Lviv, Ukraine

We left Kyiv for Lviv in Western Ukraine near the border with Poland. We took an old Soviet-era train, which is a great experience. The train just clanks metal on rails, chugging through bleak wintry mountains and steppes, no one saying a word, no one doing anything. You feel like you could be taking a train to the end of the world. The trip is twelve hours, too, so you feel like a lot of things by the time you arrive.

(Note how I'm writing in the second person, a seldom-used point of view made popular, however, by the very good Brat Pack urban New York writer, now grown up, Jay McInerney, who wrote Bright Lights, Big City, a quasi-autobiographical story about a writer in New York swallowed by the raw emotions of love and loss, and lots of Bolivian marching powder.)

But I digress. To Lviv...

We arrived in Lviv for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. Lviv is often held up by the Ukrainian independence crowd as “real” Ukraine. The Ukrainian language, rather than Russian, predominates there, and the city has long been a center of Ukrainian nationalism and independence movements. But its culture also reflects its long history as part of Poland and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and later the Habsburg Empire and Austrian Galicia.

This part of Europe divides cleanly in the imagination, even when the actual history is considerably messier. To the east lies the enormous historical pull of Russia; to the west, Poland and Central Europe. Poland is Western. Lviv is close to Poland. This is the key.

Anyway, it's a beautiful city, and it has one of the great coffee cultures of Europe. The local mythology reaches back to Jerzy Franciszek Kulczycki, or Yuriy Kulchytskyi, a seventeenth-century figure associated with the Battle of Vienna and with the early Viennese coffeehouse tradition. Legend has it that coffee beans abandoned by the Ottoman army ended up in his hands and helped launch Vienna's coffee culture. Lviv still claims him as one of its own, and the city has built an enormous amount of coffee lore around him. The historical details are disputed, but the legend is very real.

So, to Lviv. My first photo is, fittingly, a lampoon of Putin. Making fun of Putin and talking trash about Russia was common in Lviv, though much less common in Odesa when I was there. I was even scolded for speaking Russian by a waiter in Lviv. Unheard of in Odesa! Really, anywhere else in Ukraine I had been. Awesome.

Here we go...

Lviv city center from the roof of its tallest building.

Putin on a roll of toilet paper. The inscription reads “ПТН ПНХ,” Ukrainian shorthand for “Putin, go fuck yourself.” Lviv, Ukraine.

A bottle of beer featuring Donald Trump, labeled “President of the Divided States of America.” Political satire was everywhere in Lviv, often aimed at foreign leaders as much as Ukrainian politics. Like the Putin toilet paper above, this was sold partly as a joke and partly as commentary on the political moment.

Hi sweetheart. We had a great breakfast at a wonderful hotel in Lviv.

Breakfast in Lviv. I remember the breakfasts, in particular, were excellent. It was cold outside and I looked forward to setting down to a big spread, complete with coffee and tea.

Gidazepam. You could buy this over the counter in Ukraine, which struck me as pretty wild because it’s a benzodiazepine-class drug. I took them sometimes on the really long train rides, but was careful not to overdo it.

"Don't eat me." "Don't worry. I won't." Conversation I had with a dead fish in Lviv.

This guy is dapper. The statue looks good, too.

They were really into political beer in Lviv. Obama, Trump, Putin, everybody eventually ended up on a bottle.

Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, author of Venus in Furs, was born in Lemberg, now Lviv. So this bit of sexual philosophy was actually local color.

I wasn’t kidding about the political beer. Here is Donald Trump, life-size, holding a bottle. Lviv apparently decided geopolitics needed merchandising.

Dude you're gonna be sitting there for a long time, I'm afraid.

The Dominican Church in Lviv. This place was enormous and beautiful, one of those buildings that feels even bigger once you’re standing underneath it.

Lunch in Lviv. Hot soup, dark bread, and exactly the kind of food you want after walking around in the cold.

Anya outside one of Lviv’s beer museums. The sign simply says “Museum,” but the hops around it give away the subject.

This is not the train we took. This one seems to have more space.

If we were in Italy, the right hand would be poised for an expletive. But, not in Lviv.

We were in Lviv on December 25, Christmas Day on the Western calendar. At the time, much of Ukraine still celebrated Christmas on January 7 according to the old Julian calendar, but Lviv’s long Catholic and Central European history made December 25 much more visible here. That calendar divide has changed considerably since this trip.

At the time, much of Ukraine still celebrated Christmas on January 7. Since the Russian invasion, Ukraine has largely moved Christmas to December 25, part of a broader effort to separate Ukrainian religious and cultural life from Moscow.

Christmas Day!

Diana on Rynok Square, one of four mythological fountain statues at the corners of Lviv’s old market square. Even in winter, the whole center had this elaborate, almost theatrical beauty.

She had that "Sunday Mood" hat on everywhere. See that jacket? I bought it in Podgrica, Montenegro and left it in the Detroit international airport later that year.

Ivan Fedorov, one of the pioneers of printing in Eastern Europe. His monument stands near the Dominican Church, and the square around it became an open-air market for used and rare books.

Winter in central Lviv. Wet streets, old buildings, dirty snow, pigeons everywhere. Looking at this now brings the whole trip back. Lviv was magical, especially over Christmas, where it was generally subdued and a bit pensive.

Very Slavic. Hmmm. I'm James Bond. Your name is... Tatiana!

Christmas market in Lviv. It was Christmas, and I remember it this way.

TThe Lviv Opera House, opened in 1900. One of the grandest buildings in the city, and somehow even better in the winter gloom.