!
Photo by Marcin Jozwiak on Unsplash
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