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"Two Weekends: Lviv and Kraków" Miljenko Jergović
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Every journey has its unexpected culmination – the moment when everything acquires its true reason and goal, frequently having nothing in common with the intentions of the traveller and the reason for the travel itself.

Vienna, 12th September. Sitting peacefully all in black, in a heavy bishop’s black hat that recalls the hoods of the dwarves from the Grimm Brothers’ tales, with a shining cross on his forehead, holding his staff of office with both hands, leaning with his back against a glass wall separating us from the taxiways, by gate H17, which in 30 minutes will be taken by passengers flying to Lviv, is His Holiness Philaret, the Patriarch of Kyiv and All Rus’ – Ukraine. He is accompanied by a young, tall, red bearded monk, carrying his luggage and discreetly protecting him from the people that surround them. And everywhere around, in front of gate H17, there is the familiar loud and sweating Ukrainian crowd hustling and bustling, enquiring with the mundane air hostesses, outshouting one another in Ukrainian and Russian, while others, clearly foreigners, flying to Lviv, are standing silently aside, unafraid that they will not board the plane that they have been issued boarding cards for.

This is the clearest difference between the East and West of Europe, visible in all European airports before flying to the East: it comes from the people who still believe that there is something that could stop them, and with a valid boarding card they won’t be able to board a plane, and those who suspect nothing because everything in the world follows a set order and – perhaps – it can be upset only by some masked Muslim when – in the very heart of a Middle Eastern desert, before the very eyes of the all seeing media, he chops off their heads, for no reason whatsoever.

Sitting straight as his dignity commands, Philaret is curiously watching the people. He does it with a childlike openness, never turning his eyes away, gently smiling and handsome. Later, on the bus that takes us across the apron, a not too tall young man approaches the red bearded assistant and asks him to be allowed to turn to the patriarch. Without a word, yet in a friendly manner, the monk lets him go, and the young man says something to the ear of His Holiness, to which the sage smiles broadly and nods his head. The asker puts his hand on Filaret’s hand holding the staff, half on the sleeve and half on the naked skin, and there is something in the gesture that gives off a semblance of proximity.

I was assigned seat 4F; there is no curtain separating business from economy class. The monk takes the hierarch to his seat across from me and returns to his own, somewhere far behind, obviously in economy class. Before taking his seat, Philaret does something absolutely natural that I will consider later. He opens the locker above the seat, and as if afraid of knocking somebody accidentally, he puts away his pastoral staff with both hands. The wood and the metal merrily knock on the plastic as the staff rolls down the bottom of the locker. Philaret closes the lid, as if he had done this regularly. Then he sits down and takes off his remarkable hat.
I see he is bald. It surprises me, as there is no photograph of him without headgear, and now he seems to be missing something. When the plane begins to roll slowly along the taxiway, Patriarch Philaret makes the sign of the cross, with that very slow movement that the lay never exercise, broadly touching the tips of three fingers first to the right caput numeri and then the left, like the Orthodox do and not nestling the cross made in the air by his chest. Later, he relishes in the colourful food served in business class. He drinks water and wine. Polite to the Austrian air hostesses, he smiles broadly, replying to their questions. In this way he holds his reluctance within, and behaves – at least at the airport and on the plane, as if faith were a cheerful thing or as if he had heard some good news from God.

In front of the plane, on the apron of the airport named after the founder of Lviv, Danilo, Duke of Halych, awaiting Philaret is a luxurious estate car and a host in festive episcopal robes. They shake hands and disappear from my field of sight while I am approaching the modern glazed structure built before the 2012 UEFA European Championship. In this way, the Patriarch of Kyiv Philaret, keeps returning to my mind. A young policewoman looks at my passport, compares the photograph with the living man, older and with less of the beard. “First time in Ukraine?” she asks. “Yes.” And in English – “Have a nice day!”

The four days in Lviv are beautiful. When there are showers threatening with new floods in the Balkans, and everything has been the same shade of grey for years, there is sun shining in Galicia’s main city, the late summer sun is warm, and the world around shimmers with thousands of colours of the approaching autumn. The two basic colours are blue and yellow: in the houses and on church towers. The blue and yellow Ukrainian flags are fluttering, sometimes a pennant on a passing car sports, which in the backward European provinces would be flourished when the national team are playing, and others, more moderate, tie blue and yellow ribbons on radio aerials, or stick them discreetly into buttonholes, as if for a wedding. I also see a middle aged lady walking two dogs in the centre of the city. Both have blue and yellow ribbons on their collars, a testimony of patriotism. Theirs, or their lady’s.

The hotel is in the former Jewish district, on the corner of “Old Jewish” and “Serbian” streets. I obviously enjoyed the street names. Later I learned that, having captured Lviv in 1941, the Germans changed the name of the street, from “Serbian” into “Croatian”.

