Lviv, City of Underground Surprises

We took the next morning easy after the packed Independence Day we had just had. Yotam left to the airport in the morning, and Oleksii and Bilal got coffee as I got my hair cut for literally an hour at one of the nicest hair salons I’ve ever seen. We had lunch at a Georgian restaurant and took a cab to the central station for our train to Lviv. Kyiv had been an incredibly positive surprise and had rightfully earned a spot among my top 10 favorite cities after this visit. The city had fantastic culture, history, and nightlife, a unique mix of Soviet, Russian, and Central European influences, low prices, glorious summer weather, and we had not had a single mediocre meal in 4 days.

The experience of riding a Ukrainian train was virtually identical to riding a Russian or Georgian one, reminding me again how incredibly pervasive the Soviet authorities were in shaping the vast and diverse territory they controlled. We had three seats in a compartment of six we shared with two others for the six-hour ride west. The scenery was incredibly uniform - ripe yellow fields of black soil and thick pine forests, with a single major hill towards the end - but it got grayer and foggier as we rode west until the fields almost looked like they were covered in a layer of frost. We arrived at Lviv’s beautifully European train station and met Olexii’s girlfriend Vlada and her friend Vika, who lived in a suburb of Lviv. The sun hadn’t yet set but was almost cold outside - 14˚ under a heavy gray sky.

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A Night for the Ages

We checked into a hotel and headed out to the city center, where Vlada said she had some “surprises” for us. The first stop was Gas Lamp, named after the product that was invented in the unassuming building by two Polish pharmacists in 1853. I suppose necessity bred ingenuity in their case, because even in August the nighttime temperature in Lviv was 12˚ C (54˚ F). Today, Gas Lamp houses a bar designed with medieval witch aesthetic with a gift shop several times its size. The bar only serves nalivka, fruit tinctures which are essentially 40-proof fermented fruit compotes, but their names offer no hints to their flavors. Vlada recommended разпусти (“debauchery”), which was made of some kind of dark fruit and was pretty good.

We drank several potions in preparation of the next stop on our alternative pub crawl. We walked into a shop full of whips and handcuffs and were escorted into a private room in the basement dimly lit in red. What happened in this bar is too risqué to describe in detail in this blog, but every drink invited a visit from an enthusiastic dominatrix and the wait staff all carried whips they were all too happy to use. We left dazed, drunk, and covered in wax and bruises after one of the most intense and unexpected evenings in memory. I had expected this in Odessa, but not in Lviv which was marketed as an idyllic Austro-Hungarian town. We ended the evening in a hookah bar (of course), where we rewatched the entire Independence Day parade and I dozed off for a good hour.

The gloves are just for the food

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Imperial Scars and Partisan Hideouts

On our way back to the center the next morning, we passed a stone monument with the national symbols of Ukraine and Poland, as well as a Jewish star. This was a memorial to the victims of political repression in Western Ukraine, which had been a Soviet occupation zone under the terms of the Ribentropp-Molotov Agreement and fell to a combined German-Soviet invasion in September 1939. From then until the German invasion of the Soviet Union in summer 1941, the NKVD murdered 49,867 prisoners and exiled a stunning 1,738,256 people to Siberia, most of them Ukrainian and Polish nationalists and Jews. This fact would help explain some of the attitudes towards Russia we would come to experience in Lviv.

Lviv was not big on subtlety, as we would soon find out

Indeed, by this point I had learned to differentiate Russian and Ukrainian enough to tell that there were essentially no signs in Russian anywhere in the city, with the exception of tour providers advertising экскурсии (excursions), the choice pastime of Russians abroad. This was a stark contrast from Odessa, where Russian was essentially a lingua franca, and even Kyiv had some Russian signs. The entrance to the old town was marked by the splendid opera house, a Neo-Baroque structure that would have fit in in Vienna, Graz, or Budapest and made it clear we were within the borders of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. As if that wasn’t enough occupying powers, the building opposite had a Polish inscription marking it as the Galician Savings Bank, a legacy of the Polish control of the city from 1918-1939. The building’s facade had a small near-copy of the Statue of Liberty, which apparently symbolized savings and Oleksii claimed was 5 years older than the one on Ellis Island.

Oleksii said he had a special place to take us for coffee, and led us past a normal-looking café to a staircase heading below ground. We found ourselves in a mineshaft, where we were handed helmets and escorted through a “coffee mine” (do these people know where their produce comes from?) to a small underground café. It was not yet noon, but the waiter offered us rum in our coffee as he served us slices of sirnik, a cheesecake-like pastry with raisins. Before we could dig in, though, he whipped out a flamethrower and lit up the entire table in front of us, leaving glazed coffees, two confused tourists, and two amused Ukrainians.

