Old Russian Lvov 1256-1349
In 1256 Daniel Romanovich of Galicia, the prince of the Kievan Rus principality of Galicia-Volhynia, built a castle for his son Lev on the site of today's Lviv. From this Lev (Old East Slavic for lion) the city got its name Lvov - "belonging to Lev or to the lion". The lion also appears in the coat of arms and in numerous stone sculptures of the city. The favorable location at the crossroads of trade routes allowed the city to grow rapidly. However, the ravages of Rus by the Mongols as well as tribute payments soon undermined the power of Galicia-Volhynia. After the local line of the Rurikid dynasty died out, Lvov fell first to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in 1340, then to Poland in 1349.
Polish Lwów 1349-1772
In 1356, the Polish King Casimir the Great granted Magdeburg city rights; German citizens, Jews as well as Roman Catholics settled in the city to a greater extent than before. In the same year, the Armenians received privileges from Casimir. The official language was now German for almost 200 years. The seal of the town council read in Latin S(igillum): CIVITATIS LEMBVRGENSIS. In 1387, after a short Hungarian rule, the town came back to the Kingdom of Poland. From 1375 to 1772, Lwów was the capital of the Polish Ruthenian Voivodeship and the Lvivian Land (Ziemia lwowska), since 1569 in the Noble Republic of Poland-Lithuania.
In the early modern period, the city developed into an important trading center and - along with Kraków, Vilnius and Warsaw - a center of Polish cultural and intellectual life. The near environs of Lwów became a Polish language island, but the area remained predominantly Ukrainian-speaking. In the 16th century, Lvov was home to the Russian Ivan Fedorov, one of the first East Slavic book printers after the Belarusian Francysk Skaryna.
During the Khmelnytskyi Uprising and the Russian-Polish War of 1654-1667, Lvov was besieged by the Zaporozhian Cossacks in 1648 and 1655. The city received the predicate semper fidelis ("always faithful") because it repeatedly defended itself against besiegers during the 17th century.
Founded in 1661 by the Polish King John II. Casimir, is the oldest university in Ukraine today.
Austrian Lviv 1772-1918
In 1772, with the first partition of Poland, the city fell to the Habsburg monarchy. Lviv became the capital of the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria and the fourth largest city in the multiethnic state. Initially, Emperor Joseph II wanted to impose German as the language of administration, as he did throughout his dominions. From the time of Maria Theresa's school reform until about 1850, instruction in the secondary and trivial schools was exclusively in German, which was problematic because - as the Polish author Kazimierz Brodziński recalled - Polish children could only acquire the subject matter by memorizing it without understanding it.
In 1778 a German Evangelical Lutheran congregation was founded in Lviv. Its most active representative was the merchant Johann Friedrich Preschel.
In the middle of the 19th century, the composition of the civil service changed. While 600 of the 800 civil servants had previously been German, the relative autonomy of the Kingdom of Galicia from 1867 led to the rapid addition of Polish as a second language. Now mainly Poles functioned as officials of the Viennese k.k. Government in Galicia.
From 1867, when the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary was formed, the Galicians had uniform Austrian citizenship and were represented in the Imperial Council, the parliament of Cisleithania in Vienna, by Polish and, after the extension of the electoral law, also by Ruthenian deputies. The Imperial Law Gazette published in Vienna was also published in Polish from 1867 and in Ruthenian from 1870.
Lviv was the seat of the k.k. Statthalter (the representative of the emperor and his government), the Sejm (regional parliament), three archbishops (Roman Catholic, Greek Catholic, Armenian Catholic), who by virtue of their office were members of the Herrenhaus of the Austrian Imperial Council, and a chief rabbi. From 1804 to 1870 the city was also the seat of the Evangelical Superintendency A. B. Galicia. Consulates of Great Britain, France, Germany, Russia and Denmark were located in Lviv. The Galician capital had a university and a polytechnic, both with Polish language of instruction, four Polish, one German and one Ruthenian grammar schools.
Around 1900, about half of the inhabitants were Poles, a quarter Jews, and 30,000 Ruthenians (the term for Ukrainians at the time). The latter were discriminated against by the Polish population. In 1908, three Polish k.k. Gendarmes killed a Ruthenian peasant, after which the Ukrainian philosophy student Miroslaw Siczynski shot the governor, Count Andrzej Kazimierz Potocki. Bloody clashes between Polish and Ruthenian students followed.
Before World War I, Lviv was - with Krakow and Przemyśl Fortress - one of the largest garrisons of the Austro-Hungarian army in the east of the Empire. The location was a cornerstone for the protection of the Austro-Hungarian border against the Russian Empire. The Russian army captured Lviv at the end of August 1914 and advanced far to the west. Lviv remained occupied by Russia until June 1915 and was also threatened several times until the Russian Revolution of 1917.
Polish Lwów 1918-1939
At the end of World War I, the West Ukrainian People's Republic was established in Lviv on November 1, 1918, but Poland gained control after sometimes fierce fighting in the Polish-Ukrainian War. Polish troops occupied the city on Nov. 21-22, 1918, and 64 people were killed in a pogrom against the Jewish population that lasted from Nov. 22-24, according to the report of Henry Morgenthau, Sr. Many were injured or robbed. It was proved that some of the Polish officers, soldiers and civilians were responsible. Also involved were members of the Jewish militia (a dozen were arrested) and deserters from the Galician army. Among the victims of the looting were also parts of the Polish and Ukrainian population. The act of violence permanently shook the previously quite harmonious coexistence of the various ethnic groups and religions in Lwów in the interwar period.
