☙ Alternate History, Dark Fantasy, and the Roots of Vulgaria ❧
“The cartographer’s quill trembled at the border—not from ignorance, but from fear.”
In a world much like our own, tucked between the frostbitten Carpathians and the marshes of forgotten kings, there once existed a province known to scholars as Galicia—a real place, a tragic place, a borderland perpetually tread under the boots of empires.
But in our telling, that land never died.
It evolved. It endured. It hardened.
Thus was born Vulgaria—not a mirror of Galicia, but a distillation of it. The grief, the grandeur, the ghouls. All the things left behind by history’s footnotes have, in Vulgaria, been given voices.
✠ A Real Root, a Fictional Flower
Galicia-Lodomeria was once a Habsburg crownland, a strange amalgam of Polish, Ruthenian, Austrian, and Jewish heritage. A place of border conflicts and baroque ambitions. But where history ends, Vulgaria begins.
We have taken inspiration from its patchwork cultures and rewritten it as something darker and deeper—a last bastion of civilization, hemmed in by superstition and encroaching monstrosity.
In this alternate echo:
- Galicia’s ruins become Vulgaria’s watchtowers, eternally on guard.
- Its peasantry becomes a people of iron wills and haunted eyes.
- Its forgotten counties gain new names—Lembergrau, Buchenhain, Schattenburg—their Gothic essence distilled from dusty archives and delirious margins.
✠ A Nation Born in Refusal
Where Galicia bent beneath the empires, Vulgaria resists.
It stood against Ottomans, Mongols, Muscovites, and things without names.
It never fell. Not to time. Not to reason. Not even to the modern world.
The fictional nation serves a narrative purpose: to be the last place where sanity still wears armor, where superstition and science have not yet parted ways, and where the knight, the scholar, and the mystic may still share a table without ridicule.
✠ Why This Matters to the Order
The Order of Vulgarian Knights is more than a club with costumes. It is an intentional experiment in myth-making—a fusion of alternate history and personal purpose. By rooting ourselves in a reimagined Galicia, we claim a space where genres may interweave, and where heritage—both real and fictional—can become the source of strength, not strife.
We are not reenactors.
We are reclaimers.
We do not mourn what was lost.
We ride with what remains.
And in the cracks between history and horror, we have raised a principality of our own.