We left the “mine” and passed a crumbling building wall, which had a sign marking it as an old synagogue torched by the Nazis in 1942. Across the street was the city’s old armory, which had a very extensive collection of medieval weapons punctuated by huge portraits of Polish and Ukrainian noblemen battling Tatar and Mongol forces. It was now time for lunch, and Oleksii had another surprise in store for us. We knocked on a nondescript door in an apartment building, and were greeted by a mountain of a man carrying an assault rifle who asked us what the password was. By this point, it was hardly a surprise that the correct answer was Слава Україні! The man poured us all shots of some fruit liqueur and pulled some lever to allow the bookcase behind him to swing open, revealing a hidden staircase in the wall. Since I couldn’t take a picture of the man, I’ll attach one from the restaurant’s website, along with the preamble of the menu:

The menu is a little lower! But let me introduce myself first!

My name is Mykola.

My pseudonym is Nagan. I am the commander of Kryjivka.

For patriots - Glory to Ukraine! Muscovites (moskals) - feel out, you asshole!

The struggle continues!

The cellar had a series of halls of the type one would find in a pub, but the walls were all lined with photos of Ukrainian partisans during WWII and militias in Donbass, along with rows of military medals and the occasional stash of old weapons. We passed a teenager letting out his anger on a punching bag and were seated at a table, where we entrusted Oleksii to order for us. We had a traditional meal of derunyy (potato latkes, but not as good as the ones we had had in Kyiv) and kulesha, the Ukrainian version of mămăligă, served with fried onions and salty cheese, washed down with kompot.

The food was fine, but we had come here for an experience. Midway through the meal, a man in partisan garb walked in, fired a blank into the air, and started waving around his pistol as he greeted other patrons with Слава Україні! He and another man with a WWII rifle spotted us, walked over, and asked Bilal and me if we were Muscovites. We replied that we weren’t, but he told us to stand up and walk towards a stone wall with our hands on our heads. Rifle searched us and prodded us with his rifle butt as Pistol pronounced us moskals (Russian agents) and threw us in a tiny jail cell, where we were to be interrogated through the bars. Pistol’s English was passable, but he kept trying to speak to us in Ukrainian. When he saw that wasn’t getting results, he asked us if we spoke Russian. Oleksii had warned me to forget all my Russian upon entry, but I immediately answered немного (a little) out of habit. This was very obviously not the right answer, and it earned me a pistol shot from a 9-inch distance that left my ears ringing while Bilal was accused of being a Tajik agent. Our ticket to freedom was to try and sing along to a patriotic song and recite the entire text that the soldiers on Independence Day had chanted, which we managed to do haltingly. Pistol was very impressed by our knowledge of the unofficial last line of the song, which had been omitted at the parade - Путин Хуйло, a soccer chant which roughly translates to “Putin is a dickhead”. This earned us shots of medovukha - a honey-based spirit

We emerged in a courtyard and found ourselves facing a WWII motorcycle with a sidecar armed with a submachine gun and a 20-foot high contraption straight out of Mad Max marked with UPA symbols - the nationalist Ukrainian Insurgent Army which fought the Soviets, the Germans, and Communist Poland. They were certainly a spicy bunch, with a record of ethnic cleansing of Poles in Western Ukraine and assisting the Nazis in locating and murdering Jews, but here, in so-called Banderstadt, named after nationalist leader Stepan Bandera, they were heroes. Oleksii took us to the roof of the building, where we found a rotating antiaircraft cannon and overcoats with a view of the old city. Finally, we got to each try our luck at flying a Yak-9 flight simulator, with the incredibly non-subtle objective of shooting down as many Russian planes over Crimea as possible.

Oleksii took us to a craft beer “theater” to sample local brews - the limited edition “Putin is a dickhead” was unfortunately sold out. We said goodbye to him and Vlada, as they were returning to their hometown, and set off to explore further away from the old town. Most of the buildings were classy and tasteful, but many of them were slowly decaying. We saw a massive statue of Ivan Franco, a polymath primarily known for his poetry who received a level of honor typically reserved for Lenin alone in these parts. The best part of this area was the small courtyards that apartment buildings were built around, often housing ancient Lada and Trabants which made the whole place feel like the 80s.

We reached Lonsky Prison, which had been used by the Poles, the Soviets, the Germans, and finally the Soviets again. It was a grim, depressing place, and it had a particularly dark history. As the Germans raced towards Lviv in June 1941, the NKVD executed 1,681 prisoners here rather than have them fall into German hands and forced local Jews to carry their bodies out for burial. The cells were full of evil-looking Soviet artifacts and dark anti-Soviet art, often with barbed wire lining the ceiling. The effect was complete with a visit to the 5-story tall monument to Stepan Bandera a short walk away, easily the largest in town.

