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Thalerhof (also transliterated as Talerhof from Cyrillic-based East Slavic texts) was a concentration camp created by the Austro-Hungarian authorities active from 1914 to 1917, in a valley in foothills of the Alps, near Graz, the main city of the province of Styria. [1]
The Austro-Hungarian authorities imprisoned leaders of the Russophile movement among Carpatho-Rusyns, Lemkos, and Galicians (see Galician Russophilia); those who recognized the Russian language as the literary standard form of their own Slavic language varieties and had sympathy for the Russian Empire. Thus, the captives were forced to abandon their identity as Russians, or sympathies for Russia, and identify as Ukrainian. Captives who identified themselves as Ukrainians were freed from the camp. Between 1924-1932, four issues of the Thalerhof Almanac were published in Lviv, in which collected documentary evidence of the number of prisoners and the murders of peaceful Russophiles by the Austrian authorities was published. Out of 5,500,158 inhabitants of Eastern Galicia in 1914, 2,114,792 (39.8%) were native speakers of Polish, and 3,385,366 (58.9%) were native speakers of Ruthenian (Rusyn or Ukrainian). In the book "Habsburg national politics during the First World War", authors D.A. Akhremenko, chairman of a public organization called Historical Consciousness, and K.V. Shevchenko, a professor at Belarusian State University, state that Thalerhof held a total of 10,000 Russians, about 2,000 Rusyns (according to other sources up to 5,000), and about 200-250 students placed in the camp on charges of sympathy for the Russian Empire, and the Russian books of Grigory Skovoroda, Taras Shevchenko, Pushkin, Tolstoy and others. [2] In total over twenty thousand people were arrested and placed in Thalerhof camp. [3]
Thalerhof had no barracks until the winter of 1915. Prisoners slept on the ground in the open-air during both rain and frost. [4] According to U.S. Congressman Medill McCormick, prisoners were regularly beaten and tortured. [5] On 9 November 1914 an official report of Fieldmarshal Schleer said there were 5,700 Carpatho-Rusyns, Lemkos, and Ukrainians in Talerhof. In the winter of 1914-1915, a third of the roughly 7,000 internees died of typhus. [6] The camp was closed by Emperor Charles I of Austria, 6 months into his reign. [7]
In the first eighteen months of its existence, three thousand [4] prisoners of Thalerhof died, including the Orthodox saint Maxim Sandovich, who was martyred here (beatified August 29, 1996 by the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia).
From 1945 to 1955 the site was used as an airbase by the RAF, and known, as RAF Station Thalerhof before being transferred back to the Austrian Government. Graz Airport currently occupies the former site of the camp.
The barracks were demolished in 1936. The corpses of 1,767 internees were then exhumed and reburied in a mass grave at Feldkirchen bei Graz. [7]
Ruthenia is an exonym, originally used in Medieval Latin, as one of several terms for Kievan Rus'. It is used to refer to Rus' region, a triangular area which mainly corresponds to the tribe of Polans in Dnieper Ukraine. It is also used to refer to the East Slavic and Eastern Orthodox people of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Kingdom of Poland, and later the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and Austria-Hungary, mainly to Ukrainians and sometimes Belarusians, corresponding to the territories of modern Belarus, Ukraine, Eastern Poland and some of western Russia.
Rusyn is an East Slavic language spoken by Rusyns in parts of Central and Eastern Europe, and written in the Cyrillic script. The majority of speakers live in an area known as Carpathian Ruthenia that spans from Transcarpathia, westward into eastern Slovakia and south-east Poland. There is also a sizeable Pannonian Rusyn linguistic island in Vojvodina, Serbia, as well as a Rusyn diaspora throughout the world. Per the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, Rusyn is officially recognized as a protected minority language by Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Hungary, Romania, Poland, Serbia, and Slovakia.
Ruthenian and Ruthene are exonyms of Latin origin, formerly used in Eastern and Central Europe as common ethnonyms for Ukrainians and partially Belarusians, particularly during the late medieval and early modern periods. The Latin term Rutheni was used in medieval sources to describe Eastern Slavs of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, as an exonym for people of the former Kievan Rus', thus including ancestors of the modern Belarusians, Rusyns and Ukrainians. The use of Ruthenian and related exonyms continued through the early modern period, developing several distinctive meanings, both in terms of their regional scopes and additional religious connotations.
Transcarpathia is a historical region on the border between Central and Eastern Europe, mostly located in western Ukraine's Zakarpattia Oblast.
Lemkos are an ethnic group inhabiting the Lemko Region of Carpathian Rus', an ethnographic region in the Carpathian Mountains and foothills spanning Ukraine, Slovakia and Poland.
The West Ukrainian People's Republic or West Ukrainian National Republic, known for part of its existence as the Western Oblast of the Ukrainian People's Republic, was a short-lived polity that controlled most of Eastern Galicia from November 1918 to July 1919. It included major cities of Lviv, Ternopil, Kolomyia, Drohobych, Boryslav, Stanyslaviv and right-bank Peremyshl. Apart from lands of Eastern Galicia, it also claimed the northern part of Bukovyna and the Carpathian Ruthenia. Politically, the Ukrainian National Democratic Party dominated the legislative assembly, guided by varying degrees of Greek Catholic, liberal and socialist ideology. Other parties represented included the Ukrainian Radical Party and the Christian Social Party.
