Galicia was named after a medieval town and claimed by Hungarian kings who lost it
Straddling today's southeastern Poland and western Ukraine, Galicia takes its name from the town of Halych, first recorded in a Hungarian chronicle in 1206. Hungarian kings kept calling themselves rulers of Galicia long after being driven out, and in 1772 the Habsburgs dusted off that old title to justify grabbing a slice of Poland.
Scholars argue over the label itself. Some historians link it to Thracian newcomers after Rome conquered Dacia in 106 CE; others favour Slavic roots, either a word for a bare, treeless hill or halka, meaning jackdaw. The bird appears on Halych's coat of arms, though the name is older than the emblem. East Slavic tribes held the land from the sixth century until Kievan Rus absorbed it in the tenth, and towns such as Volodymyr and Jaroslaw honour Kyiv's grand princes.
In the twelfth century the Principality of Galicia emerged, and after its last prince died without a recognised heir around 1198 or 1199, Roman the Great of Volhynia united both lands. He took Kyiv in 1204 but was killed at Zawichost in 1205 after turning on his Polish allies, and the realm became a battleground for Poland and Hungary. King Casimir III the Great of Poland conquered most of it in 1349, and it later became the Ruthenian Voivodeship of the Polish Crown.
Maria Theresa's share of the 1772 partition became the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, whose full title also listed the small Duchies of Auschwitz and Zator west of Krakow. No other Austrian province was bigger, more crowded or lay further north. In 1773 it held about 2.6 million people in some 5,500 villages and 280 towns; serfs made up more than 70 percent, and most of them had little or no land.
The First World War turned it into a front line. Russian armies overran most of Galicia in 1914 and were driven back by a German and Austro-Hungarian offensive in 1915. When the empire collapsed in 1918, western Galicia joined the restored Polish state while Ukrainians in the east proclaimed the short-lived West Ukrainian People's Republic. The 1921 Peace of Riga placed Galicia in the Second Polish Republic, recognised internationally in May 1923, and Ukrainians there and in Volhynia formed about 12 percent of Poland's population.
Source: Galicia (Eastern Europe)
