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Published: April 15th 2009
Pitching up at the apartment in Lviv - which I had rented for Ana and me to spend three days in over New Year - gave me an improbable sense of déjà vu. As we entered the cosy flat on
vulytsya Fedorova I felt as though I was not stepping into the home of a rotund lady called Marianna, but of my imagined thirty-five year old self. It was clean, light, and decorated in a comfortable style that, subconsciously, I had aspired to wrapping myself in ever since being punched and kicked out of a Stalin-era ghetto the year before.
My lazy Ukrainian and fondness for big cities would never let me settle in the west of Ukraine, but when finding a home becomes more of a priority than finding
adventure and a good story, I hope it will be in a place like this.
It wasn’t perfect: a rummage around the place brought out the idiosyncrasies that not even the plushest Ukrainian pad is complete without. There was no hot water when we arrived after 13 hours in a stuffy train carriage, so I washed for the first time behind the sliding doors of the gorgeous shower pod by pouring water from
a long-since-boiled kettle over my head from a tin saucepan. As I dried myself off and took the saucepan back to the kitchen I realised that it had only been half-clean: I had stepped into the bathroom smelling of tea and blankets and emerged reeking of mackerel.
The apartment was a warm collection of contradictions: glorious landscape paintings of Lvivska
oblast’ hang from the walls in cheap frames; the cupboards are stocked with run-of-the-mill tea and expensive mugs; a humble grey television set is pointed at a luxurious black leather sofa.
The rest of the building had no such identity crisis. Its entrance - a chipped ceramic tile floor, dusty blue letterboxes, an echoey wooden staircase - is blissfully rustic. Its courtyard is guarded by chilled-out pigeons.
On the second-to-last leg of my sabbatical from Kyiv’s mood swings, it was the rustic side of Lviv that I wanted to capture and enjoy. Colleagues had mentioned its tasty food and bright buildings, as well as the European atmosphere that hints at its proximity to Poland. The town is almost sacred: Lviv, babushka’s
blinchiki and Andriy Shevchenko are three things that Ukrainians dare not criticise.
We had arrived
on a cold, beautiful winter’s day. A sprinkling of snow sat on top of the town’s streets, and a watery sun hung in the sky. The temperature was ten degrees the right side of zero; the air pinched our cheeks and tickled our lungs. At first glance, the town seems more historically significant than a place to busy oneself in the present day. We leafed through the pamphlet of Lviv events and listings on our coffee table and agreed that there was nothing to do, a state of affairs that lent itself perfectly to aimlessly dashing from café to café, warming our toes, filling our stomachs, and guiltlessly emptying our heads of all thoughts of looking for work and accommodation in Kyiv that would stalk us on our return.
In Ukrainian it is Lviv, a name that, for me at least, conjures up stories of nationalist Stepan Bandera and his fight in the 20th Century to kill off Russian culture in the region. The Russian version is Lvov, a word that reminds that it was once - despite Bandera and many others’ best efforts - one of the westernmost tips of the Soviet Union. The town played a
fascinating role in the Second World War.
It is Lwow to the Poles and Lemberg to the Austrians; every nation that has ever wanted Lviv for its Empire has left a name behind.
Nowadays the place feels European, with none of Kyiv’s big city brusqueness and Communist housing. Street names tip a wink to kindred spirits further west:
vulytsya Krakivska,
vulytsya Serbska - although our speaking Russian was never met with hostility. In fact Lvivites seemed happy to indulge us and to practice their own Russian, taxi drivers and shopkeepers making grammatical mistakes that teachers from St. Petersburg used to rap my knuckles over.
The people are different from their brothers in Kyiv, calmer, with none of their tiring brashness or passive aggressiveness. Ana said that they even look different. I only spoke Ukrainian once - an unimpressive stab at ordering a plate of pasta that drew from the waitress a sympathetic smile.
The atmosphere of Lviv is almost exactly how I imagined it would have been in the provincial early Soviet Union, before the hysteria began: ladies in fur coats gossip in the queue for bread or stamps; couples smooch and drink coffee together; shops are sparsely stocked with homemade goods; a rickety
tram totters from square to square on its way to the train station. Having apparently stepped ten years forward in time earlier in the day, I had moved 90 years back after lunch.
One square is home to a large street market, doing hearty business even in the freezing cold. On all four sides there are buildings with pretty baroque facades. A Church sits in one corner, its golden dome wrapped in snow. Stalls sell woodcrafts, fur
valenki boots and paintings. The scene, I thought, would make a fine painting itself.
In a park a short walk from the centre, children push home-made sleds up a hill and then wizz down the snowy slope at an impressive speed. One child misses my shinbone by inches: my eyes almost pop out of my head in shock and I puff my cheeks in relief as I exhale, sending a cloud of frozen breath into the air.
The next day was New Year’s Eve, and the first time during our stay in Lviv that being underwhelmed had any negative impact on our mood. That night we left
vulytsya Fedorova at 11.30 and slipped along the black ice to the square
in front of the Opera House, where a couple of thousand people had already assembled. Most people had a drink in one hand and a sparkler in the other.
The salute at midnight - far from the party we had got used to the last two New Years in Kyiv, where twenty minutes of fireworks had set the sky above Independence Square on fire - was over in seconds, a limp display of yellow flashes and chunky bangs. It felt more like being in the middle of a football riot than a celebration. Afterwards we roamed the streets, unsatisfied, until the cold once again got the better of us and we rushed home. By one o’clock we were in our apartment again, sitting on the black sofa with a bottle of vodka, watching Valeriy Meladze videos on TV. It may not have been a spectacular New Year, but it was a very Ukrainian one.
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You can find more of my writing and photography on my journal,
Short stories and photographs from across Europe.
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the soul cultivator
Claire Hall
Back to basics...
Simplicity, what more do any of us really need. Loved this blog Jonathan, so reminded me of my Czech Republic era back in 93-95.