The city of dying lions

With a touch of masochism (hardly surprising as Liviv  is native city of Sacher-Masoch ) local residents show tourists the Armenian Church, the Bernadine monastery and old residential buildings of great architecture and tell how they are crumble into ruin, about the homeless people sleeping in these shambled buildings dying from cold and hunger and how the admirers of antiquity smashed a window sill of the famous Bohemian chapel to steal the stone lion

The city is lucky that the Poles consider Lviv to be an object of Ukrainian-Polish cultural heritage and allocate money and experts to salvage the city. For several years Polish artists worked hard to restore the frescoes in the Armenian Church created by Jan Henryk Rosen in the 1920s. “The frescoes were in deplorable condition. Certain fragments were beyond repair. They were restored for 140,000 euros allocated from the Polish budget. It is quite possible that the frescoes will begin disintegrating again in a few years due to constant moisture. It is possible that all of this will crumble. The fact is that local employees often do not conform to the proper restoration methods. For example, locally employed workers stripped the plaster off the bell tower and it spent the winter with naked brick walls. Looks like they did everything so the Poles would throw in some more money,” says Lilia Onyshchenko, Head of the Historic Environment Preservation Administration at City Hall.

A few years back, when it was being decided whether or not Lviv would be one of the cities on the UNESCO World Heritage List, a group of international experts examined the city’s architecture with a fine-toothed comb.

The German group was absolutely charmed by the architectural monuments in the downtown Lviv and decided to render assistance for the restoration of one of the most beautiful cathedrals in Lviv – the St. Andrew’s Church in the Bernadine Monastery.

The restorers are working in Lviv for the second year now. At dizzying heights, they are revamping unique sculptures and frescoes that are nearly 300 years old.

While artists restore the former magnificence of the cathedral’s interior to the millimeter, church liturgies are held, young couples get married and the funeral services are held.

“It will be difficult to preserve all this. The environmental situation in the city is horrendous. The exhaust emissions of vehicles blacken the walls of buildings and trees from which sculptures have been made. We are talking about acid rain and fumes. In a hundred years everything in Lviv will be totally different,” one Lviv restoration expert complained to KW.

The artist pointed to the recently restored building of a commercial bank in the center of town, “Everything will be like this, like the shelter over the Chernobyl NPR.”