History of Truskavets I — salt, oil and the first mention of 1462

Every resort has a founding date, but few have roots as deep as Truskavets. The first part of our history series looks at the five centuries before anyone thought of drinking the local water for health.

1462: a village enters the record

Truskavets first appears in written sources in 1462, in property documents of the Polish Kingdom's Przemyśl land, to which this part of Galicia then belonged. The settlement was already old at that point — archaeological finds in the surrounding hills suggest habitation stretching back to the times of Kyivan Rus and the Principality of Galicia–Volhynia.

What does "Truskavets" mean?

The name's origin is genuinely disputed, and locals enjoy telling all the versions. The folk favourite links it to truskavka — strawberry — and wild strawberries do grow on the hillsides. Linguists are sceptical: more likely candidates include the old Slavic personal name Trushko, or a derivation from the Lithuanian Druskininkai family of salt-related names (druska means salt in Lithuanian) — brought here, the theory goes, during the era when Lithuanian princes held these lands. Given what came next, the salt version has history on its side.

The salt centuries

For most of its recorded life Truskavets was a village of salt boilers. Brine springs seep out of the hills here, and peasants evaporated them in iron pans, carting the salt along the Carpathian trade routes. Salt was the region's white gold; nearby Drohobych grew wealthy on it, and its magnificent salt-works operated for centuries.

The same geology that pushed brine to the surface hid other things. Locals had long noticed springs whose water smelled oddly of tar and left oily films. They called one of them, dismissively, Naftusia — "little oily one". Nobody yet suspected the diminutive would one day be worth more than all the salt.

Oil before the oil age

In the early 19th century the Boryslav–Truskavets area became one of the world's first oil districts. Ozokerite — "mountain wax" — and crude oil were dug from shallow pits; by mid-century Boryslav, a few kilometres away, was a boomtown of derricks and speculators. Truskavets had its own mines: ozokerite, lead ore and later a source of income that would shape the resort's medical profile in an unexpected way — for it was the drillers and mine surveyors who kept striking not oil, but strange mineral waters.

An analysis was ordered. In 1836 the Lviv pharmacist and chemist Teodor Torosevich examined the Naftusia spring and published its composition, beginning the scientific era of Truskavets water. By then, in fact, the first modest bath-house had already been operating for nearly a decade — but that is the subject of part two of our history, when Truskavets becomes a resort.