HALYCHYNA AND THE FIRST CHOLERA EPIDEMIC

Abstract

The paper deals with the events and consequences of the first cholera epidemic in Halychyna in the first half of the ХIХth century, when the area was still part of the Habsburg Empire. The aim is to present and properly evaluate the events of the first cholera epidemic in Halychyna, which played an important role in the history of Ukraine and the whole of Europe, but which has so far received little attention. The paper examines the events of the first cholera epidemic, the measures taken against it, the structure of the defense, and the social consequences of the epidemic. The research was based on a number of unpublished archival sources and literature on the topic. The Kingdom of Hungary, which also belonged to the Habsburg Empire, was the first country to join the fight against the epidemic as an area adjacent to Halychyna, so the archival data of Transcarpathia and Hungary contain an abundance of the relevant source material. The history of the epidemic was studied in the earliest times by such renowned researchers, as August Hirsch, Heinrich Haeser, Nottidge Charles Macnamara, and Georg Sticker. But there are also excellent contemporary works on the subject, such as the research by Richard S. Ross III or Irene Poczka, which provide important resources for this research. The cholera epidemic first reached this part of Europe in the late 1830s. With the spread of the disease, almost everyone blamed the Russian troops that came to quell the Polish uprising. The Viennese court acted as a supporter of the Russian Tsar in the system of the Holy Alliance, which caused a significant wave of protest among the Hungarian nobility, who sympathized with the Poles. Although the Habsburg Empire’s defense against the epidemic was considered the strictest in all of Europe, the disease still made its way into the territory of the empire from Russia and took its first victims in Halychyna. After the plague, it was the largest epidemic in all of Europe. Its tragic consequences are well illustrated by the fact that nearly a quarter of a million people became ill in Halychyna and almost half of them (almost a hundred thousand) died of the disease.