I was invited to Lviv to Litfest (International Literary Festival), organised every September by the Publishers Forum. I accepted the invitation out of a sense of duty: you don’t hesitate when going to a country that has been attacked, even if you don’t like travelling and find participation in official literary occasions quite a burden.
Moreover, attracted by cities that move from one side of the state border to the other after 1945, I consider them nearly my own. The cities left by their inhabitants to the diktats of great historic moments so that other people, displaced from somewhere else, could settle in their homes, mentality, fate, and character. This is how I arrived in Wrocław, former Breslau. Where Poles came and Germans left. Now I’m in Lviv, left by Poles and entered by Ukrainians. Obviously, there are differences, the fate of any city is unique, so that Lviv was Ukrainian even when it was Polish, at the same time being also Jewish, German, Armenian, Russian – who knows who else Lviv belonged to in its unique and motleyed past. It was also ours, Bosnian, as 100 years ago you literally died here for the Emperor and homeland, and the first battle of Lviv claimed as many lives as three Bosnian wars. The name Galicia, a distant and mysterious country that did not exist on the maps, accompanied us therefore throughout the entire wretched 20th century we had, and here, finally, I perceived Galicia the real, with my very eyes.

On working days, Lviv has nearly a million inhabitants. The number of permanent residents is around 200,000 less. The old city is larger, more spacious, and stands taller than the one in Zagreb. It was built by the Habsburgs, cleanly with ambitious intentions and plans. Although it lies on the outskirts of the Empire, Austrian Lemberg looks not at all like a wall or a watchtower, a defensive bastion from the East. The city is open and brims with lushness, with the spirit of a metropolis reigning supreme, as if it did not lie on the frontier; it radiates with extent, unfettered space. If Europe looked for its capital of culture for a longer spell, instead of moving it each year to the like of like Gypsy camps, Lviv – Austrian, Polish – and also today’s, Ukrainian – would be an ideal place. Instead of founding its European quality on bank interest rates, the intergalactic anti rocket shield of George Bush senior and his followers, Europe could perhaps build it on culture and cultural memory.

The Opera building is huge and grand, yet in the reckless and overpowering spirit of the belle époque, its hapless constructor, Zygmunt Gorgolewski, built it on water, on the little River of Poltva that even today continues its flow somewhere under the stage. He built Europe’s first foundations of concrete, yet unfortunately, the building started to sink in as soon as it had been completed. Gorgolewski followed the architects’ code of honour and chose to kill himself. He fulfilled his intention in peace, although not without sentimental details, and survived by some miracle.

When his heart stopped some time later, the Opera stopped sinking. The concerned constructor rests nearby, in Lychakiv Cemetery.

After the First World War, Lviv became a part of the modern Polish state. The ambitious plans of the Habsburgs were replaced with even more ambitious ones of those who had for centuries found the city their cultural, academic, and spiritual metropolis. The time of great construction continued, one historical cultural layer superimposed itself on another, when, after the nearly two yet long Soviet occupation, the Germans entered the city in July 1941. They did not demolish it, as they did with other cities of the East, but decided to preserve it for themselves, as it was. Lviv was saved from demolition by the spirit of Austrian architecture; the Nazis were impressed by its touch of Vienna, something of the Royal and Imperial monarchy, both in its grandeur and its character, a veduta. You could almost claim that also Hitler’s Viennese watercolours saved the city, of course if we construe the city as streets and squares rather than the people. The people, the Jews of Lviv, 60,000 of them, had already been murdered by the Einsatzgruppen after the first summertime air raid. (Between the two world wars, Lviv was Poland’s third city as far as Jewish population is concerned.) The pogrom continued until the end of the war, with equally gory episodes of the civil Polish Ukrainian War, which primarily boiled down to the burning of villages and the slaughter of defenceless men, children, and women. Reconciliation and the catharsis of that war took place quietly, far away from the eyes of the world and the will of the political elites in the 1990s and early 21st century, following the civil motto of “we forgive and ask for your forgiveness”. Today, Ukrainians find Poles the most devoted and dependable champions of their case before Europe.

Almost untouched, the layers of historical, stylistic, and political epochs are visible here perhaps like nowhere else in Europe’s East, in the façades, monuments, churches, and parks. So far, no new raiders or conquerors from the West have arrived to build their glass towers and turn the homely bookshops into mobile telephone stores. Thus, Lviv must be the lastplace in Europe to look really like Central Europe from its own Central European representations.

Least visible in the city centre are the Soviet traces: perhaps a yellow Zaporozhets or a Moskvich or a Volga painted over by its owner, taxi driver, with a strange silver paint reminiscent of the local silver metal primer used to paint the pot bellied stoves after the end of each year’s heating season, and a beauteous semi open GAZ (Gorkovsky Avtomobilny Zavod, Gorky Automobile Plant) truck, property of the municipal waterworks company. A few kilometres away from the centre, you can see the ugly socialist model developments from the 1970s and 1980s, and standing even further – on a street that until 1991 bore the name of the terror inspiring instigator of the Cheka, Felix Dzerzhinsky – there is the magnificent though ill ominous building that used to house the KGB.

