At the Andrey Sheptytsky National Museum in Lviv, people were filling sandbags, chipping at a pile of building sand with shovels. “It was cold overnight and the sand froze,” explained Roman Zilinko, 43, director of exhibitions at the museum. I followed him into the marble atrium with its vaulted ceiling and classical-style columns.
“It used to be beautiful,” he said sadly, “but now it’s just a lot of garbage.” As we walked through the downstairs galleries, he gestured at picture hooks on the walls, empty display cases and plywood packing cases. Zilinko and his colleagues had spent the past two weeks packing up the exhibits. Galleries upstairs were locked, their doors sealed with wax and string.
The museum, which first opened its doors in 1905 when Lviv was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, is named after the influential archbishop who founded it. It houses an important collection of ecclesiastical art, as well as paintings by Ukrainian Impressionists.
Zilinko, like the rest of the staff, is still coming into work every day: protecting Lviv’s treasures is a big job. He is understandably tight-lipped about where the exhibits are being stored. “They are safe,” he said coyly, fiddling with his beard. “Well, safer than here.” He pointed downwards: “Underground.”
The museum’s collection spans the 12th to the 20th centuries, a period during which Lviv was part of the Mongol empire, Poland, the Austro-Hungarian empire, Imperial Russia, Poland again then, after the second world war, the Soviet Union. The city’s rich history is reflected in its architecture: Renaissance palaces mingle with baroque churches and neoclassical façades in ice-cream colours. The city has a strong intellectual tradition. Over the centuries it has been a hub for mathematicians, scientists and philosophers.
“Lviv was part of Europe – culturally, economically, spiritually – for hundreds of years”
“Lviv is on the edge, between European civilisation and that beast civilisation of Russia,” said Ilko Lemko, a historian who has written 12 books about the city. It’s always been a “city of refugees”, Lemko said when I met him in his apartment, in a typical Soviet block on a hill overlooking the city centre. “Armenians who fled from the Seljuk Turks in the 13th century, Jews after the fall of Byzantium.”
As a young man in Soviet-era Lviv, Lemko, now in his 70s, played guitar in a band and described himself as “dissident lite”. He remembers the first time he saw a public display of the blue and yellow Ukrainian flag, which the Communists suppressed. “It was in 1988, I was selling concert tickets on the street, and a girl was wearing it around her shoulders. My heart leapt out of my chest.”
Only recently has Lviv become a stronghold of Ukrainian identity. Before the second world war, the majority of the Lviv’s population was Polish, and just under a third was Jewish. Almost all the city’s Jews were murdered during the Nazi occupation, from 1941-44. When Lviv became part of the Soviet Union in 1945 (the Soviets had also briefly occupied the city from 1939-41), its Polish population was expelled. In the second half of the 20th century, many Ukrainians from the surrounding countryside migrated to Lviv, as did Russians displaced by the chaos of the war.
The city’s inhabitants believe its history makes it stand apart from the rest of the country. “Ukraine wants to be part of Europe,” said Lemko, “but Lviv was part of Europe – culturally, economically, spiritually – for hundreds of years. It was over the 50 years of Soviet empire that we lost this flavour of Europe.”
At the turn of the 20th century, the Scientific Library of the Ivan Franko National University of Lviv was the most modern library in the Austro-Hungarian empire. There were lifts and a card-catalogue system, which at the time were cutting-edge technology.
Vasyliy Kmet, 46, director of the library, studied at the university in the 1990s. At that point, he remembers, the library was still painted in the standard Soviet institutional colours: “Green panels, an orange stripe and yellow walls. I hated coming here.”
The grand, double-height reading room has been empty for two years now, since the beginning of the pandemic. Craning my neck, I admired the painted frieze, with its symbolic representations of medicine, law, theology and philosophy, the four faculties of the university when it was founded in the 18th century.
“For me a library is like an army”
There are 3.5m books and documents in the collection, including a 12th-century Italian manuscript of Cicero’s “De oratore”, 14th-century liturgical texts, medieval Torahs, 16th-century lute music and the diary of a Ukrainian officer during the first world war. “We have volumes in 147 different languages and dialects,” Kmet told me proudly. “Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, German, Hebrew – but also Chinese and Japanese.”
Although Lviv wasn’t badly bombed during the second world war, the library wasn’t entirely unscathed: Kmet showed me a photograph of the reading room after a Soviet shell blew off its roof in April 1944. The Nazis did more significant damage, looting hundreds of thousands of books. When the Soviets took over, more went missing, said Kmet, allegedly “borrowed by researchers”.
Many books were outlawed by the Communists: those in Ukrainian, those by “degenerate foreigners” (such as Jews or western Europeans), those deemed anti-Communist or anti-Russian, and those said to contain “aggressive idealism”. If someone asked a librarian for a banned book, it was noted on their record.
Some of the worst destruction, said Kmet, was caused not by the Nazis or the Communists, but by bad conservation. “I found pages from rare volumes covered with scotch tape.” When he took over the library in 2007, he set up a conservation department and has also overseen the digitisation of most of the collection.
Since the war began, most of the valuable documents have been secured in metal boxes and stored “somewhere underground”, together with the added precaution of dehumidifying canisters and fire extinguishers. Kmet is determined to preserve Lviv’s culture and history. “For me a library is like an army,” he said. “A library can create an intellectual revolution. A library is more powerful than Putin’s aeroplanes.”
