The two-volume book Our City Lviv is by far the most readable source on the City of the Lion. This book can be found in almost every household with children because it is used as a school manual for a subject called Lviv Studies. The book’s author is Oleksandr Shyshka, director of the research library at Lviv Polytechnic National University. Before his current posting, he worked for 25 years at this university’s Radio Design Department, which means that he has a very wide circle of interests in both the humanities and the sciences. This may explain why his book on Lviv is so interesting and readable: you can believe every word because it was written by an academic, who relied on documents and did not lean toward any political force. What guided him was his love for Lviv.
“Mr. Shyshka, you live right in downtown Lviv and your windows face the Arsenal.”
“The fact that I had to pass Marketplace Square every day also had an impact on me. Can you imagine: on your right is High Castle and on the left is Freedom Avenue and to reach it you walk down ancient narrow streets, striding through history.”
“Oscar Wilde once said ‘The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.’ Today many historians say that Lviv is more than 750 years old.”
“We are really celebrating the so-called 750th anniversary of Lviv, although it would be more correct to say the ‘750th anniversary of the first recorded mention of Lviv.’ The Galician-Volhynian Chronicle says that Kholm (now a city in Poland) was burning and you could see this fire as far away as near Belzky Fields (now the Lviv neighborhood Znesinnia). Since the blaze could be seen from Lviv, this means the city already existed as a town. Unfortunately, there is no other concrete evidence.
“At the time, Prince Danylo of Halych or, as some say, King Danylo, was building a number of fortified towns in the Galician-Volhynian Principality, which was the western frontier of Kyivan Rus’. Incidentally, he built Kholm and other towns, so historians believe that he also turned Lviv into a town. Still, there is ample evidence that people were living here long before that. In the 1990s, when the Golden Lion Hotel was being built, a 5th-century settlement was uncovered. If the results of those excavations are anything to go by, we could celebrate the 1,500th anniversary of Lviv.
“The Galician-Volhynian Chronicle does not mention any date. The year 1256 was suggested by way of comparison, i.e., taking into account events that are precisely dated in other chronicles. It was the well-known Ukrainian historian Professor Krypiakevych and his follower Biletsky who came to this conclusion in 1956.
“But other historians claim otherwise. For example, Leonid Makhnovets recently published a new translation of the Galician-Volhynian Chronicle, in which he gives the year 1257. The Poles say it is 1259, and researchers of ancient chronicles even say 1270. Let me explain about the year 1270. In the vicinity of the present-day Old Market Square, all the way to the Pidzamche railway station, was the city of Danylo, which had the largest number of Orthodox churches; they exist to this day. To tell the truth, a dozen of them were destroyed - some from old age and others as a result of the policy of the Austrian government, which was carrying out a church reform and trying to Germanize Lviv as much as possible.
“The second town, according to historians and excavations, was populated in 1270 - this time it was the city of Prince Lev (Lion). He moved the boundary further south and founded what we call the medieval part of Lviv, around Market Square. And, since it was the city center in the 16th-17th centuries, it was commonly believed (especially by Polish chronicle researchers) that Prince Lev laid the city’s foundations in 1270. Polish researchers later claimed that the new territory was laid by Casimir (Kazimierz) the Great in 1340, although it had already existed for about 70 years.
“The Poles came here because the last Galician prince, Yurii-Boleslaw II, was poisoned by boyars and the state was left without a ruler. Casimir took advantage of this and made a foray into Lviv in 1340. Despite this, the so-called Boyar Republic headed by Dmytro Diadko existed for another nine years. Then there were all kinds of peripeteia, and in 1386 Queen Jadwiga of Poland finally made Lviv part of the Polish Kingdom as the city of the so-called Lviv Land, i.e., the metropolitan city of this region.”
“Tourism is now giving an impetus to Lviv’s development. What was it in the Middle Ages - trade?”