Yet who would leave their car here, sneak around, and investigate the Soviet architecture? Unlike Habsburg houses, the Soviet ones age ugly, they gather no new sense, they do not turn into living museums, which could perhaps allow the inference of a metaphorical differentiation between the two great empires that are already gone. The one that pressed its memory on the façades, and the one in which everything was secret and forbidden, so it could not leave any open memories.

But I’m here because of Ukraine great and wide, and not because of Lviv. I am here as a private investigator, a spy for my own purposes, an agent of the Se cret Service of Bruno Schulz, someone who is trying to test the credibility of media claims and diplomatic axioms about war in Ukraine. Does this war have anything in common with the Yugoslavian wars of the early 1990s? Or the First World War and 1914? Are Ukrainians fascists as Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin announces ex cathedra, are Ukrainian nationalists that have to be approached with great caution, as urged by the survivors of survivors of the European eft, or are Ukrainians – Croats, and Russians – Serbs, as Croatian TV tells you?

No answers can be found to such questions. Not only mis asked, they oversimplify the matters, bringing them down to a level comprehensible for those who think about Ukraine only incidentally, while doing a number two and reading yesterday’s papers. Actually questions could be perhaps asked only if Europe faced up to solidarity with the Ukrainians before the coming winter and, just like it shares our aversion to Vladimir Vladimirovich, it shared its energy resources so that all of us were as hot or cold as Ukrainians, once the frost has set and the snow fallen. Only such a situation would allow eliciting some wise and useful questions.

In Ukrainian, the city is called Lviv, Russians say Lvov, which sounds nearly like Lavov, yet nobody would even think to correct me or try to convince that, as a pleasant gesture towards my hosts, I could accept their “Lviv”. Those who speak my language, whether they studied Slavic philology in Lviv or Kyiv, or they learnt the living language in villages and cities, repeat “Lavov” after me quite unhindered, although among themselves, they say “Lviv”, and they don’t feel threatened by the South Slavic linguistic impact of Russian imperialism. This is important, and it is good that it is so.

Lurking around the cafés, chocolatiers, and confectioneries of the touristic city centre, there are colourful beggar women, members of the nation that is spread all over the world, whose identity connects and cements Europe. After the Jews of Europe had been murdered in our name, we’re left with the Roma as the last Europeans. And I find them – the Gypsy, Roma women – so close, precisely because they look exactly like ours. So when I meet them in Lviv, I push them away from me as someone dearest, because in a way, this is who they actually are. By the way, they disclosed to me something precious for my traveller’s experience. Give them a hryvnia or two, and you can hear a Polish “dziękuję” as well as a Ukrainian “djakuju” and “spasibi” and a purely Russian “spasiba”. They speak all the languages of this world needed and as much as needed, with a flawless sense of a false or alien word. Although there is a war, they speak Russian unimpeded. If they are not more cautious with it, they feel no pressure on the language they speak. If the begging women feel no such pressure in Lviv, then Russian is not only not forbidden but it is not even unwelcome. You won’t earn your alms in a language that enjoys an evil reputation.

T., a young volunteer girl, whose duty it is to mind Mr Writer all the time, was born after the Soviet Union fell apart. In a way, that ridiculous and horrible, huge country never existed for her. Before she was born, her father served as an officer in the GDR. And of course he found a wife of different nationality. He found a Russian woman. The family kept moving from city to city, sharing the fate of officer families in Eastern Europe. T.’s grandmother, her granny living with them in Lviv, never learned Ukrainian. Even the words she knows she pronounces with a very strong Russian accent, so nobody would even come to think that they are Ukrainian. In the evening, T. speaks about this in a restaurant with locals and visitors all around. Everyone has someone like that, so the anecdotes about those who speak Ukrainian and those who don’t come aplenty. Don’t forget, my dear, my dears, that nothing here can be compared to the Serbian aggression of Croatia. Which girl in the Zagreb of 1991 would so openly admit that her mother is Serbian, and that – at the Dolac Market – her grandmother still chats with her friends in the Belgrade vernacular.

During the Second World War, Stepan Bandera was a quisling in the fight for independent Ukraine, leader of armed resistance and military criminal, an inmate of Sachsenhausen concentration camp, whose two brothers were murdered at Auschwitz. In 1944, when everything was over, he accepted the Germans’ proposal and stood at the helm of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army and the organisation of Ukrainian nationalists to fight against Soviets and Poles. Thus, he was a complex figure full of controversies that can be found all over the occupied Europe. Ukrainian nationalists made Stepan Bandera their icon, which Russian propaganda as well as some Western media now finds powerful proof for the rise of Ukrainian fascism.

