Reality Bites

Carbonated Water Dispenser from Soviet Era

At first I couldn't quite grasp why Polish and Hungarian people call themeselves Central Europeans, rather than Eastern Europeans.  Now I understand; as soon as I boarded the overnight train from Budapest to Lviv, I had clearly crossed the Eastern threshold.  Suddenly, nobody spoke any English and any concept of customer service or courtesy was irritatingly lacking.  At the Ukrainian Border, the agents who boarded the train for passport control had a chuckle when they saw my American Passport.  My interpretation of his chuckle was, "why the hell would an American want to go to Ukraine?"  I started to wonder the same thing when, several hours later, I disembarked in Lviv and was smacked across the face with an arctic blast of post-Communist desolation.

In all fairness, I believe my experience to have been somewhat corrupted by the November weather.  The temperature hovered around freezing for most of my stay, with a ground-hugging fog that broke only momentarily...enough time to snap a few photos of the beautiful UNESCO-listed historic center.  Like Krakow, Lviv was spared the decimating German bombing of WWII.  I witnessed the architectural and Medieval city planning similarities between the two cities, owing mostly to the fact that both were part of the historic region of Galicia under the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  Due to its proximity to Poland, the Ukrainian language shares much of the same vocabulary and grammar, giving me a very slight language advantage when interaction with locals was necessary. That said, local interaction was limited as most people were shuffling as quickly as possible from origin to destination to minimize exposure to the elements, which included suffocating air pollution.

Lviv Theater of Opera and Ballet

The most humorous attempted exchange was at a cemetery located on the edge of the city.  I was tooling around looking for interesting Jewish tombstones when a woman approached me.  Although we both were skilled in other languages, none were in common.  Somehow, through a mixture of Polish and Dutch (me) and Ukrainian and German (her), I learned that she was cataloguing the cemetery residents and that she worked at an aviation museum near the airport.  She became supremely annoying after a while, asking me to accompany her to the depths of the cemetery because she was scared to go by herself.  This happened to be the coldest day of the three in Lviv, so by the time I was able to disengage, I was already chilled to the bone and had quite a walk ahead of me to get back to my apartment.  To my surprise, my puffy black jacket, hat, gloves, and scarf are not sufficient deterrents to the 100% humidity of the cold air here, which is different from the dry cold that I once knew in Alaska.

Apart from the Yanivsky Cemetery noted above, which was incidentally an assimilated cemetery (Jewish, Ukrainian Orthodox, etc), I also made it a point to visit historic places of interest of the former Jewish community who thrived in Lviv for about 500 years.  Lviv actually had a larger Jewish population than Krakow, but you wouldn't know that given the relative lack of evidence.  In fact, the apparent lack of recognition of Jewish contributions to the community and the remoteness of any memorial to said community was a painful realization.  The lowlight is the story of the Old Jewish Cemetery, which can be found here.  In a nutshell, the 500-year old cemetery was destroyed by the Nazis and has since been paved over and used as the city's largest outdoor marketplace.  Although Soviet and post-Soviet authorities recognize that the marketplace is built on top of more than 25,000 Jewish bodies, no progress has been made in restoring this site.

Holocaust Monument at Entrance to Former Jewish Ghetto

In Lviv, I felt depressed.  The buildings were muted and warn, just like the downward-turned faces of the city's inhabitants.  The feeling of desperation and desolation pervaded the city's parks, churches, and monuments to Ukrainian nationalists.  Soviet-era housing blocks were just a stone's throw away from the 14th century churches and restored Baroque facades of the historic center.  I could not find a soul nor a heart in this city of 1.5 million. 

One of the challenges I am facing during this phase of my travels is that I am barely able to keep up with all the new sights, sounds, and history that I am encountering in each new place.  By the time the revelations occur to me, it's onto the next city and a whole new bag of surprises.  This is the downside of lumping my checklist of must-sees all together in one big trip.  Hopefully over time I'll manage to sort through and make sense of what I've experienced in Central and Eastern Europe; I'm hoping that this brief diary will offset my less-than stellar short-term memory.  To maximize the benefit of this adventure, I must come away from this with some conclusions or self-awareness that will stay with me for years to come.