Krakow was once considered a traveler’s haven after the “tourists” had found Prague, but since the tourists have also now discovered Krakow, anyone wanting to protect his or her reputation has to keep moving east into Ukraine.

At the Poland/Ukraine border, the line coming into the newly-EU Poland is chaotic, a suffocating mass of people pressed painfully into each other and the metal fencing that herds them into the customs area. Since few people seem to want to go to Ukraine, though, that bedlam is a sight breezed past, guards barely giving your passports a second glance.

The mini-bus from the border to Lviv is another story. I thought the one I was on was full when we left, every seat taken and a dozen people standing should-to-shoulder in the aisle, but the driver understood “full” in economic terms and continued picking up customers for the entire two hour drive. I spent most of it standing with all my weight on my left foot because an overly large woman was shoving into my right side and someone's box of fruit was between my feet. Soon my leg began to hurt from bearing all my weight, then it began to burn, then finally, thankfully, it went numb. I suppose I could have paid $10 and 3 hours more to take the direct train between the two cities, but that would have made me a tourist.

Lviv is not Ukraine

If you’ve seen one city in Ukraine, you’ve literally seen them all. Between the artillery exchanges in World War II and the burning of every town and field in the Nazi’s systematic retreat from the Soviet army, there are few buildings in Ukraine built before 1945. The Soviets reconstructed the country according to their communist philosophies and now almost every city is row after row of identical apartment buildings.

Except Lviv.

Lviv’s city center was almost untouched during the war, and the Soviets only built their architectural eyesores on the outskirts. This means that when you stand in Lviv today, it’s not 60 years of construction greeting you, but 700.

Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo and Neoclassical buildings all press together hip to hip in a conga line of history. Medieval defensive walls surround a Gothic church ten feet from Neoclassical apartments set flush against a Renaissance university building.

While in Lviv, I often found myself just turning in a slow circle, marveling at the timeline laid before me, all of it existing in beautiful, harmonious, aging grandeur. That aging is also part of Lviv’s appeal.

Because Ukraine still struggles economically and since the “tourists” haven’t found it yet, there is little money to be pumped into upkeep. It's not like, say, in Paris or London where everything is a thousand years old but has been restored in the past 50. Lviv looks old.

I have a weird mindset towards restoration. I understand that you get to see how a place once looked, but I also feel that its authenticity is robbed in the process. Someone can point to a building in Budapest and tell me "that building is 300 years old", but it's hard to believe because it was refurbished in 1963. Somehow, there is beauty in decay, a splendor in entropy. Somehow it makes it things seem real. Lviv feels real.

Experiencing Lviv

Although there are some “sights” to see, Lviv is best experienced as a whole: Cobblestone streets snake past a 250 year-old, green-domed Dominican Monastery, and in its courtyard is a huge unidentified statue of a man with a blacksmith's apron. Underneath him is a book market, the books being sold out of cardboard boxes, mementos from the German occupation tucked in between the tomes: bits of Nazi uniforms, military medals, postcards bearing Berlin addresses and Hitler stamps.

Down the street is the Arsenal Museum, filled with massive crossbows, Turkish daggers and a sword nearly five and a half feet long. Just across from it is a 300 year-old Bernadine monastery with towering stained glass windows, enclosed within far-older medieval walls with arrow slits. Just across the drawbridge that now spans a dry moat is an electronics store History marches on.

A few blocks west is the Ukrainian opera house, with street vendors selling hot dogs covered in carrots, cabbage, beets, corn, chives and mayonnaise. Two men huddle over dominoes in the park in front of the opera house, while others play a game of chess on a stone table, the paint on the pieces chipped and the board drawn on piece of cardboard.

Apteka Museum and Armenian Cathedral

If I were to label two major sights to see in Lviv, they would be the Apteka (Pharmacy) Museum and the Armenian Cathedral. The pharmacy was built in 1735 and has been dispensing drugs longer than America has been a country. It was still dispensing drugs when we were there, patrons getting their orders filled while we went into the back room behind the counter to see the museum. Price: $0.35.

In the room were cabinets filled with hand-blown glass jars with faded Latin labels, labels I imagined said things like "eye of newt". We went down a set of stairs to the basement, where mannequins in medieval clothes were grinding powders. There, in the gloom, amongst the wooden casks, you could imagine arcane rituals going on, blood-letting and leach-laying, or secret meetings about overthrowing the Poles. The path of the museum wound through the entire building, showing nearly three centuries of medicinal science.

The Armenian Cathedral was completed in 1368 and has possibly been falling into disrepair since. Inside, past broken tablets with Latin inscriptions, was a huge vestibule, home to only a few wooden pews and faded murals on the walls. The murals that were still recognizable were beautiful: monks carrying a casket on their shoulders, a painting of Christ on the cross, almost all but his face having chipped off or faded away.

The cathedral had a certain mood: dim light coming from the high windows and burning candles, footfalls echoing. But its gray melancholy was temporarily lifted when a group of people arrived: there were nine of them, and they had apparently come to worship. While we watched, they faced the cross hanging at the front of the church and began singing. Just three sang at first, and I had never heard music like it. Two sang just one note in tune with each other, and the other sang a series of slowly rising and falling notes over them. There were no words, just their voices, and in the cold cathedral their song became visible in their condensed breath. We stood and watched and listened, entranced as they took turns singing those rising and falling notes while the others held their single notes, the music echoing and reverberating in the large, stone room. More soon joined in until they were all singing that same, haunted, melody-less song, their breaths streaming out in white clouds.

The hospitality in Lviv was amazing. I had met up with a friend there, and while we were trying to find Castle Hill (which now only bears the foundations of Lviv's defensive castle) we stopped a woman to ask for directions. We produced a map and asked her to point, but instead she walked us, six blocks out of her way, to a bus stop and told us which one to get on and where to get off. On board, we asked an older gentleman for confirmation of the stop. The gentleman talked to a lady beside him, and that lady then got us off at the stop with us and walked us, ten blocks, up to the hill. Later, another lady stopped me while I was taking a photograph of a square, and she pointed to where I should stand to get the best angle. Two security guards at a beautiful neo-classical university building tried to stop our entrance, thinking we were students trying to get in on a Sunday. We apologized and began to leave, but our accents made them realize that we were foreigners and they called us back. They unlocked the building, let us in and proudly showed us around, pointing at new remodeling, identifying statues and begging us to take pictures.

Krakow may be the new Prague, but Lviv isn’t the new Krakow. It transcends labels and stands as something unto itself. History winds its streets, music is visible in its air, and glory and entropy await any travelers—or tourists—willing to make the trip.

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