What do I mean by our other capital? Is it Bohdan Khmelnytsky’s Chyhyryn (1648-1669), or Ivan Mazepa’s and Kyrylo Rozumovsky’s Baturyn (1687-1708 and 1750-1764, respectively)? Or do I refer to Kharkiv, capital of Soviet Ukraine in 1917-1934? No, what I have in mind is the capital for western Ukrainians – though not a Ukrainian capital – between 1772 and 1918, namely, Vienna.
To be sure, there was much to deplore about Habsburg rule, especially its inability to remedy endemic rural poverty and its policy of allowing favored nationalities like the Poles and Hungarians to lord it over lower-ranking ones like the Ruthenians (most of whom eventually chose to identify themselves with the resurgent Ukrainians of the Russian Empire to the east). But today, many Galicians look with nostalgia to a time when Germans, Poles, Jews and Ukrainians, as well as Greeks and Armenians, could live side by side in a city like Lemberg (today’s Lviv) without killing each other – something for which they would exhibit an alarming propensity in the decades after the Austro-Hungarian collapse in October 1918.
Our ancestors’ contacts with Vienna go back before the 1772 First Partition of Poland. Some joined the army that Polish King John Sobieski recruited to help lift the second Turkish siege of Vienna in 1683. Although that may not have been quite the civilization-saving turning point that some make it out to be, while Sobieski’s memoirs have perpetuated a rather exaggerated account of the role of his cavalry thundering down from the Kahlenberg, Ukrainians take pride in their participation. Moreover, the contribution of one Galician in particular is undisputed. Yurii Kulchytsky (aka Georg Franz Kolschitzky), from the village of Kulchytsi in what is now the Sambir district of the Lviv region, knew the Turkish language and customs. This enabled him to cross the lines with messages between the besieged and starving Viennese and the international relief army. Kulchytsky also found a use for the strange greenish pellets left behind in piles by the fleeing Ottomans, which the Viennese reportedly mistook for camel dung. He roasted and ground them and brewed kahve – a bitter black drink that the sweet-toothed Viennese improved with the addition of milk or cream and sugar. This he served at his famous café, zur Blauen Flasche (“Under the Blue Bottle”), near St. Stephen’s cathedral.
Once Austria had annexed Galicia and Bukovyna, the Ukrainian presence in the capital became significant. In 1775, Empress Maria Theresa gave St. Barbara’s Church to what were now called the Greek-Catholics. Since then, Ukrainian students of theology, law, medicine and other subjects have been drawn to the city and its 14th-century university. In 1893, Ivan Franko defended his doctoral dissertation there.
The imperial court and legislature drew politicians and civil servants to Vienna. After the fall of the empire, Western Ukrainian leader Yevhen Petrushevych maintained a government in exile there from 1919 to 1923. A congress held in the city in 1929 founded the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. During World War II, the OUN recruited students and workers in Vienna for the “Roland” expeditionary group. After the war, the heavily bombed city was divided, like Austria itself, into American, British, French and Soviet sectors, with shared jurisdiction in the central First District. As Timothy Snyder relates in “The Red Prince” (2008), Wilhelm von Habsburg, who had supported Ukrainian political goals in 1918, worked with the OUN and French intelligence at this perilous time. He was seized by Soviet soldiers at the Südbahnhof on August 26, 1947, and died of tuberculosis in a prison hospital in Kyiv nearly a year later.
The Austrian State Treaty of May 15, 1955, ended the four-power occupation. The restored nation was to be neutral. Under Article 19, Austria was obligated to maintain foreign war memorials, including a nearly 12-meter-high statue of a Red Army soldier near the Hochstrahlbrunnen fountain. The Viennese, recalling the mass rapes by the Soviet soldiery in 1945, irreverently dubbed it the “Monument to the Unknown Father.”
Today, a resident of Lviv will find Vienna oddly familiar. Its medieval walls, like Vienna’s, were mostly dismantled and replaced with boulevards; its Poltva stream, like Vienna’s Wien, was covered over. Under Austria, the classicism, Biedermeier, romantic historicism, art nouveau and Sezession modernism of Leopolitan architecture echoed Viennese trends. Viennese-trained architects worked there, and the Viennese firm of Fellner and Helmer designed some of the city’s buildings, including the Hotel George. (Jacek Purchla, “Patterns of Influence: Lviv and Vienna in the Mirror of Architecture,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies XXIV (1/4), 2000: 131-47). Vienna’s influence on Ukrainians was not limited, of course, to Lviv; Fellner and Helmer also designed the opera house in Odesa. And the artistic revolution that began in fin-de-siecle Vienna could not but influence 20th century painters, musicians, and writers throughout Ukraine.
But some things stay in Vienna. The subtle sarcasm of that undefinable quality known as Wiener Schmäh has not penetrated the Ukrainian character. Yet the elaborate manners, derived from Spanish court ritual as a means of aristocratic self-representation, percolated down to pre-war Western Ukrainian society. They enjoyed a revival in the 1990s as a reaction to Soviet boorishness and as an element of Habsburg nostalgia.
Nostalgia itself seems peculiarly Viennese. My grandfather lived in Vienna during the hungry years of 1918-1919, but fondly recalled the Prater amusement park with its ferris wheel or Riesenrad. My parents met there around the end of World War II, amid hunger, Allied bombing raids, a flood of desperate refugees (locally known as “burdensome foreigners”) and abductions of students by the NKVD. But they would reminisce about Christmas caroling at St. Barbara’s and hiking in the Alps. Perhaps that was youth, and the golden glow of memory. When I first visited Vienna during my student years, I found it mysterious and romantic. Although it remains my favorite, today I see it simply as a beautiful and historic city. Perhaps that’s the disenchantment of old age – or just a typically Viennese sentiment.
Andrew Sorokowski can be reached at [email protected].