Marker plates, which indicate the location of hydrants or valves, can be found all over Lviv. The plates were attached to the facades of buildings to display information about the utility as well as to ensure that the hydrant or valve could be found even if the road was covered […]

At the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a new original art movement spread across Europe and the United States. It received various names: Tiffany (from the name L. C. Tiffany) in the United States; Art Nouveau and “fin de siècle” (literally “the end of the century”) in France; […]

The Eastern Fair The Eastern Fair (Targi Wschodnie in Polish) was a major trade fair in interwar Poland. It was established in 1921 in Lviv, after the end of the Polish-Soviet War, which redrew the Polish-Soviet border and incorporated Galicia into the Second Polish Republic. The aim of the trade […]

From Kray Regional Tourist Portal At the end of the eighteenth century, as a result of the Partitions of Poland, Galicia fell under Austrian rule. One of the results of this geopolitical shift was the program of settling the lands with German colonists. In this way the Austrian authorities hoped […]

By Chris Wilkinson “To know me, you must think of me in terms of what Austria was like in 1906, when I was born. Austria in those days was a huge monarchy of 56 million people – the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The monarchy seemed indestructible.”– Billy Wilder One of Hollywood’s greatest movie […]

A look at early twentieth-century life in Bila (Polish: Biała), a village bordering Ternopil in eastern Galicia. The description is from the autobiography of Katherine Rychly Pylitiuk, who was born in Bila in 1904, grew up there, and immigrated to the United States in 1922. This post is taken from […]

We owe the oldest photographs of Lviv to Józef Eder (1831-1903), the owner of one of the first photography studios in Lviv. His photographs, which have been digitized and today are widely available on the Internet, date to the middle of the nineteenth century. Starting in 1861, together with Bernhard […]

By Iwona Dakiniewicz Galicia—a region that came into being as a result of the First Partition of Poland in 1772—came under the rule of the Austro­-Hungarian monarchy. This new land, with an area of 78,496 sq. km., became the largest land in the Habsburg Kingdom, but at the same time presented […]

Lviv’s historical urban structures survived WWII largely unscathed, and so much of Lviv’s prewar cityscape is intact. Nonetheless, if we look through old photographs of the city, we come across unfamiliar places. This is not surprising as Lviv, like any city, underwent physical transformations throughout the centuries. In addition to […]

By Chris Wilkinson The cultural destruction wrought upon Eastern Europe by war and revolution is not well publicized in the west. Hundreds of thousands of books, manuscripts, maps and artifacts have been stolen or destroyed as a direct result of conflict. Consider for instance, the successive Soviet, Nazi and Soviet […]