“If you stand upon the hill that rises above the city of Lvov and watch as the evening sun sets on the roofs, you might easily believe for a moment that you are somewhere else. Before you is an Italianate jumble of terra-cotta roofs, interrupted by the occasional thicket of trees or the naked dome of a church. Rising from the layers of mist, the towers and spires etched in the evening light proclaim the city’s heart to be in western Europe. It might be Florence.
Down below, districts of narrow cobbled lanes curve and twist around the footings of medieval churches. Buildings lean out from their foundations, frowning over the pavements and the incessant clatter of pedestrians on the cobbles. Suddenly these precious little windings turn and spill into wide cosmopolitan boulevards. A walk down Teodor Square, through the municipal gardens toward the opera house, evokes images of Paris or Berlin. The red-and-white trams jangling down the streets conjure an image of Vienna. The town hall, a stark piece of nineteenth-century utilitarianism, stands in the center of a large piazza, embraced by a girdle of market vendors and statues of classical Rome.
Given its physical bearing, this curious mixture of Mediterranean and Germanic, romantic and classical, Lvov is something of an anomaly today, standing as it does on the western fringes of the Soviet empire. For most of its history it was a Polish city, nestled in an area largely populated by Ukrainian peasants.
It was a city of Poles, Jews, Ukrainians, the eastern outpost of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and for hundreds of years it had been a center of Western culture and commerce on the edge of the Russian steppes. In those days, its official name was Lemberg; only the Ukrainians called it Lvov [sic], and its Polish name from its earlier history was Lwow. Today, the Poles are an aging minority, the Jews have all but disappeared, and the city is dominated by Russians and Ukrainians.
By evening time, when the narrow streets have been cooled in long shadows, the market vendors have folded up their stalls, have swept their rubbish, and are gone; the sound of running water can be heard cleansing the streets of debris. In the empty piazza, when the tram cars are silent, again the sound of water can be heard trickling from the fountains at either end -- Diana amid the flowers, Neptune with his trident. The sounds seem to drift up toward the hill that rises behind the square and eventually towers over the city.
Standing upon that hill, called Wysoki Zamek -- High Castle -- and gazing across the city... you can see the street lights begin to wink in the evening haze; you can almost feel the heart of the city resting. The sounds will soften to the gentle wind disturbing the trees as the last of the tram cars clatter up the boulevards. And you can hear, way off in the distance, the whistle of trains echoing long into the night.”
(From In the Sewers of Lvov, by Robert Marshall (Scribners, New York, 1991).)
