Transregional Region-Making in the Eastern Carpathians

The East Slavic Lemkos, Boykos and Hutsuls imparted their names to the respective ethnographic borderlands, the Lemko, Boyko and Hutsul regions in interwar East-Central Europe. Today, most of those regions belong to Western Ukraine, while in 1919, these spaces in the Eastern Carpathians were split between Poland, Czechoslovakia and Romania. These young national states, which desired to securitize their borders after World War I and the turbulent period that followed, critically looked at those highlanders, which were often unknown to them. In the pre-war period, when all these regions belonged to Austria-Hungary, the state facilitated the imagination that these people were Ruthenians or Ukrainians. While there were several Ukrainian state-building attempts between 1917 and 1921, regional power relations did not allow to integrate the Western Ukrainian lands into one (Ukrainian) state. Consequently, Ruthenian-Ukrainian minorities in all regions were objects of the cultural and inner politics of the new East-Central European states, which ordered to research those groups, so that they could understand them. Ukrainian scholars simultaneously tried to communicate their own ideas of Ukrainian territory in Europe and the world. Therefore, they cooperated with locals in the Eastern Carpathians as well as state institutions. The project researches, how networks between state, Ukrainian and local actors were built and how they influenced the perception of those regions by the means of modern scholarship. This includes the question about reciprocal effects. How could state, Ukrainian and local agendas profit from these relations, how did their mental maps transform? Which hopes and aims were realized, which were not? Therefore, this project researches cooperation of official and private scholarly institutions in Poland and Czechoslovakia, which were involved in the research and knowledge communication on the Eastern Carpathians. This includes especially regional or private museums, which were founded in the regions under investigation between 1926 and 1932. Besides the publications of involved researchers, newspaper reports, journals issued by the institutions and internal documents, the archival papers of several researchers will be investigated. This allows for new insights in historical knowledge on the Lemko, Boyko and Hutsul region in todays Western Ukraine and the Carpathian Euroregion, which will take the agency of the locals into special account.

The project examined the Eastern Carpathian border triangle between Poland, Romania and Czechoslovakia from the perspective of region-building. Following the collapse of the Habsburg Empire, these newly formed nationalizing states were confronted with numerous problems, including a large proportion of Ukrainian minorities in their borderlands, as the Ukrainians were the largest nation in Eastern Central Europe to have been left without a state of their own following the Paris Peace Conference. The Eastern Carpathians, in particular, were predominantly inhabited by Boykos, Hutsuls and Lemkos. These were ethnographic groups that had been classified as Ruthenians (Ukrainians) by the Habsburg Monarchy. However, the three new nation states developed differing perceptions of this border region - which often met with resistance from the Ukrainian national movement. Through the prism of ethnographic regions, the project examined how perceptions of this mountainous region and its population groups were manipulated for political ends. In doing so, the project examined not only various professional actors from all the local and national groups involved, but also various techniques of knowledge: field research, photographs, short films, maps, historical slide shows, postcards, statistics, academic and popular science publications, and travel guides. Through this broad comparison, the project explored whether methods such as statistical tables or scientific texts had not rapidly lost their relevance in the face of the image and, later, the moving image. Veritable deluges of images - from photo postcards to chocolate wrappers - sought to convey ideas about people to the general public, ideas that those affected had often never heard themselves. As a result, Poles, Romanians, Czechoslovaks and Ukrainians - as well as international media professionals - held very specific notions of this border region, which, however, found a hearing among the Bojkos, Hutsuls and Lemkos only briefly, at best, when they hoped to secure new resources in return for their loyalty. The project thus makes important contributions not only to the techniques of knowledge in question and to individual national histories, but also goes on to champion the fluidity of loyalties and identities in ethnically diverse East-Central Europe. These cross-regional and cross-national approaches provide research with new ways of engaging with groups on the border, who are often difficult to grasp through written sources but have, for that very reason, been all the more frequently manipulated by the media of outsiders. In doing so, the project has provided important impetus for research into Ukrainian and East Central European identities, their histories of knowledge and their visual representations.