Vanished Kingdoms

by Norman Davies

  Yet an embarrassing background of political turmoil could not be wholly concealed. The prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, a vulgar billionaire, a media baron, is the longest serving leader of a major European country, and a serial offender against good taste and responsible conduct. Having survived decades of accusations of corruption, he was finally stripped of his legal immunity, and faced four trials for tax fraud, bribery and sordid sex offences. Italian women were staging demonstrations against him in all the major cities. When his government proposed to introduce 17 March as an extra national holiday to mark the proclamation of the Kingdom of Italy, his coalition partners walked out. His public standing, which only three years previously had produced the ‘Festa da Silvio’, was sinking to the level of the Casa Savoia. To say that the international reputation of a wonderful country was being tarnished by its political elite was an understatement.

  Historians increasingly believed that Italy’s malaise had deeper causes. Dysfunctional politics are perhaps the outward symptom of more fundamental flaws. The Unification of Italy, once held up as a glorious achievement, was proving at best a partial success. The manner of its execution, as an instrument of the ambitions of the Casa Savoia, never engendered a sense of solidarity between Italy’s diverse regions, and even when the Savoia left, centrifugal forces remained strong:

  Geography and the vicissitudes of history made certain countries… more important than the sum of their parts might have indicated. In Italy the opposite was true. The parts are so stupendous that [some of them] would rival every other country in the world in the quality of its art or the civilization of its past. But the parts have never added up to a coherent whole. United Italy never became the nation its founders had hoped for because its making had been flawed both in conception and in execution… ‘a sin against history and geography’. It was thus predestined to be a disappointment… [The Italians] have created much of the world’s greatest art, architecture and music… Yet the millennia of their past and the vulnerability of their placement have made it impossible for them to create a successful nation-state.76

  The president of the Republic, who had often railed bitterly against his countrymen’s quarrels, must have been holding his head in despair. Giorgio Napolitano could only have reflected on the absence of fundamental consensus throughout his long career. He would certainly have remembered the day of the referendum in June 1946, when he and his Communist comrades in Naples had tried to celebrate the republic’s victory. They hung out their Red Flag alongside a national tricolour from which the coat of arms of the Savoia had been ripped out. Their headquarters was promptly stormed by a baying mob of monarchists, who had won an overwhelming majority in the city.77 Disunity threatened then, and has continued to do so ever since.

  * Santo subito, meaning ‘an instant saint’, was the cry raised on the death of Pope John Paul II in 2005, when many of his admirers were demanding beatification without delay.

  * The Order, now known as the Order of the Most Holy Annunciation, still exists. Its motto is variously taken to stand either for the Latin word fert, ‘he bore’, as in ‘Christ bore our sins’, or for a hidden message such as FORTITUDE EIUS RHODUM TULIT, which would refer to the conquest of Rhodes by Amadeus III, or fOEDERE ET RELIGIONE TENEMUR, ‘We are held together by the constitution and by religion’.

  * Oldini, ‘la comtesse divine’, often reckoned one of the great beauties of the age, fascinated Parisian high society, lived luxuriously in a grand Hôtel on the place Vendôme and became one of the stars of early photography.41

  * Alternatively, ‘Toujours, ma chèvre monte et ma femme descend.’

  † A fine evening of ‘Melodie e poesie’ was staged in the Italian embassy in London, featuring Neapolitan songs and readings from Dante and Petrarch, and among the guests, Fabio Capello, the football coach, and Antonio Carluccio, the master chef. By a happy coincidence, Capello was born on 18 June 1946, the birthday of the Italian Republic.

  9

  Galicia

  Kingdom of the Naked and Starving

  (1773–1918)

  I

  The road to Halich is very wide, extremely bumpy and almost empty. It runs across rolling open countryside for 60 miles south from L’viv, the chief city of western Ukraine. Every now and again one passes through a roadside village with its goose-pond, its old wooden houses and flower gardens, and its rebuilt, onion-domed church. Though the fact is nowhere advertised, one is travelling over part of the ‘continental divide’, the watershed between the Baltic and the Black Sea. To the west and north-west, all waters flow into the basin of the Vistula. To the east and south, they flow either into the Dniepr or the Dniester. Our road, via Rohatyn, is heading for the Dniester.1

  Our driver, Pan Volodymyr, belongs to the middle-aged generation that learned to drive during the Soviet era. Indeed, one could talk of a Red Army driving style – utterly fearless and completely regardless of human life. Pan Volodymyr seems to care nothing either about his own skin or about passenger welfare. His main technique is to charge at full speed down the middle of the road, wheels straddling the centre line. In this way, he avoids the steep camber and the deepest of the potholes that multiply on the tarmac’s outer edges, but the main purpose, one suspects, is to be lord of the road. He careers along, oblivious to the bucking motion, the constant jumps and jolts, and the non-stop judder of an over-stressed chassis. He constantly takes left-turning corners blind, then fights with the shaking steering wheel as the vehicle yaws back over the hump into the dangerous pothole zone. He spurns his seat belt, except for a short stretch where the police are known to lurk; and he clearly has no use for the handbrake, which lies buried under a pile of bottles and magazines. Worst of all, when he sees another car approaching, he refuses either to slow down or to move over. Instead, he clings to a position within inches of the centre line, daring the oncomer to give way, and only veering outwards at the very last second. He is equally contemptuous of combine harvesters, of massive swaying timber-trucks, and of drivers from the same school of driving as himself. When asked if he could possibly keep his speed below 75 mph, he presses on regardless in sullen silence.

