Personal Journeys: Lviv’s, and a Family’s, Stories in Architecture

Joseph Sywenkyj for The New York Times

A view of central Lviv.

"Here we have architecture, and what was inside perished," Ihor Zhuk said. "Only a skeleton of this creature remains, like shells of sea creatures that lived many, many years ago."

Connect With Us on Twitter

Follow @nytimestravel for tips, features and photography from all over the globe.

Joseph Sywenkyj for The New York Times

Akademika Bohomoltsia Street, a 10-minute walk from Rynok Square.

The Lviv-based architectural historian and I were sitting in this Ukrainian city at a cafe grafted onto a pink neo-Renaissance building with elaborate white trim and statues of nudes. Most of this architectural confection, which dates from 1901, is still occupied by the George Hotel, where luminaries like Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Ravel once stayed. During much of its 750-year history, Lviv had been one of Central Europe's most cosmopolitan centers, Mr. Zhuk said. But in the middle of the 20th century the polyglot culture that built this city was all but wiped out by war, mass murder and postwar ethnic cleansing.

Given that history, the survival of Lviv's architecture is remarkable. Nazis destroyed almost all the city's synagogues, and decades of neglect have left many of the remaining buildings with crumbling cornices and missing plaster. But otherwise much of the historic cityscape is now as it was in August 1939, on the eve of World War II, when my father, Adam Ulam, left to embark on one of the last boats out of Poland, never to return.

I had come to Lviv seeking family touchstones, but I was starting with a largely blank map because my father, a professor of Russian history, was silent about his own past. I was equipped with a family tree that I found after he died in 2000, and I had introductions to several local guides who specialize in helping descendants find traces of their families.

Today, Lviv is about 45 miles from the Polish border. But during my visit this June, I wandered streets that recalled the days when it straddled the fault line between Eastern and Western Europe. A short walk through the city's historic center would take me past buildings that reflect contributions of its Polish, Jewish, Ukrainian, Armenian and German communities, all of which had roots going back to the late Middle Ages. I saw churches from the many different denominations that shaped this city's skyline: a squat Armenian cathedral from the 14th century with a jumble of intersecting roofs; a huge 17th-century Baroque church built by the Jesuits and modeled on the Church of the Gesù in Rome; Ukrainian Orthodox three-dome churches.

Beyond the once walled medieval center, I encountered a different legacy, dating from the period when Lviv was Lemberg, one of the largest cities in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Here there were long avenues of Art Nouveau buildings, suburban neighborhoods with Arts and Crafts villas and even examples of early Modernist-style architecture.

World War II put an end to Lviv's exuberant architectural traditions, and today, grim Lego-like Soviet-style towers surround the city's large historic core. An estimated 90 percent of the city's pre-World War II population, which included one of the largest Jewish communities in Europe, was killed or expelled by Nazi and Soviet armies. In a little more than a decade, the city was transformed from a cosmopolitan center into a relative backwater with a new population consisting primarily of postwar Ukrainian immigrants resettled there by the Soviets.

At the lively outdoor cafes and beer gardens around Rynok Square, Lviv's historic center, where there was often a live band and swing dancers twirling around at sunset, I encountered various tourists on their own heritage tours: Ukrainians who view this city as a birthplace of Ukrainian nationalism and Poles nostalgic for the interwar period when Lviv was Lwow, one of the most populous cities in Poland.

The architecture on Rynok Square defies attempts by any one group to lay claim to the city's past. An imperial neo-Classical city hall built by the Habsburgs anchors a vast cobblestone plaza surrounded by a hodgepodge of Renaissance and Baroque-era palaces and town houses built for Polish noblemen and merchants from Armenia and Italy. With facades ranging from green stucco to blackened limestone, they seem to be vying for attention. Everywhere, though, there are sculptures and images of the lion, Lviv's medieval symbol.

Anda sedang membaca artikel tentang

Personal Journeys: Lviv’s, and a Family’s, Stories in Architecture

Dengan url

https://travelwisatawan.blogspot.com/2013/10/personal-journeys-lvivas-and-familyas.html

Anda boleh menyebar luaskannya atau mengcopy paste-nya

Personal Journeys: Lviv’s, and a Family’s, Stories in Architecture

namun jangan lupa untuk meletakkan link

Personal Journeys: Lviv’s, and a Family’s, Stories in Architecture

sebagai sumbernya