When, still in Zagreb, I was getting ready for this trip, I remembered to check how much of Stepan Bandera there is in Lviv. Such things are easy to see and can hardly be hidden away or disguised, as they peek out to the surface even if the political regime is trying to conceal them, they pop up in the least expected places, in street graffiti, in urine soaked staircases, on book covers, yet are most visible in street stalls with souvenirs.
For three days, however, I was looking for Stepan Bandera in vain, and only on the fourth day, a few hours before flying back, I located him in a spacious market with smuggled goods, old trinkets, football fan paraphernalia, and folk handicrafts. On one or two stands, they had cups with images of those who rendered great services to Ukraine, and finally, among them, was a cup with Stepan Bandera. (Finally, because otherwise I would have had to think that somebody was walking before me and stashing away everything that is so obvious for Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin). For a moment, I even hesitated whether to buy a cup with an image of Bandera, and finally resigned.

It would have been too weird a keepsake, and it would be hard to find a place and purpose for it. Bandera was killed by KGB agents in Munich in 1959. His biographies read that during the war, he collaborated simultaneously with the Germans and the British. And I believe that, like in some other cases, it is true.

Here, in the very heart of the city, they also have a Russian district with a wealthy and broad “Russian” Street, there is the parish church, there are the congregation who do not belong to Philaret’s dissenting Ukrainian Orthodox Church – Kyiv Patriarchate, but pray to God under the custody of the canonically recognised Ukrainian Orthodox Church – Moscow Patriarchate, independent of the Russian Orthodox Church, yet not autocephalic. Although patriarch Cyril refers to Ukraine and Ukrainian independence with reluctance if not hostility, much like Vladimir Vladimirovich, a great number of Ukrainians, active and fighting compatriots included, profess their faith in his Church. Is this a paradox? Perhaps it is, or perhaps it isn’t. It rather only corroborates the fact that the matter of identity is neither simple nor clear.

This is a Church that my fellow passenger, Philaret, also belongs to, under whose pastoral staff I felt safe, and who in 1990, found himself among the candidates for the Patriarch of Russia. Earlier, in the 1960s, he was a bishop in Vienna and lectured the New Testament at the seminary in Moscow. He was an outstanding and respected figure until 1992 when, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the patriarch rejected his request for autocephaly and complete independence of the Ukrainian Orthodox community, without which no church can be a canonical one. Philaret rebelled, disregarding the Moscow rejection and excommunication, which some found a brave deed, while others perceived as no more than ambition and craving for power.

Recently, he reached for a powerful and unique metaphor, calling Vladimir Vladimirovich the Cain of our days. At a first glance it was brutal and harsh, yet Cain raised his hand against his brother, and Russians and Ukrainians are brothers, a brotherhood nothing can render null and void. Even a fratricide. This layer is most crucial in Philaret’s message. Just because it concerns something far broader and greater than an individual, even if that individual were the tsar of Russia himself.

The word “Moskal” (Muscovite) Russians find offensive. Its implications reach the context of Ukrainian nationalism and the days of Stepan Bandera. Yet I have never heard or read, especially on the walls, in the papers left in the hotel lobby, and in election posters (yes, there is an election here again) the term “Moskal” used for ones who are you fighting against. And they will be fought against for who knows how long, as nobody here believes that all this will quickly come to pass. Whoever and whatever they are like, Russians are not a subject. And they cannot be one, partly because of what Philaret talks about, partially because of T.’s granny, and partially because Ukraine is simply a huge country and a vast culture, even against it, it had a country that is 15 times its size and one of two or three cultures dominating the Earth. And although Russians are not mocked, Putin is, quite wittily. There are plenty of puns with his name. A pretty canvas shopping bag is printed with an easily recognisable face, with an added moustache and somewhat touched up hairdo and inscription “Putler kaput!” He can be found on toilet paper rolls, doormats, and in other denigrating roles and habits. Yet this is Putin only; no one else.

Yes, you can have the impression that Ukrainians enchanted me, that the charm of Lviv addled my mind, and that I made this typical mistake and believed that Ukraine is tantamount to Lviv, much like foreigners have long believed, and some may believe to this day, that Bosnia is the same as Sarajevo, much like somebody may believe that I am a victim of propaganda, but whose propaganda? As the Croatian position towards Ukraine imposed by the American embassy in a suburb of Zagreb, inspires my aversion as the invectives of the man from the door mat do, somebody might believe me to be taking sides, which I probably do, yet nowhere in these four days have I seen anything that would induce me to suspect that Ukrainians do to the Russian minority what Russia does to Ukraine. Perhaps this will change, perhaps out of despair people will get worse, perhaps they will become nationalists and fascists, which they are already accused of, but as long as it is not so, it is my duty to say that people who I have seen are neither nationalists nor fascists. And perhaps everything is otherwise in some other city in Ukraine, yet this is what it was like in Lviv towards the end of summer 2014. And it is important to note that it was so, because if things happen otherwise one day, one will also have to know how and when this came to be. I’m here among friends or very good acquaintances. A. is a professor and translator; she wrote, and did so consummately, about Meša Selimović and Miloš Crnjanski, a phenomenon charming in all aspects. Z. is her younger colleague, also perfectly well versed with Yugoslavian cultures and literatures, not necessarily in an academic and solemn manner. They can be talked to about anything, and therefore also about the differences and similarities on their and our wars.

