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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Louise Arner Boyd (1887-1972) was an American explorer of Greenland and the Arctic, who wrote extensively of her explorations, and in 1955 became the first woman to fly over the North Pole privately chartering a DC-4 and crew that included aviation pioneer Thor Solberg. In August 1934, after being elected as a […]

Interethnic marriages are common on territories where together with the indigenous population live representatives of other ethnic groups. Most often they are between ethnic groups that have close religious, linguistic, and cultural characteristics. “In interwar Galicia the largest number of such marriages was between Ukrainians and Poles, especially on the border of […]

The railway first came to Lviv (Lemberg) in 1861, connecting the city to Przemyśl as part of the connection from Krakow. In 1866 a railway was built connecting Lviv to Chernivtsi (Czernowitz). As a result, the capitals of two Austro-Hungarian crownlands Galicia and Bukovina were connected not only to each other, […]

One of the best well-preserved examples of prewar Lviv hand-painted signs is found on the façade of a lovely cafe called Sztuka. A cafe of the same name existed in Lviv during the Austrian era. Today’s cafe, though continuing the tradition of the original cafe which was founded in 1909, is located […]

An interesting feature of Lviv’s ghost signs is black and yellow or red and white painted stripes found on former storefronts. There are several opinions floating around as to what exact function they served, so I have yet to have a definitive answer. However, many working in Jewish heritage recently […]

I came across a lovely prewar photograph of the outside of a hat shop in Lviv. The hand-painted sign reads in Polish “Pracownia czapek – wykonuje po najtańszych cenach,” which means “Hats workshop – produced at the cheapest prices.” In addition to Polish, it includes a Yiddish translation as well […]

Old photos are windows to the past, to a forgotten world. I’m fortunate to have quite a few old family photos, which allow me to get a glimpse into the lives they led. I decided to share some of these photos with a correspondent from Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty who […]