# Lwów, Ukraine



## Anton_Dnipro (Sep 12, 2009)

You listed some castles and probably some little unknown towns, but for example 
Warsaw was destroyed by the Germans. You didn't forget that Warsaw became a big city when it was a part of the Russian Empire? The Polish downtown was a little part of more than 1million people megapolis, that was destroyed during the war. So, in accordance with your logic, if most of Warsaw was built by the Russians, so it's the Russian city. Isn't it? 
But anyway the question was that Lviv has never been a Polish but it was a multinational city and I don't care who destroyed Gdansk/Danzig or Warsaw.


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## Arcovia (Jan 4, 2008)

Jedrzej said:


> Well, the big difference is, and even Anton_Dnipro has wrote it, that Gdańsk was IN Poland in years 997-1308 and 1466-1793, so for quite a long time. Maybe Polish wasn't a predominant language, but it was in Poland and Poles had a big influence in this city. Not to say that Germans had destroyed this city during the war, and the present city was entirely built or rebuilt after the war by poles. So de facto what you can see no is in 90% built by Poles after the war. Lwуw was never in Ukraine for a simple reason: there was never such thing as Ukraine and Poles were always predominant in this city. Lwуw also wasn't destroyed during the war, so what you can see now was built by Poles and some other nations that built this city.


So if the 16-th-century Golden Rose Synagoge in Lviv will be rebuilt (I hope so much it will), it will cease automatically to be Jewish and become Ukrainian? Ok.  

Of course, Poles were not ‘_always predominant_’ in the city, that’s obvious, and regarding the name of Ukraine, just think that local Ukrainians were called Ruthenians until as late as the 20-th century - here you are, for example, the seat of the Ukrainian cultural organization ‘Prosvita’ in Stryi (Lviv region) constructed in the early 1900’s, Ukrainians are called here ‘Ruthenian people’ as you can see in the photos:














































As to the languages, well, only 2% of inhabitants of Wrocław knew Polish in the early 1900’s, Kiev is a Russian-speaking city now, I am Ukrainian but speak Russian (while my ancesters spoke mostly Ukrainian), so many Poles spoke German and Russian when Poland was part of the three different states, and so on – does it change anything? 



Jedrzej said:


> Well, first of all Russians mostly destroyed our cities during the war. And they were doing it in contrary to Germans just for fun.


Hmm… Russians are convinced of having liberated Poland and now you say they destroyed it.  BTW, there are so many great historic buildings destroyed by the Soviet Army in Ukraine during the war – it was just a matter of priority – when it comes to things more important than architecture (from the viewpoint of the Army commanders), the latter is always sacrificed.


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## Jedrzej (Dec 25, 2005)

Anton_Dnipro said:


> You listed some castles and probably some little unknown towns,


Well, they aren't small. Both of them have nearly 100 000 inhabitants, and what's more important were also that big before the war. And as Delfin said in the post above mine, Gdańsk was also destroyed by Russians, as well as parts of Poznań, Słupsk, Gorzów Wielkopolski, Olsztyn and many, many others. Maybe you've heard about these cities, they are quite big. And Krasiczyn castle was one of the most precious monuments in Poland which even now is very famous. 




Anton_Dnipro said:


> Warsaw was destroyed by the Germans. You didn't forget that Warsaw became a big city when it was a part of the Russian Empire? The Polish downtown was a little part of more than 1million people megapolis, that was destroyed during the war. So, in accordance with your logic, if most of Warsaw was built by the Russians, so it's the Russian city. Isn't it?
> But anyway the question was that Lviv has never been a Polish but it was a multinational city and I don't care who destroyed Gdansk/Danzig or Warsaw.


Well, once again. Warsaw even though it was in Russia in XIX century, was predominantly Polish. The same story with Lviv. It was in Austria, but predominantly it was Polish.


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## Jedrzej (Dec 25, 2005)

Arcovia said:


> So if the 16-th-century Golden Rose Synagoge in Lviv will be rebuilt (I hope so much it will), it will cease automatically to be Jewish and become Ukrainian? Ok.


You've complettely missed my point. I just said, that what you can see now in Gdańsk, even though it looks like before war, was built by poles after the war. So it's more like poles built this city so that it looks like before the war. So germans can't come and say "hey, bring me back my town house!" because the town house they've owned doesn't exist any longer. And I'm saying that we have more claims to this city now, because we built it. Ukrainians didn't have to rebuilt Lwów because it wasn't destroyed. So my grandparents can come to Lviv and say "bring me back my town house, because I built it by my own hands!", while germans can't do this in Gdańsk.[/QUOTE] 




Arcovia said:


> Hmm… Russians are convinced of having liberated Poland and now you say they destroyed it.  BTW, there are so many great historic buildings destroyed by the Soviet Army in Ukraine during the war – it was just a matter of priority – when it comes to things more important than architecture (from the viewpoint of the Army commanders), the latter is always sacrificed.


