Our cities’ and buildings’ physical spaces, urban and rural landscapes, hold secrets to how people used to live, hold traces of previous eras. Embodied in outdated signage, beautiful antique craftsman, and remnants of outdated infrastructures, these mementos of a bygone world serve as are our physical connections to the past.
The largest fair in the history of Lviv / Lwów / Lemberg, the General Regional Exhibition (Powszechna Wystawa Krajowa) was held in 1894, on the 100th year anniversary of the Kosciuszko Uprising. The aim of the exhibition was to promote Lviv as a modern metropolis and demonstrate Galicia’s economical and […]
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The Recovered Story of a Prewar Metalworks Owner Countless people contributed to the urban development of Lviv and left their enduring mark on the city. It is thanks to these architects, urban planners, engineers, entrepreneurs, craftsmen, construction workers, and factory workers that we have the beautiful architecture, cobblestone roads, infrastructure, […]
Location: 26-40 Piskova St., 22-38 Kharkivska St., 3-7 Ostrozkoho St.Built for: Vlasna Khata Ukrainian building cooperative Years of construction: 1927-1929Architect: Oleksandr PezhanskyiStyle: Modernism (functionalism) with elements of Art Deco After overcoming World War I and the financial crisis, housing developments (often called “colonies”) started to be built in Lviv for […]
Location: Area around Kotliarevskoho St. & north-east part of Chuprynky St.Years of construction: 1880s-beginning of 1900s Main architects & initiators: Julian Zachariewicz & Ivan LevynskyiConcept: Garden CityStyle: Villas – Late Historicism, Neo-Romanticism, Early Secession In the 1880s, two prominent Lviv architects Julian Zachariewicz and Ivan Levynskyi (Jan Lewiński) initiated the […]
By Chris Wilkinson The majority of churches in Lviv’s Old Town seem to have one thing in common, namely that their wooden predecessors were reduced to ashes by fire. They were then rebuilt in stone, a material that could withstand both the ravages of fire and time. On multiple occasions, […]
By Eugeniusz Misiło for Nasze Słowo In April 2019, the entire Christian world was shocked by the fire in Notre Dame — the Gothic cathedral in Paris. From everywhere came words of compassion and solidarity with France and the French. Including from Poland and Ukraine. The calculation of losses and […]
The Eastern Galician countryside — most of which today is located in western Ukraine — is dotted with abandoned Roman Catholic churches (kościoły) that today stand as reminders of the centuries-old Polish communities that once lived there. Before the war, Roman Catholic Poles made up 21% of the population of […]
In the part of Galicia that is today Ukraine, dating certain remnants of the past can be relatively easy due to the language of the inscription — anything in Polish dates from before WWII. On the other hand, in a city like Przemyśl where Polish was and still is the […]
It was in Przemyśl, a small Galician city situated today in Poland near the Ukrainian border, that I first discovered what a boot scraper was and where my love for these remnants of the past began. I had first seen these odd metal objects in Lviv, but hadn’t given them […]
Today a small city in eastern Poland, Przemyśl (Peremyshl in Ukrainian transliteration) was once one of the major cities in Galicia. Przemyśl’s population consisted of many nationalities, including Ukrainians, Poles, Jews, Germans, and Czechs. According to the Austrian census of 1830, the city was home to 7,538 people of whom […]
It is not uncommon in Przemyśl, Poland, to find two, three, or even four different street signs on one building—dating to different periods and regimes: the Austrian Empire, interwar Poland, Communist Poland, and modern Poland. This is because in Poland there was never a campaign to remove Polish inscriptions from […]