“Perhaps we would have had it easier, if we were little too,” Z. says all of a sudden with resignation.
“No, it wouldn’t,” I answer. “Our problem was small, Balkan. Ukraine is like half of Europe, it cannot be brushed under the carpet.” And when I say so, I really believe it.

K. is the translator of two of my books into Ukrainian. I became familiar with her via e mail, and now I’m meeting her for the first time. She comes from Vinnitsa, some 40 kilometres away from Lviv, but she lives in Kyiv. She is a poet, a literary activist, highly educated; she’s one of those blessed people who – as Andrić wrote in a dedication – will be straightening up the winding Drinas throughout their entire lives, although all and any Drinas of this world are winding, and not one has ever straightened up. For that and some other reasons, I find her very close; a close Ukrainian relation.

I also feel like telling her too that Ukraine is great.

Thus, there comes a time that I am no longer sure who I am convincing about something: myself or these women? And, finally, how big one you cannot turn your head away from would have to be? We shall see it this winter, I believe.

The fourth is S., my Belarusian translator who arrived in Lviv from Prague, where he lives and works for the Belarusian section of Radio Free Europe.

Ukrainians and Belarusians are close in history and in the language. Belarus is governed by dictator Alexander Lukashenko. He has managed to supress the entire political opposition, and assumed a clever position towards the situation in Ukraine, supporting no side. Which is why the peace talks took place under his patronage in Minsk. S. is afraid that the war in Ukraine has lastingly cemented the reign of Lukashenko, and nothing will be able to shake it, as the nation has once seen what happens to those who have managed to secede from Russia. Does the excommunication of Philaret of Kyiv by Kirill of Moscow count before God, or is hell only on earth?

I don’t make a good tourist, I say to a suggestion to visit the city; yet A. and Z. insist. Both, each in her time, honed their language as guides, one in the Soviet days, the other much later, and they are very keen. I don’t resist any more; I get along. And good that I did, because the combination of an atmosphere of war that continues over 1,000 kilometres away, yet is also here, under the skin, and history adjusted to the shallow tourist memory and poor concentration: results of wars that are very much the same, can be surprising. Z. routinely talks about the history of houses, streets, and squares, craftily interweaving an odd anecdote or two, and crossing the borders without any hesitation: Polish, Austro Hungarian, Soviet, Ukrainian; she talks about Poles as if they were her kin, so some now are also hers, and everything is as it should be in Central Europe that was obscured with various maps, and borders of the states are not aligned – much like, let’s say, in Zagreb or any other hole – with the language, culture, and literature boundaries. Here, however, apart from who they are, everyone is somebody else.

I am standing before the main portal of the magnificent Dominican Church, which in Soviet days was turned into the Museum of Atheism and Religion. Built in the 18th century, the powerful and solid church of the “hounds of the Lord” makes an impression on a stranger, when for the first time he stands, so small, in front of the columns of its portal. It’s Sunday, people are thronging to mass; the church was re consecrated in the 1990s, and divided into museum and church parts. Much like many Roman Catholic churches in Lviv, it was turned into Greek Catholic. Ukrainians are Greek Catholic, Uniates, un less they are Orthodox and belong to one of the three churches of the Orthodoxy.

The Museum of Pharmacy is near here, an apothecary that was set up long ago by none else but the Dominicans. Like in one of our towns by the sea, I tell my friends. And they know which city I mean. On the other hand, Lviv is full of various museums, big and small, and one would need months and not a long weekend to visit them all. So I visit none.

Large and beautiful, the Jesuit Church was rebuilt in the 18th century after a fire. Its walls were painted by the best Galician artists of the 1840s, and it is devoted today to St. Peter and St. Paul. If I remember well, it served as a storehouse for books in Soviet days. Once the roof started leaking, the precious old prints yielded to devastation. These were some ahistorical times, when everything was beginning from the start, and the mystical and historical memory of bygone periods were replaced with ghastly memories of a period that was to last forever.
Yet, Lviv was very lucky, also with Soviets. They turned churches into warehouses, true, but they neither demolished nor damaged them; they left the city more or less what it was, without ruining the old to build the new. It remains unknown what made them so attentive, as unlike the Nazis, the Bolsheviks had no reasons to become captivated with the spirit of Viennese architecture. Stalin had no talent as a watercolour painter, but, as the books say, he was exceptionally gifted musically and sang beautifully.

Every journey has its unexpected culmination – the moment when everything acquires its true reason and goal, frequently having nothing in common with the intentions of the traveller and the reason for the travel itself.
The Armenians are an ancient Lviv people; they have lived here since the 14th century, when they started to build up their cathedral, which can be found in the street bearing their name, in a district that they used to inhabit in large numbers. Standing in the courtyard is the wondrously beautiful wooden crucifix against a Calvary presented in minute detail. The crucifix and Calvary are protected by a small shingle covered roof, for which historians of art certainly have a name, so that they laugh at the naïve descriptions of the visitors, and which, together with the atrium, recalls a bygone cycle of Armenian feature films that were shown on our TV every Sunday when the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia still existed. It was one year, when I was 15 or perhaps 16.

