Planes, trains and extortionate taxis

"The Economist", 26 april 2010

Roaming around eastern Europe under a volcanic ash cloud

Day one

IT IS never a waste of time to visit the capital of Galicia, which in Latin is called Leopolis (literally, Lion City). But you can waste a lot of time rowing about the name. In the Austro-Hungarian empire the city’s name was Lemberg. It was commonly known as that in the English-speaking world too (it is named thus in a Baedeker travel guide, belonging to your diarist’s great-aunt, who travelled in those parts more than a century ago).

In pre-war Poland it became Lwów (pronounced Ler-voof) and to this day many Poles still use that name. Indeed, they can get quite cross if you call it anything else. Even after the historical reconciliation with Lithuania and Ukraine in recent years, the loss, in 1945, of Poland’s eastern provinces, and particularly the great cities of Wilno (now Vilnius) and Lwów, still rankles. Under Soviet rule, the city usually went by the Russian name of Lvov; in independent Ukraine it is Lviv (or L'viv if you insist on the “soft sign”, which turns the “l” into something closer to a “lyuh”). You can pronounce it “Lyuh-veef” or “Lyuh-vyoo”, depending on which kind of Ukrainian you speak.

Ukrainian cultural warriors waste huge amounts of time writing peremptory letters to the media demanding that they write Lviv (or L'viv) instead of the other variants, which they see as legacies of foreign rule. To tease them, this diary will call the city Lemberg. This will no doubt lead to lots of comments on this article. Please ignore them.

The effort expended in the name wars would be better spent on smartening up what was once a wonderfully grand provincial metropolis. Along with the ghosts of murdered Jews and deported Poles, echoes of past glories are unmissable, particularly in the fine frontages of the city centre. Not only there: your correspondent once visited the city’s museum of sewerage to inspect the magnificent wrought-iron pipes of long ago. But the scars of the Soviet era, and the gaudy gimcrack results of 20 years of crony capitalism, are visible too. The airport is particularly dismal: cramped, squalid, with rude staff and far too few flights.

One of the few routes to Lemberg is via Warsaw, where your diarist nearly misses his connection because of a huge queue at an inadequate transit point. This is just punishment for writing articles that say Poland is a modern, go-ahead country. The new airport in Warsaw will be magnificent when it is finished. But for now it still has glitches. After 30 minutes, and with the flight to Lemberg already boarding, the queue is only inching forward. Then it stops altogether.

The cause is an elderly Ukrainian lady from Canada. Her hair, an anachronistic tawny blonde, is piled high on her head, stabilised by numerous hairpins. The security guard insists she removes them. She points out, in broken Polish, that her hair will fall down. Calling her “Babcia” (Granny) and using the informal “Ty” (demeaning when addressed to a stranger), the guard insists. Her daughter and granddaughter plead on her behalf, in English, which she evidently doesn’t speak. He ignores them. It is tempting to punch him, hug her, and storm through. But that would hold things up further. Finally “Granny”, small and plump, still wearing defiantly high heels, totters through the metal detector, her hands vainly clutching her ruined hairstyle.

Day two

YOUR DIARIST is a guest at a conference on security organised by Ukraine’s rather tattered hawks. They want their country to join NATO. But the alliance has kicked that issue into the longest of grass, and Ukraine's new government, under President Viktor Yanukovich, is against the idea. The gloomy proceedings are off the record. But as the conference venue is in a university building, your diarist, along with a former British ambassador to Moscow, is put in front of 100-odd international relations students who ask well-informed, difficult questions in perfect English. The best comes at the end: “I want to integrate my life into Europe. But Europe doesn’t want Ukraine, and our government is not capable of the changes. What should I do?” Here in Lemberg, once one of the great cities of central Europe, it seems blindingly obvious that the European Union is missing a huge chance to engage these bright youngsters. One hundred years ago, they and my great-aunts belonged to the same world. Now it is divided by a new iron curtain, based on humiliating, expensive visa regulations.

In the evening, it is time to visit an old friend, Borys Gudziak, the inspirational rector of the Ukrainian Catholic University. In the early stages of the second world war, the Soviet occupiers of western Ukraine murdered the university's staff and sent the students to the gulag. Fr Borys—a Harvard-educated American-Ukrainian—has re-founded it, with spectacular results. Run on a shoestring, it has educated thousands of students in theology, philosophy, classics and other subjects (it has just launched an MBA). But it is not just an academic powerhouse: part of its mission is to provide a loving life for mentally handicapped people. Like many ex-communist countries, Ukraine too often adheres to the shameful standards of the Soviet Union in dealing with such matters. Fr Borys is raising money for a grand building to house a community of mentally handicapped people. That teaches the students something even more valuable than what they learn in the classroom.

UCU is a jewel in Ukraine’s educational system. But it struggles. A few years ago, the authorities hassled it and indirectly threatened Fr Borys with deportation. It is affiliated with the Greek Catholic church, which is under the Pope’s authority but uses Orthodox liturgy. Harshly persecuted in the Soviet period, the church is still regarded with suspicion by some Soviet-minded Ukrainians. UCU’s independent curriculum, high academic standards and insistence on admitting solely on merit are a sharp challenge to Ukraine’s educational establishment. Over unfiltered local beer, we recall our student days in Cracow in 1986.

Walking home after dinner, your diarist gets hopelessly lost. The culprit is the Google Maps application on his Blackberry, which seems to be disorientated by Lemberg’s peculiar history and geography. It confidently puts him in the wrong place and sends him haring down blind alleys. It is often said that speaking Russian or Polish in western Ukraine arouses the wrath of local “nationalists”. It is true that one local nightclub demands that guests give a “password” in the form of a slogan from the Ukrainian Insurrectionary Army (usually known by its Ukrainian initials of UPA) before entry. But asking for directions on the street in Russian and Polish arouses no hostility, only an eager desire to help. Your diarist is eventually delivered to the door of his hotel by a lady from Tajikistan who married a Ukrainian 15 years ago and has lived in Lemberg ever since. How is life? Fine, she says. “This is a European city”. If only Brussels would see it that way.