Galicia

Galicia is the historical region of east-central Europe now divided between southeastern Poland and western Ukraine, taking its name from the medieval principality of Halych. Long a borderland between competing empires, it formed a crownland of Austria-Hungary from the late eighteenth century until the First World War, a legacy still visible in its shared Habsburg-era architecture, before being partitioned between Poland and the Soviet Union after the Second World War. Its complex history left it home to a mix of Polish, Ukrainian, Jewish and other communities whose populations were dramatically reshaped by the upheavals of the twentieth century.