Lvov

(lyəvôf`), city, Ukraine: see LvivLviv
, Rus. Lvov, Pol. Lwów, Ger. Lemberg, city (1989 pop. 791,000), capital of Lviv region, W Ukraine, at the watershed of the Western Bug and Dniester rivers and in the northern foothills of the Carpathian Mts.
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L’vov

a city and the center of L’vov Oblast, Ukrainian SSR. Located in a hilly area on the watershed of the Bug and Dnestr rivers, the city has an airport and is a highway and railroad junction, with lines to Kiev, Odessa, Mostiska, Ivano-Fran-kovsk-Chernovtsy, and Stryi-Chop. It is divided into five urban raions. Population, 594,000 (1973; 340,000 in 1939, 411,000 in 1959).

First mentioned in the chronicles under the year 1256, the city was founded by the Galician-Volynian prince Daniil Romanovich, who named the city after his son Lev. During the 13th and 14th centuries it was a major handicraft and commercial center, and its people actively fought the Mongol-Tatars. In 1356 it received Magdeburg law. Seized by the Polish feudal lords in 1349, L’vov belonged to Hungary from 1370 to 1387, when it reverted to Poland. The L’vov Brotherhood, founded in the 16th century, played an important role in the Ukrainian people’s struggle against national and religious oppression by the Polish nobility. In 1704 the city was captured by the Swedes. By the first partition of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1772, L’vov passed to Austria as part of Galicia and was renamed Lemberg. In November 1848, during the bourgeois revolution in Austria, an uprising occurred in the city. As capitalism developed, the city became the industrial, commercial, and cultural center of Galicia. It was part of Austria-Hungary from 1867 to 1918.

At the turn of the century I. Ia. Franko, the Ukrainian writer and democratic revolutionary, lived and worked in L’vov. Between 1901 and 1903, L’vov was one of the points through which Lenin’s newspaper Iskra was smuggled into Russia. On June 2, 1902, street fighting broke out between workers and Austrian troops.

During World War I (1914-1918), Russian forces occupied the city from September 1914 to June 1915. After the collapse of Austria-Hungary, the bourgeois-nationalist National Rada seized power on Nov. 1, 1918, proclaiming the formation of the “Western-Ukrainian Republic” in Galicia. On Nov. 21, 1918, gentry Poland seized L’vov, and from 1919 to 1939 it was the administrative center of Lwow Wojewodztwo. Under the leadership of the Communist Party of the Western Ukraine, the city’s workers struggled for social and national liberation and for reunification with the Soviet Ukraine, staging political demonstrations in 1922 and strikes in 1929-30. On Sept. 22, 1939, the Red Army liberated L’vov, and that same year, when the Western Ukraine was reunited with the Ukrainian SSR, L’vov became an oblast center of the Ukrainian SSR. On June 30, 1941, the city was captured by fascist German forces, which inflicted great damage. The city was liberated by the Soviet Army on July 27, 1944, during the L’vov-Sandomierz operation. Under the leadership of the Communist Party and with the fraternal aid of the Russian people, the city and its industries were fully reconstructed during the first postwar five-year plan. In subsequent years L’vov developed as an economic, scientific, and cultural center. In 1971 the city was awarded the Order of Lenin.

Today L’vov is one of the Ukraine’s major industrial centers, with a gross industrial product in 1972 that was 61.7 times that of 1940. The leading industry is machine building. The city produces motor vehicles and hoisting and transport machinery (buses, automatic loaders, conveyors), television sets, electronic devices (kinescopes), medical instruments (radio-electronic medical apparatus), agricultural machinery (at the L’vovsel’-mash Factory), and gas appliances. Other factories include L’vovpribor and enterprises producing biophysical devices, tools, milling machines, and diamond-cutting instruments. The city’s light industry manufactures footwear, knitwear, and clothing, and the food-processing industry is represented by a dairy, creamery, meat combine, brewery, winery, and confectionery factories. There are also glass and ceramics plants, enterprises making reinforced-concrete products, an oil refinery, chemicalpharmaceutical and paint and varnish plants, printing enterprises, and factories producing furniture, cardboard, and musical instruments.

The early architecture of L’vov has survived in ruins, in almost completely reconstructed buildings (the Roman Catholic churches of St. Mary and St. John the Baptist), or in sections incorporated into later structures (the white St. Nicholas Church); these three churches have existed since the 13th century. In the center of L’vov, surrounding Market Square, are found many specimens of civil, chiefly residential, and religious architecture of the 16th to 19th centuries. The Gothic cathedral, built between 1360 and 1493 by the architects P. Stecher and M. Grom and restored in the 18th century, contains Renaissance and baroque sculptural decoration and paintings, 16th-and 17th-century funerary sculpture and carved altars, and Renaissance chapels with burial vaults (the Boim chapel, 1609-17; the Kampianow chapel, 1609-29, architect, Pawiel Rimlanin). The Armenian cathedral, whose nucleus dates from 1363-70, reflects 12th- and 13th-century Armenian architectural styles.