We enter the church as the mass begins. Sounds of an ancient language are heard from the altar; the celebrant is singing in a loud baritone that at times sounds like the deep tones of the organ, but I hear it from the side, as a sonic decoration, when I am trying to take a photograph of a near improbable wall painting with my smart phone (there will finally come a time when telephones get smart and people stupid). I give up and at the last moment I see a procession from the altar approaching me, so I manage to escape to the side on time. The procession stops in front of the painting: the not too tall man, in the robes of the Bishop of Jerusalem from before the crusades, with a face in which there is nothing of an old man but which is old in itself, boasting over 2,000 years, much like his voice, words, and melody. The melody comes absolutely from beyond the impression that he church rite evokes, and from beyond the division into major and minor, into cheerful and sad. What he’s singing is in a way older than grief and joy, or perhaps superior to them.

Men in modest black clothes and girls with carelessly covered heads gather around the celebrant. The bishop intones, and they answer. The voices overlap one another, building an architecture of melody and rhythm that is perfectly harmonised with the architecture of this construction, and with the architecture of our bodies. This is what it looks like at the moment. This is what it sounds.

I’ve never experienced anything like that. Two thousand years in a very short fragment of time and alignment of everything with everything which, I assume, they call God. I have arrived in Lviv to experience it. The fresco in front of which the Armenian procession stopped, was made between 1925 and 1929 by a Polish Art Nouveau painter, Jan Henryk Rosen. This is a scene of the funeral of St. Odilo of Cluny, patron saint of rescuing souls from the Purgatory, a Benedictine monk who, in the days of hunger, sold the church gold to feed the poor. St. Odilo is accompanied by three figures: the Past cloaked with a black hood, the Present looking at us, and Future striding in the front with eyes closed. The face of the Present is a self portrait of Jan Rosen. A handsome, stern man of over 35, he is a highly praised artist, who, however, has yet had nothing important happening to him in life.

Jan Rosen was a Varsovian, a veteran of the First World War, who took part in the battle of Ypres and the Somme. After the war, he became a military advisor to the League of Nations in Geneva, and from 1921 worked for the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. At the time he began to take seriously to art, and was first noticed by Józef Teodorowicz, the Armenian Bishop of Lviv, who invited him to paint the cathedral. For several following years, Rosen travelled throughout Poland and Central Europe, practising unorthodox and exciting church painting, and his works allow a clear sensation of the spirit of the time in which they originated. In 1937, the Ambassador of Poland in Washington, count Jerzy Potocki, ordered from him a painting of “Sobieski at Vienna” for the embassy. This is the Sobieski, King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania, who in 1683, fought against the previously unvanquished Turkish army, and by winning in the battle of Vienna channelled the entire history of Europe. In the “Chronicles of the Turkish Sultans”, Sobieski was honoured with the pseudonym of the Polish Lion. (It fit him well, as he was Lviv born. I stood on Saturday and Sunday in front of Sobieski’s house, which is no palace at all, but I did not walk inside...).

Rosen went to Washington and never returned home. His life, he spent in exile, proudly, the Polish way, painting stained glass decorations, frescoes, mosaics, and two years before his death – and he died at 91 – on special order of Pope John Paul II, he painted St. Stanislaus, a bygone predecessor of Wojtyła on the seat of the Bishop of Krakow.

Rosen was buried in Arlington Cemetery near Washington, where a friend of mine, S. M. the poet whom I saw off on a plane to America, lives. It was a few hours before I flew from the same gate H17. Improbable how important it is for a human that everything in his life is connected, and that in such a form it exists in guises of sense.
When I was sitting before the audience telling them about my book and about a certain – very distant in time – siege and war, which I remember as if it happened to another me; a few girls in the room were crying. Later, one of them approached me with a book and asked for a dedication for a friend who was going to the front in the coming days. I wrote it. I know such tears very well, and I tremble before what they will turn into in the end. The goal of the in vader is to mix the attacked, always weaker and less numerous, with a negative projection of their propaganda. Today, they are told that they are fascists, so as to turn them into fascists in the end. Today, they are told that they are Islamists and Jihadists, to turn them into Islamists and Jihadists in the end. In our case, he was fully successful in that. With identical young girl’s tears. I believe that he will not be successful in Ukraine. It is a huge, rich country, of major culture, many religions and languages, with powerful culture and literature. Ukrainian propaganda most often has the face of Taras Shevchenko, moustached, with unkempt hair. He is juxtaposed with the portraits of the shaved and pale, Vladimir Vladimirovich. Who resorts to such defences cannot finish were his enemy would like to see him. This I believe, and this I desire. If it happens so, our defeats will be given their dignity back.