  In Rohatyn, we circle the square looking for a place to stop. An oversize statue of the beautiful Roxolana stands in the centre. This daughter of a local Orthodox priest was seized as yasir or ‘human booty’ during a Tartar raid in the early sixteenth century, sold in the slave market of Istanbul and raised to be the consort of the Ottoman sultan, Suleiman the Magnificent: a local girl lost but not forgotten. The date of birth that appears on her statue is questionable, but her story is authentic. Renamed Hurrem, ‘the Smiling One’, she bore the sultan six children; her son Selim succeeded to the Ottoman throne; and the resplendent Baths of Roxolana (1556) are still one of Istanbul’s prominent tourist attractions.

  The traffic on the road to Halich says much about contemporary Ukraine. Pan Volodymyr, who is reputed to be a bishop’s chauffeur, an aristo of his profession, drives a gleaming Renault Espace, which keeps company with similarly up-to-date Toyotas and Skodas and an occasional BMW, but most of the vehicles are twenty or thirty years older. In L’viv, we had ridden in a colossal Volga taxi, which thundered over the cobbles at perhaps 10 mph and was easily overtaken by a student jogger.

  Here, in the countryside, one sees why the road has to be 10 yards wide. Soviet designs, especially of trucks, combined gargantuanism with pre-war technology. Many such monsters are still crawling around like decrepit dinosaurs, indeed one of them is edging painfully up a steep slope and being imperceptibly overtaken by a dilapidated ex-German charabanc belching heavy black smoke. As Pan Volodymyr roars up behind, blasting his horn and aiming for the narrow gap between them, another huge truck comes into view at the top of the hill, broken down and stranded on the verge, which our cavalcade has somehow to pass. The roadway is wide enough for three vehicles, but not for four. I close my eyes in prayer.

  Ordinary Ukrainians do not have such problems. They usually walk, or ri
de between the villages on creaking bicycles; they drive a horse and cart, a fura, or they stand for hours at forlorn crossroads in the shade of derelict bus shelters, waiting for the lift that may or may not come. They push sacks of potatoes on handcarts, or pull wooden beams on improvised trailers, or, with no shop in sight for miles, they trudge homewards with bulging shopping bags. They try to flag us down, or to sell us a jar of forest berries, but Pan Volodymyr careers on. Episcopal drivers stop for no man.

  Like the roads, the Ukrainian countryside is only partly de-Sovietized. The collective farms which once turned the peasants into state serfs have been disbanded, but they have not been replaced by a viable system of private farming. ‘The young people are leaving for the cities in droves,’ one of our companions says sadly, ‘or are working abroad.’ One sees the results. An old woman, bent double, holds a single cow on a rope in the pasture. The ex-Soviet dairy stands abandoned nearby. A ragged lad watches a herd of grazing goats. A grandfather dangles his grandchild on the porch of their cabin. The plots and strips and orchards adjacent to the village are tilled and tended, full of fruit and vegetables, but the great open fields, untouched for years, have gone to seed, turned into oceans of bracken and meadow-wort. ‘No one knows who owns what,’ we are told; ‘they are waiting for legislation.’ One thinks: for legislation, like the bus which may or may not come.

  The town of Burshtyn is announced miles away by a soaring yellow cloud that rises into the summer sky. It is a prime relic of Soviet times, a whole community dependent on one colossal coal-burning power station in the heart of a rural region. The coal comes from the Donbass (the Donetsk Basin), almost 1,000 miles away. Three red-and-white chimneys, extraordinarily tall and covered in soot, belch out their pungent filth perhaps 900 feet above the ground. Acres of rusting gantries line the streets. The wrecks of abandoned boilers, trucks and railway equipment litter the townscape; a thick layer of ubiquitous grey powder stifles the weeds that grow between the sleepers and the rails that no longer lead anywhere. The installation is too vital to discard and too costly to replace, so it continues to produce and to pollute.

  Halich comes into view over the brow of a hill not far beyond Burshtyn. A medieval miracle takes the place of a modern monstrosity. Our companion points to a Romanesque hilltop tower on the right. ‘That’s the twelfth-century church of St Pantaleimon,’ she announces, ‘recently restored.’ A roadside sign says ‘’. The Cyrillic letter Г, which in Russian is pronounced ‘G’ as in ‘Gal’, is pronounced ‘H’ in Ukrainian, as in ‘Hal’. The sunlit valley of the Dniester, already a sizeable stream, glistens ahead. A couple of bridges, one old and one new, cross the river in the direction of a huddle of roofs surrounded by tall trees. Beyond rises a steep, wooded scarp surmounted by red-brick fortifications.

  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 acr
oss 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:

  981 Volodymyr the Great annexes Halich to Kievan Rus′.

  1156–7 The Halich bishopric is founded.