Renaissance architecture includes the buildings erected by the L’vov Brotherhood: the Church of the Assumption (1591-1631; architects, Pawiel Rimlanin, W. Kapinos, and A. Prihylny), the Korniact bell tower (1572-78; architect, P. Barbon), and the Chapel of the Three Prelates (1578-91). Also in the Renaissance style is the group of residences on Market Square, including the Black House (late 16th-early 17th centuries) and the Korniact House (1580; architect, P. Barbon). The classical style is represented by the town hall on Market Square (now the city soviet; reconstructed 1827-35) and residences from the late 18th and early 19th centuries on Armenian, Krakow, and Theater streets. Among the city’s baroque buildings are the Roman Catholic Bernardine church (1600-30; architects, Pawiel Rimlanin and A. Prihylny), the Dominican church (1749-64; architects Jan de Witt and M. Urbanik), the Royal Arsenal (now the oblast archive; 1630’s, architect, P. Grodzicki), and the Cathedral of St. George (1744-70; architects, B. Meretin and S. K. Fessinger).

Many buildings from the late 19th century reflect an eclectic approach, notably, the former Galician Sejm building (now the I. Franko University of L’vov; 1877-81; architect, J. Hochbiergier), the I. Franko L’vov Academic Theater of Opera and Ballet (1897-1900; architect, Z. Gorgolewski), and the building formerly occupied by the Dnestr Insurance Company (1905; chief architects, J. J. Lewinski and A. O. Łupszyriski). In the Soviet period a general plan for the rebuilding and modernization of L’vov was prepared in 1956 and revised in 1966 by the architects A. V. Barabash, A. I. Stanislavskii, and I. S. Persikov. In accordance with this plan extensive residential construction has been undertaken, such as the housing district on Bogdan Khmel’nitskii Street built between 1962 and 1973 by the architects N. V. Mikula and Ia. I. Nazarkevich. Among noteworthy public buildings that have been erected are those of the L’vov Polytechnic Institute: the building housing the department of chemistry and technology (1968; architect, N. V. Mikula) and the laboratory and library (1972; architects, P. P. Mar’ev, G. I. Rakhuba-Koziura, and R. P. lukhtovskii). The L’vov Hotel was built in 1969 by the architects A. D. Konsulov, P. P. Kont, and L. D. Nivina.

The city’s monuments include those to V. I. Lenin (bronze and granite, 1952; sculptor, S. D. Merkurov) and to A. Mickiewicz (bronze and granite, 1905; sculptors, A. L. Popiel and M. I. Paraszczuk). The Hill of Glory is a famous architectural and sculptural ensemble in the cemetery of Soviet fighting men (1946-52; architects, A. V. Natal’chenko and G. L. Shvetsko-Vinetskii; sculptors, M. G. Lysenko and V. F. Forostetskii). A granite memorial to I. Franko was erected in 1964 (sculptors, V. N. Borisenko, D. P. Krvavich, E. P. Mis’ko, V. P. Odrikhivskii, and Ia. I. Sheka; architect, A. M. Shuliar). The bronze and granite Monument to the Combat Glory of the Soviet Armed Forces was raised in 1971 (sculptors, D. P. Krvavich, E. P. Mis’ko, and Ia. N. Motyka; monument artist, A. P. Pirozhkov; architects, M. D. Vendzilovich and A. S. Ogranovich), and a bronze and granite monument to Ia. Galan was erected in 1972 by the sculptor A. P. Pylev and the architect V. I. Bliusiuk.

L’vov is one of the leading cultural centers of the Ukraine, with ten higher educational institutions, including the university, the polytechnic, and institutes of printing, wood technology, medicine, and agriculture. There are also 26 specialized secondary schools. The Western Scientific Center of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR is based in L’vov, and some 40 research institutions are located in the city, of which 11 are affiliated with the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR.

Cultural institutions functioning in L’vov in 1971 include the I. Franko Academic Theater of Opera and Ballet, the M. Zan’-kovetskaia Ukrainian Academic Drama Theater (with a drama studio), the Young People’s Theater, the Soviet Army Theater, and the Puppet Theater. There is a circus, a philharmonic society (which includes a symphony orchestra, the Trembit chorus, and variety-stage groups), a conservatory with an opera studio, a music school, a school of choreography, and people’s amateur theaters. Among the city’s ten museums are a branch of the Central V. I. Lenin Museum, the Historical Museum, and the L’vov Museum of Ukrainian Art. The picture gallery, founded in 1907, contains Russian, Ukrainian, and Western European art of the 14th to 20th centuries. The Museum of Ethnography and Artistic Crafts of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR, established in 1951, houses primarily Ukrainian decorative applied art of the 16th to 20th centuries. The Museum of Folk Architecture and Life, founded in 1971, exhibits wood architecture of the western oblasts of the Ukraine. The city has a television station.

REFERENCES

Ostrovskii, G. S. L’vov. Leningrad-Moscow, 1965.
Derkach, I. S. L’vov. [L’vov] 1969. (Translated from Ukrainian).
Ocherki istorii L’ovskoi oblastnoi partiinoi organizatsii, 2nd ed. L’vov, 1969.
Nel’govs’kyi, Iu. P., and A. M. Shuliar. L’viv. Kiev, 1969.

S. K. KILESSO (architecture) and O. I. SHABLII

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