Rynok Square

Rynok Square has three sides. Townhouses hold the north, east and west; where the south side should be there is open paving and a run of low stone benches laid along the foundations of seven houses that stood there until 1942. The square is roughly 3,800 square metres larger than the men who drew it in 1662 intended, and the extra space is a hole.

The rest is orthodox. The town hall stands dead centre rather than off to one side, so you can walk right around it; streets run out from the corners; fourteen of the surrounding houses keep their historic profile. Free, open at all hours, ten minutes for a circuit. Do the circuit first — the plan of central Ivano-Frankivsk resolves from it.

A fortress town drawn to a rulebook

Andrzej Potocki founded Stanyslaviv in 1662 and gave it Magdeburg rights. The plan left little to taste: a rectangular market square with the town hall in the middle, unbroken building lines around the perimeter, two storeys and later three, facades three or four windows wide. It went up as a fortress, with underground passages running from the square to the ramparts.

In 1695 Karol Benoe finished a masonry town hall on a cross plan, its four arms pointing at the corners. Trade ran to a timetable beneath it: three fairs a year — 7 May, 8 September, 28 November — four weeks each, opened and closed by the town hall bell.

A pot of plum jam

On 28 September 1868 two hired men were boiling plum povidlo over an open fire in a yard on vul. Lypova, now Shevchenka 34. The wind took the sparks into a town still built largely of wood. The fire took about a third of Stanyslaviv — some 260 houses, the magistrate's offices, the Armenian church, the synagogues — and gutted the town hall to an iron skeleton. Almost nobody died.

Everything around the square is younger than that fire, which is why the perimeter of a 17th-century market place looks like late Austro-Hungarian commerce. The tower kept changing too: rebuilt in 1871, then replaced in 1929–1935 by Stanisław Trela's constructivist tower, 49.5 metres under a helmet-shaped dome — one of three constructivist town halls in Ukraine and the country's only public building with a gilded dome.

The side that is not there

In 1942 the German commandant ordered the demolition of the whole quarter between the square and vul. Barona Hirsha: the entire southern side, seven masonry houses. They came down by hand. According to the survivor Julius Foerman, around 400 Jewish labourers were conscripted to pull down the city's own Jewish quarter and cart the rubble away; the salvaged beams went as firewood to the non-Jewish population only. The square grew from 9,667 to 13,500 square metres.

The Soviet authorities laid a small park over the gap. In the reconstruction of 1999–2000 the architect Orest Kos set stone bench-walls along the lines of the vanished foundations, so the outline of the block is still readable in the paving. The openness of the south side is not a planner's idea; sit on the benches and you sit on the footprint.

Erased from the map, then rebuilt

In 1945 the square was renamed 17 Veresnia and the name never took. At the end of the 1950s they dissolved it instead: each side became a separate street — Rynok, Shchorsa, 17 Veresnia, and a western stretch folded into Halytska. As an address, Ploshcha Rynok stopped existing.

By the 1980s the houses were derelict, basements standing in water for years, and demolition was prepared; local architects and cultural figures blocked it. The quarter was rebuilt from the late 1980s into the 1990s by the Ukrproektrestavratsiia institute under Zenovii Sokolovskyi — modern interiors behind recreated facades, roofs in a Hutsul idiom. Most of what you photograph is late-Soviet reconstruction to a historic drawing, not 19th-century masonry. The renumbering survives too: the museum in the middle of Ploshcha Rynok is still registered at vul. Halytska 4a.

An hour on the square

The most complete run of facades is the western side, the old fiartel where no house stood under three storeys: restrained cornices, wrought-iron balconies, a grapevine carved into the entrance arch of no. 21.

The fountain went up in 2000 as a grain sprouting shoots. The metal shoots were snapped off for scrap, leaving a smooth ovoid, and after 2004 guides began telling visitors it marked the egg thrown at Viktor Yanukovych. The fountain is four years older than the egg.

166 steps take you up the town hall to a gallery at 33.3 metres, and a square with a tower in the middle only reads as one from up there. The same building holds the regional museum: around 120,000 items, from opryshok weapons to archaeology. Allow an hour and a half for both.

It is five minutes along Halytska from the Stometrivka, and cars still use part of the perimeter. Museum hours and tower access shift under wartime conditions, so check on the day. Cafes close during air-raid alerts; shelters in the centre are signposted.