Central European history: A successful Austrian invention THE life of the kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria was short and sad... and few people mourned its passing. So wrote Norman Davies in 1981 in his magisterial history of Poland. Poverty in Galicia in the 19th century was so extreme that it had become proverbial - the region was called Golicja and Glodomeria, a play on the official name (Galicja i Lodomeria) and goly (naked) and glodny (hungry). The largest and most populous crownland of the Austro-Hungarian empire, occupying a swathe of what is now south-east Poland and far western Ukraine, was also by a large margin its most backward province. Yet since the end of the cold war, and in the past few years especially, Galicia has been the focus of considerable interest, particularly in relation to Polish and Ukrainian national identities. A new exhibition, "The Myth of Galicia," which has taken four years to assemble, opened recently in Krakow and will later travel to Vienna. The 600 objects include maps, photos, paintings, sculpture and cartoons. They explain the emerging mythology of a region that was taken by the Austro-Hungarian empire from Poland after the first partition of Poland in 1772, and lasted until 1918 when the Habsburg empire's fate was sealed. The show looks at the creation of Galicia before examining Polish, Ukrainian, Austrian and Jewish perspectives and lastly "Galicia after Galicia," the contemporary mythology in which Galicia is a brand of bottled water and soup. There have always been two views of Galicia, explains Jacek Purchla, the head of the International Cultural Centre in Krakow that is hosting the exhibition. One is an Arcadian view of a mythical land of immense cultural, ethnic and linguistic richness, the cradle of enlightenment and Jewish emancipation and the birthplace of Joseph Roth, Manès Sperber and the parents of Sigmund Freud. The other is the idea of Galicia as Halb-Asien (half-Asia, as the Austrians called it), a barbaric place inhabited by strange people of questionable personal hygiene. From a Viennese perspective, explains Emil Brix, Austria's ambassador in London, Galicia was a colony that needed to be civilised and integrated into the k. und k. (imperial and royal) administration. This changed after the introduction of the liberal Austrian constitution in 1867, which made Galicia a crownland with its own regional parliament. Partly as a result of this detachment from the centre of power in Vienna, Austrians never perceived Galicia as part of their shared cultural heritage; even today some see it more as an exotic outpost of the sunken Habsburg empire. The view was rather different for Poles and Ukrainians, in particular in southern Poland and western Ukraine. Galicia became their Piedmont, the place from where the restoration of an independent Polish or Ukrainian state could begin. In the course of the 19th century, they began to feel ever more strongly about their respective imagined nations and grew more resentful of their Austrian colonisers. Galicia's Jewish community virtually disappeared after the second world war. At the 1772 partition, Jews accounted for 10% of the 2.6m population of what became Galicia. They were second-class citizens until Emperor Joseph II of Austria offered them freedom of worship, equal legal protection and required the adoption of conventional family names as well as military conscription. These reforms were seen as a form of persecution by the Orthodox rabbinical and Hasidic communities, according to Larry Wolff at New York University. They interfered with their religious practice and split the community into enlightened modernisers and staunch traditionalists. Even so, Galician Jews generally proudly identified themselves as Galitzianer, distinct from other Jewish populations in eastern Europe. Outside Europe, it is the descendants of the 2m Galician emigrants to America in the 19th and early 20th century who are keeping the myth of Galicia alive. In Europe, Galicia is a central element of Poles" national identity and of Ukrainians" search for a European identity. "The latest proof of the political significance of the Galician heritage has been the contribution of its Ukrainian parts to the success of the Maidan this year and last year," says Mr Purchla. For many Ukrainians today Galicia is a beacon of Western civilisation. Whatever its flaws, this Austrian invention is relevant and alive. "The Myth of Galicia" is at the International Cultural Centre, Krakow, until March 8th 2015