The House of Habsburg
September 17th
I have a confession to make — I love the Habsburgs and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. I find something very comforting in the required conformism and bureaucracy of a benevolent despotic empire. Lives that are lived and judged by numbers and official notes and rigid social standings. When every day and every week and every month and every year are the same and follow the same path and routine as previous days, weeks, months, and years. A good emperor who might be a tyrant, but looks like a kindly old man with a grey beard and whiskers is always there — on the banknotes and in patriotic songs and in paintings or photographs on the walls of local officials. Always there — just like the empire.
Until the empire is no more.
I spend a day exploring small towns in the Carpathian region in southeast Poland — the old Galicia region of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The weather didn’t help — rain all day and twice I get soaked to the bone. It is the first time I am in this area even though it seems to me like I recognize the sights and buildings and XIX century urban town grids. I read a lot about this region in XIX and the early XX century when it was under the rule of Habsburgs and a part of Dual Monarchy and it is a fascinating subject for me. Not really sure why — is it the stagnation and sameness of passing years? the bureaucracy that put Byzantium to shame? the political experiment that united so many different cultures and ethnicities (and budding nationalistic spirits) under one ruler? I am not sure, but more and more I think that benevolent dictatorship is the best political system invented so far — and Austro-Hungarian Empire is a prime example of it.
And no, I am not kidding about my admiration for a benevolent dictatorship.
