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The border as pain and remedy: commemorating the Polish – Ukrainian conflict of 1918-1919 in Lviv and Przemyśl

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Tatiana Zhurzhenko
Tatiana Zhurzhenko*
Affiliation:
Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki, Helsinki FI-00014, Finland
*
* Email: zhurzhenko@yahoo.com
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Abstract

The fight for Lwów/Lviv in 1918 was the first military conflict in the difficult twentieth-century history of Polish–Ukrainian relations. In the inter-war period, an impressive military memorial, the Eaglets Cemetery, was constructed in Lwów to honor the young defenders of the city. A monument to the Eaglets was also erected in the neighboring Przemyśl. In inter-war Poland, the Ukrainians, who had lost their cause for state independence, created their own cult of national heroes, the Sich Riflemen. Their graves in Lwów and Przemyśl, as well as in many smaller towns, became sites of public commemoration and national mobilization. This article traces the emergence, the development and the post-World War II decay of both competing memorial cults, focusing on their revival and political uses after 1989. It examines the trans-border aspects of memory politics in Lviv and Przemyśl and analyses the role of war memorials in (re-)establishing the link between ethnic communities and their homelands.

Keywords

UkrainePolandwar memorialscommemorationsborderborder minorities
Type
Research Article
Information
Nationalities Papers , Volume 42 , Issue 2 , March 2014 , pp. 242 - 268
Copyright
Copyright © 2014 Association for the Study of Nationalities 

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