“There were several periods of untrammeled growth. The first one began in 1386 and ended when the Turks seized Constantinople. At that time Lviv was very affluent because it was located at the intersection of trade routes and maintained close commercial ties with the Middle East. Then these lucrative ties were cut and Lviv went into decline. To crown it all, in 1527 a raging fire gutted almost everything except for a few buildings and fortifications. Lviv’s second burgeoning began later, in the 17th century. Many foreigners, particularly Italians, arrived. (The original Lviv was Germanized.) Their advent helped revitalize trade with Western Europe and reestablish links with the Orient.
“Bohdan Khmelnytsky’s wars undermined Lviv’s progress, although he failed to capture the city. After all, he never set himself this goal, but the area was destroyed. After the partition of Poland, the Germanization of Lviv began again. In fact, the new revival was launched when the Austrian government passed a law on the so- called Dual Empire, i.e., the unification of Austria and Hungary. Galicia was granted certain privileges, for example, a Sejm, and Lviv became a full-fledged city authorized to pass its own local government resolutions. Actually, the year 1860 saw a new revival of the city, which coincided with the Industrial Revolution. The Lviv-based trade and industrial fair was known throughout Europe.”
“People of various nationalities made a contribution to the city’s crown of glory. Whom would you name?”
“The first people were, naturally, Danylo of Halych and his son Lev as founders of the city. If one speaks of the Polish kings in later times, it was Jan III Sobieski who did his utmost for Lviv. Among the interesting personalities of Polish culture was Burgomaster Kampian, who personally funded the construction of the City Hall tower. He made a sizable contribution, although he also spent municipal funds. I must mention the Lviv chancellor, subsequently burgomaster, Bartolomeusz Zimorowicz, who left us a well-documented chronicle of Lviv. Among Ukrainians, we have the brothers Rohatynets, who founded the Stauropegion Brotherhood. One of the brotherhood’s members, Kostiantyn Korniakt, also built a tower at his own expense, which became part of the Assumption Church ensemble.
“The Austrian period also boasts some personalities that are interesting from the intellectual angle, for instance, the scholar and Basilian monk Kompanewicz, who excelled in historical studies. In 1844 the historian Denys Zubrytsky published an unsurpassed work on the history of Lviv, which comprises chronicles and carefully documented materials. He recorded various facts that he found in the books of the municipal courts and magistracy. As a result, we have a detailed description of every year in the period from 1340 to 1772.
“There were many political personalities in the second half of the 19th century. I must name some writers, such as the members of the Ruska Triitsia, the Ruthenian Triad, who in fact introduced the standard Ukrainian language in Galicia, as well as Ivan Franko and a pleiad of other political and public figures, who were then working in Lviv. Some time later, a group of Ukrainian politicians headed by Kost Levytsky and Yevhen Petrushevych came to the fore. One should also note the military men, who laid the foundations of the Ukrainian Sich Riflemen (Sichovi Striltsi) and Kyrylo Tryliovsky, who organized a network of Sich physical-education associations that later made it possible to form the first legion of the Sichovi Striltsi. This was in fact the embryo of the first Ukrainian regular military unit.”
“We do not know much about the technological discoveries made by Lviv residents.”
“Among the discoveries of worldwide importance one must recall the famous oil lamp invented by Ivan Zeh and Ihnatii Lukashevych at Mykolasz’s pharmacy. Intensive research in microbiology was conducted at Professor Weigl’s institute, where an anti-typhus serum was developed. Under the German occupation, the institute continued to function and a number of world-famous scientists, such as Stefan Banach, who were left without means of subsistence, were in dire straits. The serum was made out of the blood that the lice sucked. Whenever Banach would come to the institute, he was given some lice in a little box, and they sucked his blood. Thus, the universally acclaimed mathematician, author of the theory of normed linear spaces (Banach spaces), was able to get ration tickets. This even helped some researchers evade deportation to Germany.
“Among the scholars of Polish background living in Lviv was Eugeniusz Romer, who founded a cartographic institute and helped establish the Atlas book publishing company.”
“Lviv lived through a lot of tragedies. One of them - by far the biggest according to some - was the shooting of Lviv intellectuals by the Nazis.”