Ten steps away from the door of the hotel, there is Masoch Café, and in front of it stands an exceptionally successful caricature of Leopold Sacher Masoch, who was born and lived in Lviv until he was 12. The bronze figure is of a height of a not too tall a man, and has a hole in the heart, as the young man had his heart ripped out. Ladies take photographs with him, and put their hands into his left pocket, in which there is also a hole. There is something interesting in that pocket, yet four days have gone, and I have not put my hand in there. I don’t know, perhaps you call that homophobia. In my district, there was a tramp they called Kenedi. When he grew up and became a man, and I believe he must have been ten or eleven at the time, he would stand at the gate of the school yard and urge girls to put their hand into his pocket, because he had a sweet in there. Those from the first and second grades did, perhaps out of fear, and they escaped screaming. There was a hole in Kenedi’s pocket.

Just next to the monument, there is an entrance to a house, in which people live, and which, like most houses in “Serbian” Street is 200 years old. Sitting on its stone threshold every morning and looking at the passers by is a huge rusty cat in a flea collar. Once they have put their hand into the pocket of sad faced Leopold, the girls grasp the opportunity and take photographs of themselves with the cat. On the fourth morning, the cat was not there on the threshold. A sign that I was leaving.

Translated from the Polish by Piotr Krasnowolski

The guidebook says that the Main Square is probably the greatest public square in Europe. I like this Polish, Gombrowiczean modesty contained in the word “probably”, because a certain South Slavic country as if from tabloids, originating from ancient Iranian peoples and Visigoths, would substitute the word “probably” with “certainly”. I walk around the Main Square: there are no market stalls, souvenir vendors, patriotic accessories, or national flags in sight; there is nothing that would imply that this square or Poland’s most famous city belongs to a specific family of nobles. Passers by are given the right to decide for themselves, what Kraków is and who it belongs to; to discover and to reconstruct a private history of this wondrous city.

Kraków, Lviv, Drohobych, Przemyśl, and Ternopil are cities of the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, a mythical European country, which occupies a special place among fantastic, unreal, imaginary, or lost European cities. Galicia, presently divided between Poland and Ukraine, is a metaphor and a lasting, inconsolable misery of the insatiable world. In the last decades of Austria Hungary, it was the poorest among the Habsburg provinces (excluding Bosnia and Herzegovina), a country of the most excellent identities, a country of many languages and many cultures, a country of miracles – and a country, in which the most terrible European prophecies have been fulfilled, in which all eastern Jewish worlds will be destroyed completely and which, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, will re emerge as a joint metaphor of two feuding neighbouring nations drenched in blood: Poles and Ukrainians.

In the largest Main Square, at the International Cultural Centre Gallery, between October 2014 and March 2015, an exhibition entitled “The Myth of Galicia” was held, which will be moved to Vienna Museum Karlsplatz, where it will remain open through the spring. It is a multimedia based thematic exhibition devoted to the question, which does not require an answer, because it only makes sense when unanswerable. We can see exquisite oil paintings: academic portraits of Emperor and King Franz Joseph I and his family, depictions of Galician peasants, illiterate highlanders and shepherds, townswomen from Krakow and Lviv, identity documents, bank statements, imperial and royal railway stocks, receipts, lists, obituaries, front pages of newspapers, which were published in more than a dozen languages and represented twice as many nationalities, national and cultural identities, and conflicting political ideologies. And, obviously, many different symbols of nobility, banners and coats of arms, including the most common coat of arms, appearing in various forms, of Halych, from the 15th century – and since 1806 Galicia’s coat of arms, a jackdaw over three crowns.

Jackdaws are smart little birds in the crow family, found across Central and Eastern Europe and in North Africa, which they reach travelling on cargo ships, physically incapable of flying such long distances. Variant forms of the surname derived from the Czech word “kavka” (jackdaw) can be observed in Galicia, Central Europe, and Bosnia – like, for example, one of the most celebrated ophthalmologists of his time, the Bosnian Serb Vladimir Čavka, or the Jewish writer from Prague, employed by a Trieste based insurance company, whose name was Franz Kafka. Some people believe that jackdaws bring good fortune; a jackdaw perching on the roof is also said to harbinger visitors. Although it was not beliefs that made the bird part of the Galician coat of arms, the fact that it harbingers a visit is a perfect metaphor for the history of Galicia. It used to be a country of visitors, most of all, a country, in which nobody was a host more than anyone else and everyone was far from their centre, thrown out of the orbit of their national affiliation, far away from the capital, from their first and their second Rome. It was this decentralisation that made them so deeply rooted in Galicia. And this is what makes Galicia undying today, at least in the European imaginary of cultures and literatures.

On one of the walls, among dozens of inscriptions and descriptions in Polish and English, we find as if a warning to the viewer prone to over romanticise the diversity of Galicia: an explanation that it used to be a melting pot of languages, nations, and religions, a home of tolerance but also a home of hatred. This made me wistfully remember Ivo Andrić, who studied here, at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków (he did not complete his studies, but was awarded the degree honoris causa in 1973) – whose view of his native Bosnia was similar (as evidenced in his famous “Letter from the Year 1920”). However, in the same way as Andrić remained misunderstood – driven out of Zagreb and Croatian literature, excluded by Bosnian Muslim literary luminaries and nationalists – those who can recognise this duality of hatred and convergence, hatred and mutual recognition in Galicia have been misunderstood.