Nearby was St. George’s Cathedral, which from the outside looked like a typical rococo Catholic cathedral found throughout Central Europe. The interior also looked suspiciously Catholic, built as a dark cavernous hall with pews, high stained glass windows, and an organ on the second floor. The intricate flags bearing saints’ visages and gold statues, however, indicated that it was something else, which turned out to be Greek Catholic. I had no idea such a denomination existed, but Lviv is actually one of its main centers and we would see other Greek Catholic churches before we left.

Our walk back to the hotel took us past an imposing black memorial to the West Ukrainian National Republic, a democratic state that briefly controlled this region from November 1918 to June 1919, when it fell to Polish control. A final bit of history appeared in the form of a small supermarket with various products listed in Yiddish and Polish on its exterior wall, a relic from a bygone era.

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One Final Cellar

The weather the next morning was properly autumnal, gray and cool with the threat of rain. We walked up Lviv High Castle, the highest point in the city, which looked even more autumnal with leaves already changing colors. We took a shortcut and had to do some aerobics to hop over trees knocked over by a storm, but we made it to the top, which had a nice view over the city in which the ugly Soviet parts which surrounded the center were finally visible. The hill also bore a monument to the Union of Lublin, which formed the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1569, yet another piece of Lviv’s colorful history.

We headed down the hill and had coffee at a very Austrian café in the old town, serving at least two dozen types of pastries of which we sampled the apple strudel and пташине молоко (pigeon’s milk cake, an Eastern European specialty). We then visited the Bernadine Church, an incredibly opulent structure with a spectacular Roman fresco covering the ceiling. This church, too, walked a fine line between Eastern and Western churches, with the cavernous design, massive organ, and high stained glass windows of the former, and near absence of pews, golden statues and inner sanctum, and embroidered saint flags of the latter.

We had received a recommendation to visit the Pharmacy Museum, an intact apothecary from the 19th century which operates as a pharmacy to this day. Next door is an underground restaurant located in and designed like a medieval tavern, so you get the drift of local entrepreneurs. The pharmacist led us to an unmarked door behind the counter, which opened to reveal a maze of rooms lined with ancient pharmaceutical equipment, with explanations unfortunately only in Ukrainian. Since this was Lviv, we eventually ended up in a courtyard which led us to an underground cavern full of creepy monk mannequins and ancient medicine vials and jars. It was a very unusual tourist attraction, like so many others in this city.

The old town had so many more churches to explore, so we made our way to the Church of Transfiguration, again blending Catholicism and Orthodoxy with pulpits, haloed icons, and Greek inscriptions (as well as Ukrainian inscriptions made to look like Greek). My favorite piece of artwork there was a larger-than-life painting of Moses receiving the tablets, the only person depicted without a halo around his head. The final church was the city’s Armenian cathedral, an incredibly dark space with inscriptions that were strangely in Polish. The artwork there was unique, to say the least, including a painting of saints carrying a dead body to burial with the help of some friendly ghosts.

Back on the street, it had started to rain, but that didn’t seem to deter the usual crowd at Piana Vyshnia - and the original branch to boot. We wanted one final unique Lviv experience before we left, and there was a perfect restaurant to fit the bill.

Above the partisan pub from the previous day was another nondescript door marked only by a Masonic sign bearing the inscription “The Most Expensive Galician Restaurant”. We knocked and were led into a tiny apartment straight out of the 1970s by an old man in pyjamas who was watching Ukrainian TV on a laptop-sized screen. He offered us some of the potatoes he was cooking and let us feed his rabbit, until I told him my grandfather was Galician and asked about the restaurant. He nodded and opened a small side door, behind which was a uniquely bizarre restaurant with walls covered in Masonic symbols and shady-looking puzzles, as well as portraits of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. The prices on the menu were exorbitant, but we knew that there was a catch. We had a very fancy meal of salmon tartare, duck breast with polenta, and a local pastry for dessert, served at a little table overlooking the market square. It was a perfect final meal for the trip, but the check was over 12,000 UAH ($446) for the two of us. Bilal made some noise about being a poor student and asked for a 90% discount, and the waiter returned with a new check on which a zero had been knocked off of everything.

It was the perfect way to end a visit to a city that had been full of surprises, where seemingly every building contained more than meets the eye, where the flame of patriotism burned brighter than anywhere else, and where history could be peeled back like the layers of the fabulous cakes the city's cafés served. After exactly a month on the road, it was time to head back to Yale.