https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galicia_(Eastern_Europe)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Petroleum_Trail
https://web.archive.org/web/20161006104634/https://www.ostaustria.org/bridges-magazine/volume-10-june-29-2006/item/1172-galician-california-galician-hell-the-peril-and-promise-of-oil-production-in-austria-hungary
Galician California, Galician Hell: The Peril and Promise of Oil Production in Austria-Hungary
As the location of the headquarters of OPEC and the IAEA, Vienna's connection with the international energy industry and with petroleum is well known.
Anyone who has flown into Vienna and driven by the massive complex of OMV refineries that separate Schwechat from the city itself knows that Austria boasts its own refining industry.
The oil production occurred almost exclusively in the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, acquired by the Habsburgs during the first partition of Poland in 1772. (That same territory is split today between Poland and the Ukraine.) The crescent-shaped province marking the northeastern border of the Habsburg Empire was devoted almost exclusively to agriculture, and the land was not kind. Characterized by repeated crop failures, its agricultural yield even in the best of years was the lowest of all Austrian provinces. Overpopulation led to endemic famine, which contemporary critics and historians alike have believed to have caused an estimated 50,000 deaths from malnutrition each year. A wave of emigration that started in the 1880s carried 420,000 Galician Ukrainians and over 390,000 Galician Poles across the Atlantic Ocean by 1914, and still Galicia's population grew by 45 percent between 1869 and 1910. In 1905, only 24 percent of adult male Ruthenian peasants were literate, compared to 95 percent of the empire's Germans and Czechs. Added to growing national tension between Polish landowners and Ruthenian peasants was resentment of the local Jewish population; Galicia knew neither prosperity nor peace. While some historians of Galicia have emphasized the political freedoms that its residents enjoyed as citizens of the Kingdoms and Lands Represented in Parliament (as the "Austrian" half of Austria-Hungary was called after 1867), most insist that the benefits of civil liberties were outweighed by the miseries associated with economic backwardness. This is the image of Galicia that survives today.
Given the overwhelming preponderance of agriculture and the centrality of village life, oil derricks and refineries, storage tanks and pipelines have no place in our imagined landscape of Galicia - but they should. Galicia produced over two million tons of crude oil in 1909, accounting for 5 percent of world production, and ranking as the third-largest petroleum producer in the world (after the United States and the Russian Empire). Observers lauded the Galician petroleum industry's great potential - there seemed to be no reason why the apparently unlimited supply of petroleum could not cover domestic demand and even be exported - but it was equally evident that the actual state of the petroleum industry, like that of the province and its inhabitants, was lamentable. While contemporary references to "Galician Hell" and "Galician Sodom" complement modern accounts of malnutrition, illiteracy, and the "idiocy of rural life," the nicknames "Polish Baku," "Eastern European Pennsylvania," "Austrian El Dorado," and "Galician California," more aptly reflect the enthusiasm of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. What all of these appellations share is an invitation to comparison with foreign communities similarly characterized by the excitement of sudden booms and jolting progress upon the discovery of natural riches. Oil, it was hoped, might be the salvation of Galicia, a province otherwise with little raw material from which to develop industry.