Memorial to the Soldiers of the Ukrainian Galician Army

On 1 November 2002, eighty-four years to the day after Ukrainian soldiers took Lviv in the night, the remains of Yevhen Petrushevych were brought from a Berlin cemetery and laid in the chapel at the centre of this memorial. He had headed the West Ukrainian People’s Republic, and died in exile in 1940.

Around the chapel lie riflemen and officers of the Ukrainian Galician Army, killed defending that republic in the fighting for Lviv in 1918–19. Their names are cut into granite. Over the wall stands the Cemetery of the Defenders of Lviv — the Polish ‘Eaglets’, who died in the same streets in the same weeks, facing them. Both memorials were consecrated on the same morning in June 2005.

The night of 1 November 1918

Austria-Hungary was breaking up, and both nations expected to inherit Lviv. The Ukrainians moved first. Between about half past three and four in the morning on 1 November 1918, some 1,200 soldiers and 60 officers under Colonel Dmytro Vitovsky occupied the city’s military objectives and public utilities. By daylight the flag over Lviv had changed.

It stayed changed for three weeks. The city’s Poles organised within hours — about 200 fighters on the first morning, roughly 6,000 within days, more than 1,400 of them schoolboys and university students, the youth who gave the Eaglets their name. Polish losses in the street fighting came to 439, among them 120 gymnasium pupils and 76 students of Lviv University; Ukrainian accounts put their own dead at around 250. Ukrainian forces withdrew on the night of 21–22 November, and the war for Galicia ground on into the summer of 1919.

A memorial built from nothing

Nothing survived here to restore, so this is new work, begun in 1998 to a design by the architect Mykhailo Fedyk with the Mistoproekt institute and sculpture by Dmytro Krvavych and Mykola Posikira. It is deliberately plain: low granite slabs carrying the names of the men who fell in the battles for Lviv, rows of crosses, bronze cartouches bearing the decorations of the Sich Riflemen and the Galician Army, and the chapel that holds Petrushevych.

Cardinal Lubomyr Husar and Cardinal Marian Jaworski consecrated it on 24 June 2005, with Presidents Viktor Yushchenko and Aleksander Kwaśniewski standing by. The date had not been chosen for the Ukrainian memorial alone.

What the Soviet years took

Under Soviet rule neither side’s dead could be commemorated. The Polish cemetery was closed in 1945, its stone carted off for street works in 1951–52 and its catacombs turned into a stonecutting workshop; in August 1971 tanks and bulldozers flattened the rest, and a road driven across the site took about a fifth of its ground. The Ukrainian graves went more quietly. A metal cross painted to look like birch stands higher up the hill, raised in the early 1990s to the riflemen and officers of the Galician Army who fell in 1918–19; the ground it commemorates lay about 100 metres east, under what are now Soviet-era civilian graves.

The army’s largest burial field is not on this hill at all. It is across the city at Yanivske Cemetery on vul. Shevchenka, where some 1,070 Sich Riflemen and Galician Army soldiers lie under 440 concrete Cossack crosses set out in 1933–34 to Yevhen Nahirny’s design. Bulldozers levelled that field in the same summer of 1971; it was rebuilt in 1997–99 and reopened on 1 November 1998. Myron Tarnavsky, the army’s commander-in-chief, and Kost Levytsky, who headed the republic’s government, are buried there.

The cemetery over the wall

The Eaglets cemetery was designed in the 1920s by Rudolf Indruch, himself a student who fought in the defence, and held some 2,859 burials by September 1939. Rebuilding it ran from 1998 to 2005, and much of that time went on wording rather than stone. Kyiv objected to an inscription declaring that here lies a Polish soldier fallen for the Fatherland, and to the image of Szczerbiec, the coronation sword that Polish legend says was notched on the Golden Gate of Kyiv. Neutral texts were agreed in the end.

Both cardinals spoke about reconciliation that morning in 2005, and it has held. In January 2023 Volodymyr Zelensky and Andrzej Duda laid flowers at the Polish memorial together, the first joint visit by two sitting presidents since the reopening.

Visiting

The memorial is at the southern end of Lychakiv Cemetery; the main gate is at vul. Mechnykova 33, about 2.5 km east of Rynok Square, with tram No. 7 stopping almost opposite. Ask at the ticket office to be pointed towards it; the signposting is thin. Ten minutes covers the ground, though most people stay longer, reading the plates.

Weekday mornings are best: groups rarely stop here, and the quiet is the reason to come. Since 2022 Lychakiv has again been an active military cemetery, and funerals for Ukraine’s war dead are held not far from this spot. If one is under way, keep your distance and walk on.