Russia Destroys Its First Polish Heritage Object in Ukraine
Last night I went to bed after 1 AM, only to be awakened an hour later by an air-raid alert. I was too tired and fell asleep again, but with a gnawing premonition that missiles might be coming my way. The first thing I read in the morning was the terrible news from the neighboring city of Lviv, where the Russians had attacked a residential building. As of this writing, there are five dead and more than thirty wounded, but the rescue operations haven’t been completed yet.
As photos, videos, and official statements published today have allowed the identification of the affected building, I would like to tell a few words about it and why it’s special.
To be more specific, it is a complex of 17 adjoining three- and four-story apartment buildings that form a round, or rather trapezoid, structure enclosing a large courtyard, located in the middle part of Stryiska Street, a key thoroughfare, just opposite Stryiskyi Park, one of Lviv’s oldest and largest parks, at the crossroad with Sakharov Street (incidentally, mentioned in my previous article as a street named after a Russian that hasn’t been renamed despite the derussification campaign in Ukraine).
The complex, whose popular name literally translates to “Townhouses,” was designed in 1925 by the architect Michał Ryba (1896–1951) and built in 1926–30 at what then was the outskirts of the city. The original inhabitants were professors of the Lviv Polytechnic University. It is a curious specimen of functionalism, a leading architectural style in interbellum Poland, of which Lviv was part at the time.
And that is precisely why this event is notable. It is the first object related to the Second Polish Republic and, in general, the first Polish heritage object destroyed by Russia in Ukraine.
In October 2022, two Russian missiles landed close to the Catholic Church of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross in the village of Berezdivtsi, some 40 kilometers south of Lviv. This church also has Polish origins, as it was built in the second half of the 18th century, at the time of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, by Bernard Merettiner, a German architect known for St. George’s Cathedral in Lviv and the Buchach Town Hall in today’s Ternopil Oblast. However, the attack did not destroy the church, but only damaged its windows and façade.
Naturally, Russia mostly targets objects from the Soviet times or Ukraine’s independence era, but it has also destroyed many historical buildings dating back to the occupation by the Russian Empire — in Mariupol, Bakhmut, Kharkiv, Chernihiv, Kyiv, and elsewhere. Not all of them were consrtucted by Russians. For example, a number of buildings constructed in the 19th centuries by Belgian industrialists in Lysychansk were shelled in 2022.
The oldest building that can be classified as destroyed (as opposed to simply damaged) is an 18th-century mansion in Kharkiv Oblast that housed a museum of the philosopher Hryhorii Skovoroda, attacked in May 2022.
Among the damaged objects, there are several older ones dating back to the Cossack Hetmanate (an autonomous Ukrainian state that was a protectorate of Muscovy in the 17th and 18th centuries) and even Kyivan Rus, as in the case of two churches and a monastery in Chernihiv and the archaeological site of the city of Iskorosten (today’s Korosten in Zhytomyr Oblast).
And now the terrorists are expanding the cultural and historical geography of their barbarism.
UPDATE1: There are 10 dead and 42 wounded as the result of the attack as of July 8.
UPDATE2: UNESCO has confirmed that the destroyed building is located in the buffer zone of the World Heritage Site of Lviv’s Historic Center, and that it was the first attack in an area protected by the World Heritage Convention since the beginning of this war.