Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations (80 page)

We drive into town, crossing the new concrete bridge over the Dniester, and passing a
fura
with a tethered foal trotting behind. The square is spacious, dusty, windblown and almost deserted. A large cobbled expanse rings an ill-defined central area where a tall statue stands amid a clump of much taller trees. The pines and planes have somehow been grafted and pollarded to produce a high panoply of leaf cover supported by bare trunks. A tiny goose-pond shimmers alongside. This is not just a country town, but a town with a patch of countryside right in the middle of it.

A small gaggle of men are sitting or squatting in the shade, waiting for something to happen. A couple of them struggle to their feet to watch us arrive. A Renault Espace with plates from L’viv provides them with the event of the morning. We rumble over the cobbles round three sides of the square until we reach a shady parking space near the local reception committee. Two dilapidated vehicles nearby look more abandoned than parked. Nothing moves. We climb out to take our bearings.

Halich does not look the least bit historic. It appears to have been hit by a cyclone, most probably the Second World War, and then by a Five Year Plan that ran for only two or three. At one time, the square must have been lined with shops and houses on all four sides. Only one line of older buildings remains, on the northern side. It backs onto the Dniester, and contains the ‘Pharmacy’, a bookshop and a store selling glassware. The other three sides are largely open to the elements. Even on this summer’s day, the wind blows a cloud of dust through the trees. The western side is half-filled by a Soviet-era pavilion from the 1960s or 1970s covered with wooden scaffolding. It is being prepared either for reconstruction or for demolition, but no workers are in sight. The eastern side is defaced by an incongruously modern furniture store, not yet completed, and by a gaping open space through which the corrugated-iron or green-painted roofs of the cabins of the locals can be glimpsed. The southern side, under the lea of the wooded scarp, displays a small wooden-built, onion-domed church, an overgrown paddock confined by a fence, and a crumbling Soviet cinema.

Curiosity encourages a stroll through the trees to the statue. It turns out to be as grandiose as its surroundings are shabby. A monumental bronze horseman, sword in hand, rears above a white marble plinth. The inscription reads ‘
’, ‘
Korol
’
Danylo Halitsky
’. Pan Volodymyr announces that
Korol
’ means ‘
König
’ – ‘King’. It’s both a surprise and a puzzle. So, too, is the date: ‘1998’, less than ten years before our visit. One of our party wonders how a poverty-stricken community can afford an inordinately lavish historical symbol. Someone else adds that another monument must have stood here until quite recently: most probably a statue of Lenin. At all events, we are seeing signs of what we came for. This is where the name of Galicia began.

Lunchtime. The Restaurant ‘Mirage’ is open. One notes a delicious sense of irony. Food in Soviet times was often a mirage; now one can buy it. The fare is modest but appetizing: red beetroot soup, a thick slice of roast pork and a tomato salad. All the wooden houses on the street have their own little gardens and apple trees. The supply of fruit and vegetables is plentiful.

After lunch, we wander back across the square to the wooden church spotted earlier. Outside is a tablet dated 1929 that we try to decipher. It is a memorial to a group of twenty-one locals, ‘WHO SUFFERED FOR THE RUSSIAN NAME IN THE TALERHOF CAMP UNDER THE AUSTRO-HUNGARIAN YOKE’. This is tricky. The inscription obviously relates to the First World War, when Halich would have been occupied by the Russian army before being recaptured by the ‘Royal and Imperials’, and its Russophile flavour explains why it survived the Soviet era. Talerhof sounds Austrian. But why had the victims suffered ‘for the Russian name’? Perhaps they were people whom the Austrians had regarded as collaborators. Someone had wanted to remember them, and some official had allowed them to do so; 1929 could have been the year of their return, or more likely of its tenth anniversary.

Inside the church, an elderly woman is sweeping the floor; a still older man rises from his seat and offers to show us round. Pan Roman speaks Ukrainian, Polish, Russian and German. He was born in 1925, he says, after his Ukrainian father married his Polish mother. He stands beside a nineteenth-century iconostasis adorned with folk-style icons, and tells us his story, which, like the ill-lit church, is filled with confusing details. When he talks of the German army, it is not clear whether he is referring to the First or the Second World War. Between the wars, he had ‘finished seven classes’, meaning that his schooling ended when he was thirteen or fourteen. He does not say so, but the school, like his mother, must have been Polish. He leaves us in no doubt about the defining moment of his life. In 1946 he and his mother were deported to Siberia, where they were ‘thrown out of the train’ and ‘buried in snow’. He does not explain how a young man of conscript age could have survived the war, or when they returned from Siberia.

We decide to walk up the hill to explore the castle. When we reach it, we find that the impressive red-brick construction is modern. As Pan Roman had told us, the original was levelled by Red Army artillery in the summer of 1944 after the Wehrmacht had set up a defensive position there. There are no medieval ruins to be seen, and there is nothing to say whose castle it once was. The view across the valley to the distant church of St Pantaleimon is ravishing.

