Between 1811 and 1848, approximately 400 families from Bohemia and the Egerland came to eastern Galicia and settled in 22 villages in the Carpathians Mountains and their border areas.
The German Bohemian villages consisted of distinct, cohesive groups who had lived together in a community in the Bohemian Forest or in the Egerland and had remained united throughout their migration and relocation. This made it easier for them to put down roots in Galicia and Bukovina.
Their earliest settlement was Mariahilf, which was established by thirty-three families in 1811. Other Bohemian communities included Teresówka (1818), Machliniec (1823), Zakla (1825), Kornelówka and Josefsthal (1830), Ludwikówka (1832), and Felizienthal, Annaberg, and Karlsdorf (1835).
The German Bohemians in Galicia consisted of two main groups: the Egerländer and the Böhmerwäldler, both Roman Catholic, according to the research of Walter Kuhn.
People in the Machliniec area, which included the mother colonies Machliniec, Nowe Siolo, Kornelówka, and Izydorówka, were exclusively Egerländer from villages around Plan, Tachau, and Pfraumberg, and between Bischofteinitz and Pilsen. Those in the Felizienthal area, however, came from both these Egerland areas and from Bohemian Forest villages around Kuschwarda, Wallern, and Prachatitz. Kuhn identified these places of origin by studying birth places noted in the Roman Catholic marriage records in the Machliniec and Felizienthal parishes.
The Bohemian Forest, one of the largest forest areas in Europe, reportedly had vast areas never been disturbed by an axe by as late as 1870. In the center, along the Kubani, is the primeval forest from which the Felizienthal people emigrated. This area had only slowly been penetrated for settlement in the course of wood cutting for the glassworks cottage industry. Woodcutters, Köhler [charcoal burners] and Aschenbrenner [potash burners], a primitive people who lived in simple huts in the deep forest, were the vanguard of civilization. Only gradually were small farms established in clearings around the abandoned glass huts and in the process, the woodcutters became smallholders.
- Excerpt from Galicia: A Multi-Ethnic Overview and Settlement History with Special Reference to Bukovina by Irmgard Hein Ellingson
