Oil City is the name of the largest Galician* oil well, located in Tustanowice. During the second half of the nineteenth century, Galicia experienced a black gold rush, which was started by the Lviv pharmacists Jan Zeh and Ignacy Łukasiewicz, who between 1852 and 1853 developed an effective formula to distil pure oil from petroleum.

During this time, the pioneering oil mine of Prince Stanisław Jabłonowski was opened in 1852 in Siary and the model oil company of Ignacy Łukasiewicz and his partners was opened in Bóbrka in 1854, while places such as Gorlice, Krosno, Jasło, Słoboda Rungurska, and Boryslav entered the history books of the oil industry in Europe.

Landowners, engineers, financiers, and peasants joined the search for black gold. As a result, Galicia* turned into the world’s third largest extraction centre in the early twentieth century, following only the United States and Russia.

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* Galicia was a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (today the territory of Poland and Ukraine)