Lviv was founded around 1256 and has been Ruthenian, Polish, Habsburg, briefly Ukrainian, Polish again, Soviet and Ukrainian. Its old town survived the Second World War largely intact, unlike almost every other city in the region, and is a UNESCO World Heritage site.
Rynok Square
The Market Square is 142 by 129 m with the town hall and its 65 m tower at the centre, surrounded by 44 townhouses, each once belonging to a different merchant family and each with a different facade. The Black House and the Italian Courtyard of the Kornyakt Palace are the most striking. Four fountains at the corners carry Neptune, Diana, Adonis and Amphitrite.
Churches
Lviv is a museum of confessions in one square kilometre: the Armenian Cathedral from 1363 with its frescoes and courtyard, the Dominican church with a rococo dome, the Latin cathedral, the Boim Chapel with its extraordinarily dense carving, and the Greek Catholic St George Cathedral. The Chapel of the Boim family alone repays half an hour.
Lychakiv
The cemetery, laid out in 1786, is one of the great necropolises of central Europe, with 300,000 burials on wooded slopes: Polish, Ukrainian, Armenian and Austrian, sculpture from neoclassical to art nouveau. Since 2022 it has also received the war dead, and that part of the cemetery is not a sight but a place to pass quietly.
Coffee and food
Lviv takes coffee seriously and has done since the Austrian period; the city has a coffee mine, a chocolate factory and enough themed restaurants to be a genre of its own. Beyond the gimmicks, the Halytska kitchen serves proper Galician food, and the Vernissage market sells crafts and books.
The view
High Castle hill, 413 m, is a twenty-minute climb from the centre and gives the whole city, its roofs, domes and the plain beyond. It is where people go at sunset.
Now
Lviv is 70 km from the Polish border and has been the country logistics and medical hub since 2022, taking in hundreds of thousands of displaced people. It has been struck by missiles several times. Air raid alerts happen and are taken seriously; when the siren sounds, follow people into a shelter or a metro-style underpass. Cafes and museums operate normally between alerts.
The names
Lviv, Lwów, Lemberg, Lvov and Leopolis are the same place in different centuries. The city was named for Lev, son of the Ruthenian king Danylo who founded it, and every subsequent ruler kept the lion. It appears on the coat of arms, on manhole covers and in about four hundred sculptures around the old town, which local guides will happily count for you.