The Galician exhibition is accompanied by a large, 500 page cloth bound hardback album with several hundred pictures and facsimiles, reproduced so vividly that they bring to mind the heroic age of copperplate engraving. The quality of print and unrivalled Polish graphic art (by the way, why are the only Croatian book designs that deserve to be displayed alongside Polish publications ones by Mihajlo Arsovski and his contemporaries?) is a pure feast for the eyes, but both the catalogue and the exhibition provide a key to understanding the myth of Galicia, namely, a diversity of viewpoints.

An introduction, which explains the real and the imaginary history of the no longer existent kingdom, is followed by interpretations of Galicia as an Austrian, Polish, Ukrainian, and Jewish myth, which gives us an idea of the Galician myth of Galicia. The texts – do we need to add this? – were written by authors from different countries and their diverse perspectives are not theoretical, but are genuinely interpretative. One thinks and speaks of Galicia as a remembered, documented, and experienced tradition, so the impression that the exhibition and the catalogue leave is completely non political; their overall tone is never conciliatory, or pro European. This exhibition is an art event, a manifesto, and also a literary adventure in itself. It certainly offers a theme we could write essays on – or translate into grand epics... Polish as well as Ukrainian writers have often done both. (Just a few steps on, in a shop window, I saw a novel that has made the headlines in Poland since its release in autumn 2014: “Księga Jakubowa” (“Jacob’s Scriptures”) by my favourite Olga Tokarczuk. I enter the bookshop and I pick up the book of over 1,000 pages, which revolves around the character of Jakub Frank, a Jewish rabbi and dissenter, who easily transgresses the boundaries between religion and identity, the East and the West, Christianity and Judaism, Christianity and the Ottoman Empire... Jakub Frank was not a Galician in the narrow sense, and yet he was Galician; Jakub Frank is a child of this astounding and unthinkable world...).

Among the exhibits are incredibly moving suggestive anti Semitic postcards from the late 19th century, in which the Catholic majority ridiculed their Jewish neighbours. The iconography of these postcards, their visual narrative and style served as a model for Nazi propaganda, enthusiastically picked up by the Ustaše and Positive Christianity in 1941 – which was also evident in the hideous anti Jewish exhibition in 1942 – but it is not very hard to imagine that these depictions of Jews as usurers, long fingered petty merchants with portable stalls, hung around their necks, laden with combs, hand mirrors, and hair grips, had an entirely different effect on people then. They hated their neighbours, because they were taught this hatred by the Church, because their neighbours were poor, unusual, different, and because they were also hated by them – but this hatred will turn fatal and destructive only during the 1930s in Germany, when the iconography of anti Semitism will take on the sense that it has now.

But we can also see pictures of Jewish acrobats and gymnasts, among whom there will be advocates of Zionism – the ultimate separation and return to the ancient homeland. Galicia was a fertile ground for diverse and opposing views rooted in particularistic nationalist and racist myths, as well as in universal myths of brotherhood and mutual understanding between all people. In Galicia, Europe could have united, but it did not. Here, Ukrainians and Poles became reconciled after a bloody war they waged under Nazi occupation. Galicia has been a place of break up and reunion. In the 1960s, Poles appealed to Germans: “We forgive and ask for your forgiveness.” Then, Ukrainians often said the same thing to Poles, from Lviv. This land is soaked in their blood – and there is more of this blood there than in all of the Balkan countries put together. We Croatians also contributed to the bloodshed in Galicia, as did Bosnia, on an even larger scale, in the battles of Lemberg and Przemyśl, in 1914 and 1915. I tell them that there is also a Bosnian myth of Galicia, although it is only connected with the war. My fellow countrymen know very well how to die for their homeland, but they have no idea what to do if they survive. You have Olga Tokarczuk, I say, you have Oksana Zabuzhko; your myth is literature, ours is violence.

I am looking at a large portrait of Franz Joseph I and his family, and I am trying to recognise his nephew Franz Ferdinand I, a schoolmate of Gavrilo Princip, a hundred years later, in Kraków, in my land, in fatherland not mine.

Translated from the Polish by Paweł Łopatka

Articles were originally published in the “Jutarnji list” daily on 20th October and 6th November 2014.

Miljenko Jergović – poet, prose writer, columnist. One of the greatest Croatian writers. His prose and poetry are translated into many languages. Winner of several Bosnian and Croatian awards, as well as the E.M. Remarque Award and Premio Napoli. For the novel "Ruta Tannenbaum" in 2007 he was honored with the Meša Selimovic for the best novel in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Croatia and Montenegro, and was nominated for the Angelus Central European Literary Award. This award was won by his next novel, “Srda pjeva, u sumrak, na Duhove” [Srda sings, at dusk, on Pentecost, 2011].
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