NEUSTERN is a research project funded by Poland’s NCN and based at the Tadeusz Manteuffel Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw.
We are interested in how the creation of new schooling institutions by the Austrian state changed the Greek Catholic Church and enabled its leaders to redefine themselves in terms of national belonging and political allegiance.
The name of our enterprise comes from Mykhailo Harasevych, one of the key protagonists of our research, who was ennobled at the beginning of the nineteenth century as baron von Neustern. We have chosen archpriest Harasevych, because he was the first native Galician who attempted to write a history of Galician Ruthenians, his Annales Ecclesiæ Ruthenæ. We use his case as an individual example of wider historical trends and his intellectual biography will form part of a broader picture of his social and cultural environment.
In order to achieve a deeper understanding of the Greek Catholic ecclesiastic elite, we want to create a prosopographical database integrated with an open-access digital map, containing information on individual priests’ education and careers. This will allow us to describe the social networks, to which they belonged and eventually to apply this knowledge to the interpretations of their intellectual and political trajectories.
The official name of our project is “Greek Catholic Prelates of Galicia in the Face of Revolution, Restoration and Nationalism: Mykhailo Harasevych, Baron de Neustern, and his intellectual milieu” (NCN 2019/32/C/HS3/00466). At the Tadeusz Manteuffel Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences we are affiliated with two departments: the Historical Atlas and the History of Ideas and the History of the Intelligentsia in the 19th and 20th Centuries.