Western Ukrainian Nobility

The shliakhta (Ukrainian: шля́хта, Polish: szlachta) were a noble class of ethnic Ukrainians in what is now western Ukraine, that enjoyed certain legal and social privileges. Estimates of their numbers vary. According to one estimate, by the mid-nineteenth century there were approximately 32,000 Ukrainian nobles in the western Ukrainian territory of Galicia, over 25% of whom lived in 21 villages near the town of Sambir. They comprised less than 2% of the ethnic Ukrainian population. Other estimates place the number of nobles at 67,000 people at the end of the 18th century and 260,000 by the end of the nineteenth century, or approximately 6% of the ethnic Ukrainian population. The nobles tended to live in compact settlements either in villages populated mostly by nobles or in particular areas of larger villages.

Unlike in the case of their ethnic Polish counterparts, the western Ukrainian nobility as a class played a marginal role in western Ukrainian society, which came to be dominated by Ukrainian priestly families, who formed a tight-knit hereditary caste that constituted the wealthiest and most highly educated group within the Ukrainian population. There was considerable overlap between priests and nobles however, with many priestly families also belonging to the nobility. During the late nineteenth century until the 1930s more than half of the Ukrainian priestly families in western Ukraine had noble origins. Such families tended to identify themselves primarily as priests rather than as nobles. The focus of this article is on those ethnic Ukrainians in western Ukraine whose primary social orientation was as nobles.

The territory of western Ukraine was part of the medieval state of Kievan Rus. After the collapse of Kieven Rus, the westernmost part of that state formed the independent Kingdom of Galicia–Volhynia, which Poland conquered in 1349. Over the following centuries, most of the wealthy native landowning nobility eventually adopted the dominant Polish nationality and Roman Catholic religion, and completely assimilated into Polish society.

The nobility in western Ukraine that retained its non-Polish identity was generally poorer and developed as a social class in the fourteenth century.

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