UkrEthnoExp. Part II

August 17–19, 2009

Lviv

For me, visiting Lviv was the main reason for the whole ethnographic expedition across Ukraine. I’d always wanted to come here and never quite managed to.

I was enticed by the photographs, links and interesting details people sent me.

And finally I’m here.

The common belief is that every visitor will like the city immediately and without reservation.

When you talk to people who’ve been here, they all unanimously start praising the mind-blowing Lviv restaurants: Kryjivka, where you need to say the password “Glory to Ukraine!” to enter; Masoch, where the waitresses can whip you; the Jewish restaurant At the Golden Rose, where you can haggle with the waiters over the cost of your meal. All of these establishments belong to one company, which in two years has achieved the incredible: getting people to visit the city and talk about it with delight.

Although if you omit the restaurants (which are mentioned here not because of their cuisine, but only because they’re impossible to ignore), there isn’t really anything particularly magical left. The interest towards Lviv turned out to have nothing to do with urban planning wonders.

The city itself is nice, of course, but only in its details. It’s somewhere just above Zagreb in my personal global ranking.

But there sure are lots of interesting details here.

Traces of a not-so-distant Polish—Austrian past.

No amount of Soviet or Independent Ukrainian paint can cover it up.

Independent Ukrainian paint manages to cover up only the Soviet past.

Pay telephone

A 1980s window alarm. The glass breaking would set it off.

Doorbells.

Beautiful old plaques indicating distances to utility manholes.

And here’s the manhole itself.

Old stairways with pre-revolutionary Villeroy tile and wooden steps. By the way, what we refer to as pre-revolutionary in Russia is called czarist in Ukraine.

Wooden payphone half-booths clumsily mimic the spirit of the city.

A branded Lviv trash can.

Intersections are lit by lamps hanging directly in the middle up above.

The rainwater downspouts, which issue directly into the sewer rather than onto the sidewalk, have special hatches for cleaning out debris (just like in Vilnius).

Ukraine has a road sign that we don’t have in Russia yet: “Traffic violations will be captured on camera.”

Old and new bus stop signs.

By the way, speaking of bus stops. Here are some people standing on a street. Standing deliberately and purposefully. But there’s no bus stop sign in sight. They’re locals: they know where the bus stops anyway.

Lviv road safety barriers are all painted black and white, alternating section by section.

Lviv is commonly believed to be the epicenter of anti-Russian propaganda. They say you’ll immediately get impaled on a pitchfork for speaking Russian here, and that moskali (the Ukrainian derogative term for Russians) are identified and deported when they try to enter city. This is complete nonsense. Almost everyone speaks Russian here, and there isn’t even a hint of nationalism.

All I managed to find was some timid marker graffiti in an alley.

Moskali, get out of Ukraine [Ukrainian]

Out on the street, it’s all very different.

Come on, take me [Russian]

Lviv Region

It’s beautiful out here in West Ukraine.

There are old castles.

One of them has a Templar stone. It has very dark negative energy; even one of the women from the village told me so. No one has been able to decipher what it says. Rumor has it that top cryptographers from the Security Service of Ukraine (the Ukrainian KGB) and even experts from NASA tried and failed.

But I was able to unravel the mystery of the dark stone. It says, “F..k..g s..t! M.....f....r.”

There’s a memorial to the mighty Slavic ancestors here.

And a memorial to Nazis—fighters of the Galician Division of the SS.

And a memorial to pelmeni dumplings.

Pelm ni Store

West Ukraine seems like something completely separate from the rest of the country. And in fact, it always was. That’s precisely why it’s so strange to see a Soviet truck in front of a Catholic church with Latin on its pediment.