The city had 361,000 inhabitants at that time, most of them Poles (between 50 and 53 percent in 1912, over 55 percent from 1925), a third majority of Polonized Jews, and also Ukrainians, Germans and Polish Armenians. The majority of Ukrainians (about four to five-sixths of the population, depending on the district) lived in the area surrounding the city. In the interwar years, Lviv remained both a stronghold of Polish culture and a focal point of Ukrainian national feeling; however, the Habsburg supranational identity also remained present in the background. The Lviv-Warsaw School of Logic was world-renowned in the field of philosophy.
Administratively, as part of the Second Polish Republic, the city was the capital of the Lwów Voivodeship of the same name from 1921.
World War II
In September 1939, as a result of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, Lvov was incorporated into the Ukrainian Soviet Republic by the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland in 1939 until 1941. The Polish army had offered fierce resistance to German troops despite artillery and air bombardment, as the area had been planned as a supply route for the Allies via Romania. This plan had not taken into account that Germany and the Soviet Union could have been Allied. Three days after the appearance of Soviet troops, the fighting stopped on September 22, 1939. The Germans left the city to the Soviet troops as agreed in the pact and withdrew. As everywhere in the Soviet Union, forced collectivization of economic associations and peasant farms now took place in Soviet-occupied Lvov. At that time, about 160,000 Poles, 150,000 Jews and 50,000 Ukrainians lived in the city.
Between the beginning of the German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941 and the entry of the German Wehrmacht into Lvov, Soviet forces (mainly the NKVD) killed about 4000 political prisoners. In the early morning of June 30, 1941, the 1st Mountain Division under Major General Hubert Lanz and the Baulehrbataillon z. b. V. 800 "Die Brandenburger", supported by the Ukrainian volunteer battalion "Nachtigall", captured the city without resistance. That same day, members of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists-Banderists (OUN-B) led by Yaroslav Stetsko proclaimed the restoration of Ukrainian independence from the balcony of the Lubomirsky Palace. However, they were arrested by the Gestapo a few days later, as the German side did not want a Ukrainian state. Lvov became part of the German General Government and now functioned again under the name of Lviv as the capital of the district of Galicia.
The NKVD massacre of Ukrainian prisoners was exploited for propaganda purposes by the Wehrmacht units, the Nightingale Battalion and the Ukrainian nationalist and anti-Semitic OUN-B militia. This fueled a pogrom atmosphere directed against the Jewish civilian population. In mass killings on the first days of the German occupation, about 4,000 Jews died, some in "spontaneous" riots by Ukrainian militia and civilians in the city, but most in an organized mass execution by Einsatzgruppe C on the outskirts of the city on July 4, 1941. In addition, on the night of July 3 to 4, 1941, the Gestapo under then SS-Oberführer Karl Eberhard Schöngarth arrested 22 Polish professors, according to a list prepared with the help of Ukrainian students, and murdered them, in some cases also their relatives.
The district captain and thus supreme civil ruler in Lemberg was subsequently Joachim Freiherr von der Leyen from Krefeld. Almost all Jewish Lviv residents were subsequently murdered, including in the Lviv ghetto set up by the Nazis, in the municipal forced labor camp Lemberg-Janowska, and in the Belzec extermination camp. Almost all synagogues were destroyed. Only two buildings still exist today. In total, about 540,000 people were killed in concentration and prison camps in Lviv and its surroundings during the Nazi period, 400,000 of them Jews, including about 130,000 Lviv citizens. The remaining 140,000 victims were Russian prisoners.
As part of the German euthanasia policy, 2000 patients of the Kulparkow institution were murdered between 1941 and 1944. In addition, the Institute for Spotted Fever and Virus Research of the Army High Command was also located in Lviv.
Later in Lviv there was Prisoner of War Camp 275 for German prisoners of war of the Second World War. Near the camp there was a POW cemetery with over 800 graves. Those who were seriously ill were cared for in Prisoner of War Hospital 1241.
| Population composition in Lviv
in percent |
| Ethnic group | 1900 | 1931 | 1959 | 2001 |
| Ukrainians | 19,9 | 15,9 | 60,0 | 88,1 |
| Russians | 000 | 00,2 | 27,0 | 08,9 |
| Jews | 26,5 | 31,9 | 06,0 | 00,3 |
| Poland | 49,4 | 50,4 | 04,0 | 00,9 |
Soviet Lvov 1945-1991
When the city came under Soviet rule again in the course of the Lviv-Sandomierz operation in 1944, most of the Poles living there were expelled. Part of the population was settled in Lower Silesia, especially in Wroclaw, after the Germans living there were expelled. Many Ukrainians who had previously lived in Polish western Galicia and central Poland were simultaneously forcibly resettled from Poland and settled by the USSR in or near Lvov. This fundamentally changed the ethnic and cultural composition of the city. The traditional Polish, Jewish and Armenian populations were replaced by Ukrainians.
The Soviet authorities began the reconstruction of the city, which was accompanied by the influx of skilled workers from all over the USSR and the industrialization of Lvov. By the 1980s, 137 large factories had been established, producing buses (LAZ), trucks, televisions, and machinery. The city population grew from 330,000 to 760,000. At the same time, nationalist currents among western Ukrainians were suppressed.
Ukrainian Lviv from 1991
Lviv has been part of independent Ukraine since 1991. Since then, autonomy aspirations have repeatedly emanated from Galicia, not least because of Lviv's history as the capital of its own kingdom. The city celebrated the 750th anniversary of its existence in the fall of 2006.