Well, Russians are convinced but Poles are not. Russians attacked Poland on 17th of September 1939. If they didn't, maybe we would be able to cope with Germans. Then they murdered polish officers and many poles. They destroyed many polish cities. At the end they "liberated" Poland so it wasn't fully independent for 40 years. What kind of liberalisation was it? It is just a soviet propaganda what you are saying.


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## Karasek (Apr 6, 2008)

Jedrzej said:


> Well, first of all Russians mostly destroyed our cities during the war. And they were doing it in contrary to Germans just for fun. They destroyed for instance *Legnica*, Elbląg, Krasiczyn castle and hundreds of other cities.


No, the historic center of Legnica was destroyed during the 60s. Here are two pics:
http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showpost.php?p=52811579&postcount=77



Jedrzej said:


> Well, the big difference is, and even Anton_Dnipro has wrote it, that Gdańsk was IN Poland in years 997-1308 and 1466-1793, so for quite a long time. Maybe Polish wasn't a predominant language, but it was in Poland and Poles had a big influence in this city.


Sorry to disappoint you, but Poland had almost no influence back then. The city had a parliament (with German as the official language), a provincial government, monetary and military sovereignty and the right to maintain diplomatic ties with foreign countries. AFAIK the Polish king wasn't allowed to stay for more than three days a year in the city.


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## Arcovia (Jan 4, 2008)

Jedrzej said:


> Ukrainians didn't have to rebuilt Lwуw because it wasn't destroyed. So my grandparents can come to Lviv and say "bring me back my town house, because I built it by my own hands!", while germans can't do this in Gdańsk.


As to whose hands built Lviv you can read on the previous page. 



Jedrzej said:


> Well, Russians are convinced but Poles are not. Russians attacked Poland on 17th of September 1939. If they didn't, maybe we would be able to cope with Germans. Then they murdered polish officers and many poles. They destroyed many polish cities. At the end they "liberated" Poland so it wasn't fully independent for 40 years. What kind of liberalisation was it? It is just a soviet propaganda what you are saying.


Well, the Soviet troops occupied just the territories populated by Ukrainians and Bielorussians (leaving part of them to Poland), it’s absolutely the same thing Poles did before, so no complaints please. I also can say that if it had not been for the Polish occupation of West Ukraine in 1919, the Ukrainians might have been able to ‘cope’ with the Russian Bolsheviks thus preserving their independent state, but the history cannot be rewritten in the subjunctive mood, so it’s absolutely no good writing such things…


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## Gerasim (Apr 1, 2010)

Some information from poulation census in Lviv/Lvov/Lwów/Lemberg/Leopolis.
1910:
total population's number--206.574;
Polish as native language--175.560(85%);
Ruthen--21.780(10,8%);
German--6.825(3%);
Jewish--didn't exist as official.
1921:
total--219.467;
Polish--140.032(63,8%);
Ruthen--19.432(8%);
German--1.544(1,4%);
Jewish--56.933(25,9%).
December 9, 1931:
total--312.231;
Poles--63,5%;
Jews--24,1%;
Ukrainians--7,8%;
Ruthens--3,5%;
Germans--0,8%;
others(with Armenians!) --0,3%.
From another source:
Poles--50,4%;
Ukrainians--15,9%;
Jews--31,9%.
If L.'s "multiethnicity" had been such one it was no more than internationality in all large European cities. Essayings of multiethnicity in L.are meant for fading its acute Polish chracter in the past. I remember the older people said there had been no sound of other languages but Polish and sometimes Yiddish, no talk in Ukrainian. Concerning the war and post-war period, there's it in the memory of my grandparents, parents and mine(60s,70s). My father got to L. in september 1944 and always said there had been only Polish language all around.
Concerning Gdańsk, it was burned down in May 1945(after the German capitulation) by soldiers of Rokossowski.


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## Arcovia (Jan 4, 2008)

Well, first of all, multiethnicity and multilingualism are quite different things, you cannot make any conclusions about multiethnicity of the city on the basis of the language data, especially in the case of Lviv because most of its inhabitants were in fact bilingual. Kiev, for example, is mostly Russian-speaking city although 82% of its inhabitants are ethnic Ukrainians. 

