The first day of my tour of Lviv started with a call to battle: “Let’s go!” Ulyana, our spirited guide, shouted as she braved the drizzling rain to lead us to the first objective on our program, an underground pub situated on Rynok Square, the picturesque piazza adorning the centre of this medieval border town. Once a jewel of the Austro-Hungarian Empire made up of a mix of Ruthenian, Polish, Jewish, and Russian people, Lviv repeatedly changed hands between Poland and the Soviet Union to become in the age of anti-Russian sentiment that has dominated the country since the beginning of the war in 2014 a full-blown bastion of Ukrainian nationalism.
Anticommunism
That we were in the middle of this bastion became apparent after we descended a staircase leading to a massive wooden gate on which our guide energetically beseeched us to knock. A bearded man in uniform wearing a prop rifle opened and, without missing a beat, asked us for what was apparently a password. “Tell him it’s ‘Slava Ukrayini!’” smiling Ulyana advised, and after the “guard” answered with a hearty ‘Heroyam slava!’, we were led down a maze of dimly lit stone corridors and into a no-frills underground restaurant, replete with wooden tables and military paraphernalia allegedly used by resistance fighters during WWII. To our amazement, the resistance in question did not entail, however, as in other European cities, the notorious fight to the death against Nazi aggression, but that staged by Ukrainian patriots against the Soviet Russians, hot in pursuit of retreating German troops.
Things could only get weirder still. On closer scrutiny of the lavishly decorated walls, it turned out that some of the photographs hanging next to beat-up Kalashnikovs and rusty AK-47s were not of anticommunist fighters, but of well-known fascist leaders. Dominant among these was the portrait of Stepan Bandera, who, while certainly a hero for post-socialist Ukrainians, was also a proven Nazi collaborator of international notoriety, and a criminal at whose behest tens of thousands of Polish, Jewish, and Russian civilians were murdered during and after the German occupation of the country.
