Ukrainian nobility of Galicia

The shlyakhta (Ukrainian: шля́хта, Polish: szlachta) were a noble class of Ruthenians 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-19th 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.^[1] 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 19th century, or approximately 6% of the ethnic Ukrainian population.^[2] The nobles tended to live in compact settlements either in villages populated mostly by nobles or in particular areas of larger villages.^[1]

Unlike in the case of their Polish ethnic counterparts, the szlachta, the Ukrainian nobility in Galicia as a class played a marginal role in western Ukrainian society, which came to be dominated by Eastern Catholic clergy 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.^[3] During the late 19th century until the 1930s, more than half of the Ukrainian priestly families in western Ukraine had noble origins.^[4] Such families tended to identify themselves primarily as priests rather than as nobles.