Returning to the square and the bookshop, we purchase a small guidebook to try to solve some of the basic questions.
²
We are apparently in the so-called New Town, founded in the fourteenth century, while the ancient ‘Princely City’ lies several miles away on the top of a plateau. A picture from before the First World War shows that the square had indeed been enclosed and lined with houses, and that its extended oblong had stretched from the foot of the castle scarp to the line of riverside houses that still survive. The iron footbridge across the river was already
in situ
, built by the Austrians to take passengers from the square to the railway station. In those days, trains would have gone up and down the Dniester line from Stryj to Stanislavov, Chernovtsy, and eventually to Moldavian Kishinev.

The town’s links with the south are emphasized by the fact that for centuries it was one of the chief refuges of the Jewish Karaite sect, which originated in Crimea (see p.
266
). The Karaites, who spoke Tartar as their everyday speech, survived in Halich until sometime after the arrival of the Nazis in 1941. Their
kenasa
or ‘temple’ was blown up by the Soviets in 1985. Their memory survives in the name of ‘Karaitsky Street’.

The guidebook presents us with an elaborate chronology, starting in AD 290 with the earliest mention of Halich in a work by Jordanes and ending in 2001 when Halich joined the Association of West Ukrainian Towns. In between, sixty or seventy entries recount a wide selection of events:

Nothing of significance, apparently, happened for 400 years before 1772 or in the three years of German occupation 1941–4.
³

The tone of the guidebook outdoes the photos in Technicolor:

It was on the banks of the age-old Dniester… that the princely town of Halich – a powerhouse of Ukrainian statehood – was destined to appear. It was here that the Ukrainian spirit was nurtured, tempered in vilest battles… moulded by the will-power of lion-hearted and wise princes, covered with the glory of victorious Halich regiments, rinsed with tears, and braced with thousands of Halichians slaughtered in massacres… under the foreign yoke. [They are] brought back to life in chronicles, gospels and songs… in cathedrals, churches and whatnot.
⁴

The author is at pains to stress that under presidential decrees of 11 October 1994, ancient Halich was granted the status of a ‘National Preserve’, also that the same decrees saw ‘the beginning of the process of the restoration of historical justice’. Ancient Halich and its Ruthenian inhabitants are strongly connected to the task of reconstructing contemporary Ukraine’s identity.

To reach the
Knyazhi Horod
or ‘Princely City’, one has to drive five or six miles out of Halich and up a long hill to the village of Krylos. Pan Volodymyr sets off enthusiastically. He draws up on a steep slope in front of the rural museum, searches desperately for the handbrake, and announces that from here on we have to walk. In the museum, skipping through displays of prehistoric pots and modern folk culture, we learn that the exact location of the Princely City was not found until the second half of the twentieth century and that a huge archaeological project is still in progress. A gang of student volunteers armed with spades, sieves and cameras walks past, proving the point. These modern Ukrainians think of the medieval Ruthenians as their ethnic ancestors.

The
Knyazhi Horod
occupies
c
. 120 acres of land which exploits the natural defensive features of a wedge-shaped mountain. It is contained in a double ring of ramparts, one lining the outer circle that runs inland from the high bluffs overlooking the Dniester, the other surrounding the inner fortress on Krylos Hill. The oldest point is the tenth-century burial mound of a prince, possibly the founder of Halich, who was interred with his weapons and the remains of his burned ship. The largest complex of foundations belongs to the twelfth-century cathedral of the Assumption. The most significant item is probably the Prince’s Well, the only safe source of water for the garrison and inhabitants, who must have numbered several thousand. The site was large enough to include grazing pasture for livestock, orchards and market gardens. Its military decline coincided with the fall of the Ruthenian principality of Halich in the mid-fourteenth century, when a Polish royal stronghold was built nearby. Its use continued, however, as a local religious centre, first by the Orthodox Church, and from the end of the sixteenth century by Greek Catholics. The Palace of the Greek Catholic metropolitans stood here. The church of the Assumption began to rise alongside the ruins of the preceding cathedral in 1584, the work of a local
boyar
Shumliansky family, but was razed to the ground by a Tartar raid in 1676 and never properly restored. In Soviet times, the buildings were used as a museum. Like their tsarist predecessors, who ruled here briefly in 1914–15, the Soviets did not tolerate the Greek Catholic Church, and were fiercely hostile to any remnants of independent Ruthenian or Ukrainian history. Only now is the ancient legacy of Halich being put back together, piece by piece.

The name of Danylo Romanovych Halitsky (r. 1245–64), prince and conceivably ‘king’ of Halich, is well known to all Ukrainians as the founder of L’viv. He is said to have received his crown from an emissary of Pope Innocent IV, the most politically powerful pontiff of the Middle Ages and the sworn enemy of German emperors. Three years after his coronation, Halitsky laid the foundations of the new capital, which he named after his infant son Liv – Leo, ‘the Lion’. His own emblem was a raven, which figures prominently on his coat of arms and on all subsequent heraldic compositions derived from it. Our return journey, therefore, with ‘Volodymyr the Great’ raring for the chase, led from the Raven’s Perch to the Lion’s Den.

To travellers in the first decade of the twenty-first century, Halich is just a small, Ukrainian town of no special interest except to archaeologists and enthusiasts of medieval history. Yet throughout the nineteenth century it was a hallowed spot of unusual distinction, indeed it was the place which gave a sense of historical purpose and identity to one of Central Europe’s most famous kingdoms.