Once upon a tram

It is impossible to imagine Lviv without its trams.

The tram became a symbol of Lviv alongside a cup of Viennese coffee and stone lions that leave their pedestals at night and roam the streets frightening couples in love and making

midnight boozers paranoid. Perhaps a monument to Lviv trams will be erected one day. Although over the 130 years the trams have been running they have sustained considerable

damage, they continue to serve their purpose of getting local residents and visitors from point A to point B

Lviv trams have survived a number of transformations. The main one was on the turn of 19th century, when for 15 years some of trams were drawn by horses and others already ran on electricity. Lviv residents definitely preferred horse-drawn vehicles and when in 1908 the local tram department decided to sell the remaining 77 horses, the women of Lviv organized an unprecedented act of protest, pulling up their skirts and telling the tram to kiss their buttocks. The tram blushed deep red as this was the color that the city decided to have the trams painted in Graz, Austria, but kept running. When between the two world wars, the trams run along Zamarstynivska St, he had lots of fun. The name of the street, by the way,  is a linguistic mystery as it derived from the name Zommerstein, a local rich man. Anyway, 80 years ago Zamarstynivska was the most criminal street in the city, so beat cops patrolled it walking in between the tram rails. Should the cops walked the sidewalks, local hooligans or batyary, as Lviv residents would call them, dragged the law enforcers inside courtyards and beat the daylights out of them. Every year on All Saints Day (November 1) thousands of candles were lit ) on Lychakivske and Yanivske cemeteries to commemorate the dead.

Locals felt sad when the 12th route of the tram to Vysokiy Zamok, one of the highest points between the Urals and the Carpathians, was cancelled. They also lamented the closing of the 10th route taking passengers to Striyskiy Park, which was known as Kylynskiy Park during the Polish invasion and then accommodated something of a local economic exhibition center.

The tram got quite a scare when in 1971 the driver on the 6th route going down Horodotska St. fell asleep at the helm. The heavy tramcar crashed through a tram stop leaving 26 people dead. The incident happened near St. Anna’s Church, which housed a furniture store 40 years ago.

This place had really bad vibes. In 1495, Lviv apprentices had a skirmish with the local police in this place. The police were called “tsipaky” after the Ukrainian “tsip” or spiked flail as that’s how they were armed. It was difficult to argue with such weapons so a few rebel apprentices found the eternal rest at St. Anna’s churchyard. The official version of the incident was that the apprentices protested against the harsh working conditions. There is also an unofficial and hence more popular version. The young lads decided to visit their girlfriends beyond the city limits and walking the streets at night was forbidden at those times. Evil-tongued Russian-speaking residents of the city would say about the tram six: running rampant all covered in rahuls (peasants). There was a grain of truth in such cynicism and misanthropy as many people of provinces took this route to get to the Krakiv Market from the railway station.

School boys liked to take a joy ride on the tram from Promyslova to Pidzamcha. On weekends the tram along this stretch was practically empty. This provided a perfect opportunity for kids to jump onto the second car and hang from the rails upside down like monkeys. At Pidzamcha the young hooligans jumped off the tram not to be frog-marched out by the driver.

By the way, school kids often used trams as an excuse for being late for class. They complained that during rush hour they were squeezed between passengers and could not get off at their stop. The far-fetched story often worked for the little liars.

Another anecdote was about a Rastafarian-looking fellow who rode the tram along the 7th route. At every stop, he would greet passengers with polite announcement: “All volunteers are welcome to punch their tickets. Everyone should be a volunteer”.

A comical incident happened on the 7th route when a second noise-free line was opened. Local jacks-of-all-trades decided they could lay a special magnetic levitation cushion on which rails were installed so that the trams could travel smoothly without the annoying “clickety clack on the track”.

A few years earlier the Czechs had laid such a line in Lviv. Ukrainian craftsmen failed to execute the task, but local officials came to the grand opening of the new line. The tram driver committed a glaringly obvious mistake when he opened all the doors of the tramcar. Party leaders climbed aboard through the front doors while a street dog took the back door. The bureaucrats and the dog met exactly halfway inside the car and the incident ended with the top managers of the local tram depot being reprimanded.

In the early morning before rush hour you can take any tram in Lviv and fall in love with this form of public transport. Go past the Church of St. Olha and Elizabeth and St. George’s Cathedral, see Market Platz and the Russian Church. You can even get to the Altai lakes, which have been immortalized by the famous Lviv acapella band Pikkardiyska Tertsiya. The old and wise city tram will smile at you and take your sadness away. He knows more than any and all of his passengers taken together.