The Fairytale Cemetery

Arriving at 6am in Lwow on a ludicrously slow night train from Poland (having shortly before been woken by Ukrainian border guards with enormous German shepherds, who stamped our passports and vanished again as if part of our dreams) my family and I began a whirlwind twelve hour tour. With the toilet on the train having been out of service I left the overly happy tour guide and my family as I ran to the nearest public toilet. The beauty of the train station, with its ornate ceilings and marble floor, and the feeling of having stepped back in time was put on hold as I found the bathroom. Handing over some Ukrainian Hryvnia and being bemusedly handed a roll of paper I locked myself in a cubicle to be confronted by a monstrosity. A hole in the ground. No. I left and waited an hour or so more until we had breakfast in a restaurant. That was the low point. Or rather, when crossing the road from the train station and I managed to twist my ankle on the uneven cobblestones was the lowest point!

The high point and highlight of the whirlwind tour was taking a bus out to the edge of the city and, with the tour guides insistence, sneaking across some train tracks, through a back fence into Lychakiv cemetery. Presumably this was to avoid paying a tourist tax of some kind. Any qualms I had melted away as soon as we entered the cemetery itself. Set in a large wood, the cemetery is like something out of a romantic fairytale – parts were overgrown with stone gargoyles peering out from bushes, whilst tidier sections ere home to enormous mausoleums (the story of each known to the wily tour guide). Cemeteries are not usually thought of as attractive places, but they can be. Hauntingly beautiful but not morbidly so. Highgate cemetery in North London, resting place of Karl Marx, and the Great War military cemeteries in northern France are the first to spring to mind.

We visited the exclusively Polish part – for the fallen from the battle for Lwow in 1918 (between Poles and Ukrainians), where volunteer pilots from the U.S also found their final resting spot. The beauty of the Lychakiv cemetery was deeper than simply the first, visual layer. Lwow is a city that for centuries had been beyond doubt Polish, but is unquestionably Ukrainian now. Despite conflict between the two, in the cemetery the dead from both sides sleep together. Resting in peace. It gave me pause for reflection. This trip was made in 2013, the next year war broke out in eastern Ukraine and rages to this day.