Second, the inhabitants of Lviv were bilingual (or multilingual) in the sense that they used one language inside the family and another while speaking to a member of another ethnic community, in the latter case it was mostly Polish as the official language studied in the schools of all the ethnic communities (so they, actually, had no other choice). The deficiency of your data can be seen, for example, from the data on Jews which in 1910 were included into the Polish-speaking category, while they only spoke Polish outside their community (which constituted at least 27% in 1900 according to the data on religion). The process of de-identification of the ethnic groups was very strong and known as _Polonisierung_, especially after Lviv was occupied by Poles in 1918. The number of Poles did not exceed 50% in its maximum (actually, it was below that number calculated from the number of Roman Catholics, because not only Poles, but many Ukrainians and some Jews and other ethnic groups were also Roman Catholics). The minimum number of Ukrainians was estimated to be 20% (that was the number of Greek Catholics which were almost exclusively Ukrainians), in fact their number was greater because some of them were also Roman Catholics (and Orthodox). The data of 1931 do not reflect the real linguistic situation in Lviv because at that time the only language officially recognized in Poland was Polish, the numerous Ukrainian-language schools existing since the Austrian times were being closed everywhere in West Ukraine (not to mention the higher education), the Ukrainian language was de facto banned and every Ukrainian that could speak Polish was included automatically to the Polish-speaking community. As to the personal memories, they’re often deceptive depending on personal relations limited to a certain ethnic, social or religious group, because even according to the official data of 1931 there were at least 11% of Ukrainian-speaking Lvivers and that was the number of the persons that could hardly speak Polish, while the number of those who spoke both languages was much, much greater.


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## Karasek (Apr 6, 2008)

Gerasim said:


> If L.'s "multiethnicity" had been such one it was no more than internationality in all large European cities. Essayings of multiethnicity in L.are meant for fading its acute Polish chracter in the past.


Current view of Wroclaws city council:
Wroclaw - multicultural metropolis

Relativism can be found anywhere.


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## Jedrzej (Dec 25, 2005)

^^ I don't get it. What is so wrong with the fact that this web site is in english?


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## Arcovia (Jan 4, 2008)

I guess the point was that Wrocław where only 2% of people could speak Polish one hundred years ago (and the rest of inhabitants spoke exclusively German) is called a _multicultura_l city, while Lviv which was in fact far more multicultural and multilingual is said by someone to have an ‘_acute Polish character_’.


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## Karasek (Apr 6, 2008)

Jedrzej said:


> ^^ I don't get it. What is so wrong in the fact that this web site is in english?


Wroclaw isn't multicultural. Multiculturalism needs the presence of people from different backgrounds, e.g. language, nationalities or religions. Wroclaw is monocultural.
The paradigm of a multicultural Wroclaw and a multiethnic Lviv is the same = building a continuity between the present and the diverging past.


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## Gerasim (Apr 1, 2010)

Arcovia said:


> ... multiethnicity and multilingualism are quite different things, ...in the case of Lviv because most of its inhabitants were in fact bilingual. .


Yes, there's a difference beetween this notions. Your Kiev's example is more suitable in case of Lviv: there were many inhabitans of Ukrainian origin who didn't want, were ashamed of talking Ukrainian. Many of them were unable even to use this language, those so called "assimilated" people, in quite considerable number.The same situatrion took place to a greater extent with Jews. So, there weren't such much in fact bilingual inhabitans in townspeople as you apreciate.
As to my personal memories, yes I agree, in most cases those are subjectives but I speak in both languages(R & U) from my early childhood and Polish one came to me in age of 10 from elderly neighbour woman who brought me up, the most of memories came from her.


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## Marbur66 (Mar 1, 2009)

I wanted to see some nice pics of Lviv (since it's a photography thread and all), and all there is is pointless, historical rhetoric. Typical.


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## Arcovia (Jan 4, 2008)

Gerasim said:


> Yes, there's a difference beetween this notions. Your Kiev's example is more suitable in case of Lviv: there were many inhabitans of Ukrainian origin who didn't want, were ashamed of talking Ukrainian. Many of them were unable even to use this language, those so called "assimilated" people, in quite considerable number.The same situatrion took place to a greater extent with Jews. So, there weren't such much in fact bilingual inhabitans in townspeople as you apreciate.
> As to my personal memories, yes I agree, in most cases those are subjectives but I speak in both languages(R & U) from my early childhood and Polish one came to me in age of 10 from elderly neighbour woman who brought me up, the most of memories came from her.