“It is difficult to say that this was the tragedy of an entire city: it was the tragedy of individual families, an intellectual loss. About 40 people were shot, among them doctors and liberal arts scholars - undoubtedly, well-known people who were able to rally young people to their side. I think the Holocaust is Lviv’s greatest tragedy, because a third of Lviv’s prewar population was wiped out in a two-year period. The Jews were driven into the Lviv ghetto; they were exterminated there as well as in other camps. Then the ghetto was burned down. With a few exceptions, about 100,000 Jews who were living in Lviv were killed. Incidentally, Poles accounted for about 60 percent of the city’s prewar population, Jews about 30 percent, and Ukrainians, not more than 15 percent. These figures varied in different years.”
“Ukrainians say there is a special Galician mentality. What does this mean?”
“It can be explained by a number of phenomena. For example, boisterous merrymaking and extravaganzas were banned in Lviv in the early 17th century. In fact there was a decree on modesty. The different social strata were supposed to live in harmony. Otherwise, one could drink away an entire estate. So there were certain restrictions.
“But, seriously, there really is a Lviv phenomenon. Its roots are quite tangled. Lviv was under foreign influence from 1340 onward. Poland, Austria, and other governments imposed their policies, but the Ukrainian element remained intact. In other words, while assimilation, if only in the field of language, took place comparatively easily in eastern Ukraine, it failed, for some unknown reasons, to get off the ground here. The Polish royal government was not exactly enthusiastic about Ukraine, there was not much democracy here, the Ukrainians and Jews were in fact driven into a small ghetto. Look at former Jewish Street, now named after Ivan Fedorov, and Old Jewish Street. Ukrainians lived in between the Marketplace and the Wallachian Church, on Ruthenian Street.
“In other words, these two nations were in the same situation in terms of area and number of houses. All the rest belonged to others: Poles, Germans, Italians, Scots, etc. It was an international community of sorts. Yet Ukrainians managed to preserve their traditions and religion. Even when they had to accept a church union with Rome under the relentless economic pressure of the Polish government, they still closely guarded their calendar, rites, and the language of the liturgy, thus fully disengaging themselves from the Roman Catholics. This resoluteness of spirit allowed a small but Ukrainian Lviv to exist.
“In the revolutionary period, eastern Ukraine was rife with socialist elements, while there was very little socialism here. The Communist Party of Galicia, later of Western Ukraine, was not very strong and did not have widespread support. Conversely, the national liberation movement, the Western Ukrainian National Republic (ZUNR), and the Ukrainian Galician Army (UHA) were the local people’s own flesh and blood. Later, in the interwar period, after the Western Ukrainian National Republic had been suppressed, the surviving Ukrainian Sich Riflemen formed the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. Naturally, the Poles persecuted them, there were trials, and almost all the leaders were behind bars, but there was no terrible extermination like in the east.
“In spite of the repressive regime that was imposed by panska Polska (noble Poland), to quote a Soviet cliche, the atmosphere was not so stifling. This helped preserve the national cadres that later participated in the new struggle as part of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), etc. In the Soviet era there were also persecutions, but there was no terrible mass-scale departure of the people from their traditions. Everyone celebrated Christmas and Easter. There was ample room for dissidence here. Ukrainian was always the language of instruction at Ivan Franko University. The Ukrainian spirit was always alive and well, enabling many people to breathe as easily as they could.”
“Does your heart bleed when you hear it said today that Lviv is a provincial city?”
“Where there is a capital, there must be provinces. My heart really bleeds when I see a terribly neglected Lviv. I am pained by Lviv’s cobblestone roads, which are being ruined because nobody is repairing them, not because they’ve received a new covering. Something is rusting away, something has gone off, and then garbage collectors come and take all of it away. I cannot say that a lot of the city was renovated on the eve of the city’s jubilee, except perhaps Market Square. But even here things are not so simple. Some people cry, ‘They have cemented our historic past!’ Excuse me, but is Market Square really our historical past? It was just a place for trading. Yes, they have dug up some old cobblestone. So what? You can’t banish an old town from contemporary life and turn it into a museum. This isn’t done anywhere. The present and the past must go hand in hand. There is more politicking than common sense here. As for the way money is being made, paid, and distributed in this case, the re-constructors are not the one who should be blamed. The problem is the wrong mechanisms that the government should eradicate.”
