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.