But, Kmet admitted, “we cannot, in a time of war, guarantee security”. In Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, a missile that destroyed the council building shattered the glass in the windows of the nearby Kharkiv Fine Arts Museum. Kmet and Zilinko have been in touch with colleagues, in eastern cities and Kyiv, who are trying to get cultural treasures out of the war zone.
Sometimes this is too ambitious a task. Kmet gave the example of the Vernadsky National Library in Kyiv, which has a collection of more than 15m items: “I think it’s impossible, in reality, to evacuate them.”
He invited me to visit the Scientific Library “when the war is over and there are people here again, and not this silence and emptiness”. He wanted, he said, to show me “the documents and texts that represent so many cultures and traditions and questions of the world”. He paused. “But for now”, he said, “we are writing another history.”
Around the walls hung pencil drawings, copies of originals now in Rome, by Lev Getz, a Ukrainian artist of the first world war. Shells burst over a trench; a soldier writes a letter home; a refugee mother and child crouch with exhausted faces. A century later, war still looks the same. ■
Wendell Steavenson has reported on post-Soviet Georgia, the Iraq war and the Egyptian revolution. She is sending regular dispatches for 1843 magazine from Ukraine. You can read her previous dispatches, and the rest of our coverage of the war, here
“Where would we take them?” Odessa can’t protect its archives
The citizens of Odessa, on Ukraine’s Black Sea coast, have tried to insulate the city’s monuments from a looming Russian assault. Razor wire and tanks surround the downtown area around the Potemkin Stairs, made famous by Sergei Eisenstein’s film on the 1905 Russian revolution. The flamboyant bronze statue of the Duke of Richelieu, the city’s 19th-century French governor, is wrapped in sandbags, as if he were in a full-body cast.
Yet no one has done anything to protect a building not far away, on Zhukovsky Street, which embodies much of Odessa’s tumultuous history. The Brodsky Synagogue contains the Odessa state archive, a five-storey vault of written records that date back to the 16th century. It is a precious window onto Odessa’s cosmopolitan past.
The port city was founded by Catherine the Great in the late 1700s. Its polyglot population comprised a diverse mix of peoples, including Albanians, Armenians, Greeks, Italians, Poles, Turks and a large Jewish community. The archive is a record of this magpie history, and a potential bulwark against Vladimir Putin’s effort to subsume all of Ukraine into a parable of Russian imperial glory.
“Many nationalities helped to build Odessa,” said Sergei Mikolayevich Krachkov, one of the archive’s deputy directors, “It’s the world’s city.” Krachkov eyed me warily, as though I might be a Russian saboteur. The archive is closed, like almost everything in Odessa. But Krachkov eventually relented and gave me a tour.
From the outside, the former synagogue has a gaunt elegance, with tall, pointy windows in a style known as Florentine Gothic. Only once you’re through the front gate can you see the shocking state of decay. The façade is visibly cracked and gouged in places. A huge wooden scaffold – hidden from passers-by – appears to be holding up the building’s sagging rear wall like a girdle.
If Russia launches an assault on Odessa it wouldn’t take much to bring the building down. Less than a tenth of the archive’s paper records have been digitised, and historians have worried for years about what might be lost if they were destroyed.
Krachkov led me up a battered staircase to a floor of offices that surround the archive, housed in a five-storey concrete structure that the Soviets built inside the synagogue. Posters line the walls, showing samples of handwritten records of Odessan life from the 19th century: births, marriages, deaths. It is a unique resource for anyone tracing the genealogies of Ashkenazi Jews from the region, many of whom helped seed Jewish communities in America, Europe and Israel.
If Russia launches an assault on Odessa it wouldn’t take much to bring the building down
Built in 1863, the synagogue had a mixed-sex choir and a magnificent organ. People travelled from far away to hear weekly concerts; composers Modest Mussorgsky and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov were influenced by the singing they heard there. The building survived the chaos of the Russian Civil War (1918-22), but afterwards the Bolshevik authorities closed it, along with the city’s other synagogues. It became the Rosa Luxemburg workers’ club, a centre for socialist propagandising.
The second world war devastated the city’s archives. The Soviets moved large portions to Stalingrad – an unfortunate choice – and Kazakhstan. More than 1m archival files on the Odessa region, half of the total, were lost or destroyed. The remainder was moved into the Brodsky synagogue, which also contains records about the Holocaust. Odessa’s Jews, once more than a third of the city’s population, were reduced to a few thousand people by 1945.
In 2016 the city council voted to restore the synagogue to Odessa’s shrinking Jewish community. The concrete block containing the archive will make it hard to renovate the building, but removing it without damaging the surrounding prayer hall won’t be easy. The rabbi of Odessa’s Chabad Lubavitch sect, who holds the rights to the building, told me he isn’t sure what to do.
Krachkov led me back down the staircase, where houseplants sat in sunny windows and peeling paint hung off the walls. Many Ukrainian museums are hiding their archives, in case of Russian attack, but not Odessa, he told me with a shake of his head and a pained smile. No one has come up with a plan of how to move such delicate records. “Where would we take them?” he said. “Where is safety in Ukraine?” ■
Robert F. Worth is a former reporter for the New York Times based in France
PHOTOGRAPHS: CHIEN-CHI CHANG (MAGNUM)