What are you talking about? Ashamed??? Those people call Ukrainian their mothertongue (85% of Kiev residents of Ukrainian ethnicity) despite they speak Russian in everyday life, that is a sign of respect, while speaking Russian is just a matter of habit. Well, I see, this is difficult to understand for a Lviver (Lviv is actually bilingual and ethnic Russians speak mostly Russian there; Ukrainians and Russian often speak to each other in their own language), but in the rest of Ukraine the situation is a bit different, in the large cities outside West Ukraine bilingualism is not a natural thing – that’s the history. I love Ukrainian, I believe it to be my mothertongue, but I speak Russian, it is my first language, I’m used to it, I speak it not because I’m ‘ashamed’ to speak Ukrainian, it’s just because I live in a monolingual society where bilingualism has become unnatural during the last Soviet decades, Ukrainian-speaking people arriving to my city begin to speak Russian, while many Kharkivers start speaking Ukrainian in Lviv (and I widely use Ukrainian on forums and in Ukrainian-speaking regions) – just a little difference in mentality. But now the situation begins to change here.

As to the personal memories, Poles have one sort of memories, Ukrainians have a bit different memories, Jews have their own memories (I have a book about Jews in Lviv reporting memories of those who used to live there, well, there is not much about Polish in it but the Yiddish background is perceived quite clearly).



Marbur66 said:


> I wanted to see some nice pics of Lviv (since it's a photography thread and all), and all there is is pointless, historical rhetoric. Typical.


It will never end…


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## Pansori (Apr 26, 2006)

Nice city, one of the European jewels. 

And it's *Lviv*, not Lwow or Lvov (since this is an English-language forum and not Polish, Russian or whatever).


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## Askold (Mar 10, 2006)

Gerasim said:


> I'm so glad to see people admiring my hometown where I was born and live almost for my whole the lifetime and sure I'll never leave. You're right people, it was real Polish town either from cultural or political or historical viewpoint. Suffice to say that the town was unassailable Polish fortress during the centuries since 1396 till 1704 despite of the fact of its founding by the Russian(Ukrainian) princes in 1256. The Polish was a predominant language there wholly till a great expulsion of the Polish population in 1945-47. After that it was changed into Russian. And Ukrainian had won just about to late70s when the Ukrainian people from village(rural people) became prevalent in the town's population. Więc napiszę jeszcze po Polsku. Chcę tu podać kilku zdięć, ale nie potrafię: kto by powiedział jak to się robie?


- Ha ha ha, a nice attempt by a polish members to register this profile and pretend to be form Lviv. I can't believe poles are still suffering from this "small ***** complex" and continue act in such manner. It seems every tourist from Poland to Lviv has to:

1. Take numerous photos of garbidge or anything run down - to prove the city is unkept by Ukrainians (as oppose to, ofcourse to the time it was in Polish hands). You can find garbadge in any city if you want to find it, during my trip to Warsaw I saw tons of it too, but who would bother with pics of that? 

2. Purposely use old Polish street names from 1930's. I wonder how residents of Warsaw would react if I used old Nazi names for their town.

3. Cry about "so called polish culture", despite the city founded by Ukrainian king and built by German-Italian architects. Most of modern Lviv was built during Austrian times, when such think as Poland did not exist. I hope the polish members grow up and stop with this childish nonsence of prooving everyone their "polishness".


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## Gerasim (Apr 1, 2010)

For those who read in Russian http://www.ya2004.com.ua/2010/03/20/1749/comment-page-1/#comment-235144 
In addition, there were memorial statues in L. no one of them built after 1913(!) and all of the men of Polish nationality:
1. Stanisław Jabłonowski.
2. Jan Sobieski.--now in Gdańsk
3.Adam Mickiewicz.
4.Kornel Ujejski--in Szczecin
5. Alexander Fredro--in Wrocław.
6.Agenor Gołuchowski.
7.Bartosz Głowacki.
8.Jan Kiliński.
9.Franciszek Smolka.
I gonna bring the photos but later off because of lack of time at the moment.


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## Monolithic (Nov 7, 2010)

rychlik said:


> Yes. Lwow is the Polish spelling. Lvov is the Ukrainian one. Poles built this city.


But language of this section is English. Why theme header has Polish word only?


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## Wigner (May 17, 2010)

It's Lviv, not Lvov, Lvow, Lwow or Lwov... :bash:
Change it please...


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