Rusyns, also known as Carpatho-Rusyns, Ruthenians, or Rusnaks, are an East Slavic ethnic group from the Eastern Carpathians in Central Europe. They speak Rusyn, an East Slavic language variety, treated variously as either a distinct language or a dialect of the Ukrainian language. As traditional adherents of Eastern Christianity, the majority of Rusyns are Eastern Catholics, though a minority of Rusyns practice Eastern Orthodoxy. Rusyns primarily self-identify as a distinct Slavic people and they are recognized as such in Croatia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Serbia, and Slovakia, where they have official minority status. Alternatively, some identify more closely with their country of residence, while others are a branch of the Ukrainian people.
The Ukrainian Canadian internment was part of the confinement of "enemy aliens" in Canada during and for two years after the end of the First World War. It lasted from 1914 to 1920, under the terms of the War Measures Act.
The Lemko Region is an ethnographic area in southern Poland and Northern Eastern Slovakia that has traditionally been inhabited by the Lemko people. The land stretches approximately 140 km (87 mi) long and 25–50 km (16–31 mi) wide along the north side of the Carpathian Mountains, following the Polish-Slovak border from the Poprad River. In the East, the region is described as either terminating linguistically between the Wisłok and Osława Rivers, or ethnographically at the Sanok River, where it meets the Boyko region. Some even go so far as to consider it to extend south into the Prešov Region, Slovakia.
Carpathian Ruthenia was a region in the easternmost part of Czechoslovakia that became an autonomous region within that country in September 1938. It declared its independence as the "Republic of Carpatho-Ukraine" in 15 March 1939; however, it was occupied and annexed by Hungary the same day. Starting with October 1944, the Soviet Red Army occupied the territory and short period the territory of the region was organised as Transcarpathian Ukraine (1944—1946), until it was incorporated into the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1946. In total, between 1939 and 1944, 80,000 Carpathian Ukrainians perished.
Alexander Vasilyevich Dukhnovych was an Transcarpathian Ruthenian priest, poet, writer, pedagogue, and social activist of the Russophile orientation. He is considered as the awakener of the Rusyns.
Lemko-Rusyn People's Republic, often known also as the Lemko-Rusyn Republic, just the Lemko Republic, or the Florynka Republic, was a short-lived state founded on 5 December 1918 in the aftermath of World War I and the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It was centered on Florynka, a village in the south-east of present-day Poland. Being Russophile, its intent was unification with a democratic Russia and was opposed to a union with the West Ukrainian People's Republic. A union with Russia proved impossible, so the Republic then attempted to join Subcarpathian Rus' as an autonomous province of Czechoslovakia. This, however, was opposed by the then governor of Subcarpathian Rus', Gregory Žatkovič.
Galician Russophilia or Moscophilia was a cultural and political movement largely in the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, Austria-Hungary. This ideology emphasized that since the Eastern Slavic people of Galicia were descendants of the people of Kievan Rus' (Ruthenians), and followers of Eastern Christianity, they were thus a branch of the Russian people. The movement was part of the larger Pan-Slavism that was developing in the late 19th century. Russophilia was largely a backlash against Polonisation and Magyarisation that was largely blamed on the landlords and associated with Roman Catholicism.
Upon the outbreak of World War I, Ukraine was not an independent political entity or state. The majority of the territory that makes up the modern country of Ukraine was part of the Russian Empire with a notable far western region administered by the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the border between them dating to the Congress of Vienna in 1815.
Kost Antonovych Levytsky was a Ukrainian politician. He was a leader of the Ukrainian National Democratic Alliance in the Second Polish Republic and the head of the Council of Seniors of a self-proclaimed Ukrainian government which was declared on 30 June 1941 during the German invasion of the Soviet Union.
Feldkirchen bei Graz is a municipality in the district of Graz-Umgebung in the Austrian state of Styria.
Maxim Timofeyevich Sandovich is a New Martyr and Orthodox saint. known as saint hieromartyr Maxim of Gorlice. He is the protomartyr of the Lemko people.
With the arrival of the Hungarians into the heart of the Central European Plain around 899, Slavic tribes of Vistulans, White Croats, and Lendians found themselves under Hungarian rule. In 955 those areas north of the Carpathian Mountains constituted an autonomous part of the Duchy of Bohemia and remained so until around 972, when the first Polish territorial claims began to emerge. This area was mentioned in 981, when Vladimir the Great of Kievan Rus' claimed the area on his westward way. In the 11th century the area belonged to Poland, then reverted to Kievan Rus'. However, at the end of the 12th century the Hungarian claims to the principality turned up. Finally Casimir III of Poland annexed it in 1340–1349. Low Germans from Prussia and Middle Germany settled parts of northern and western Galicia from the 13th to 18th centuries, although the vast majority of the historic province remained independent from German and Austrian rule.
Kassian Dmitrievich Bogatyrets, or Kasyan Dmytrovych Bohatyrets, was an Eastern Orthodox priest, church historian, and Rusyn community leader in Bukovina. Born a national of Austria-Hungary, he studied theology and history, and served the parish of Sadhora. He drew the suspicion of Austrian authorities attention with his open support for Russophile politics, and was persecuted after visiting the Russian Empire in 1908. He was arrested during the first days of World War I and deported to Sankt Marien, then tried for sedition in Vienna. He was scheduled to be executed by hanging in early 1917, but was freed by a general amnesty shortly before the Austrian monarchy crumbled.
Adolf Dobriansky was a public figure and leader of the Carpatho-Rusyn movement in Subcarpathian Rus', lawyer and writer.
46°59′37″N15°26′24″E / 46.9936°N 15.4400°E
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