SUMMARY:

This article examines the identity of people who self-define as Poles living in Lviv today, where they were the dominant majority before 1945. Based on archival research and thirty-nine oral history interviews, it focuses on the problematics of defining the group as a classical “ethnic minority” in this specific, historically freighted borderland context. With ethnicity relativized by respondents, cultural practices and narratives of place instead constitute cohesive features. If “minority” is no longer a fully adequate category, I suggest that these features might be better examined and the group’s wider identity described using a specific (new) definition of the term “subculture.”