Lviv - a slice of Mitteleuropa in Ukraine

Ever since we arrived in Ukraine, one of the first web stops I make when I get online in the morning is the Kyiv Post page, which is quite different from the usual Soccernet-Facebook-Redcafe-BBC Football circuit. Hang on, we're taking things for granted already. We've had wifi access on a daily basis ever since we touched down in the UK, very thankfully, as it has provided us readily with travel information literally at our finger tips. And back to Lviv, where Prospekt Svobody (Freedom Avenue) is the scene of an ever-present crowd of blue-and-yellow-clad, flag-waving protestors. They've set up a stage and a big screen where news of the action in Kyiv is shown next to the monument to Taras Shevchenko, Ukraine's national poet whose name made waves across the Tsarist empire a century and a half before his footballing namesake failed even to make a ripple in London. There are cheers, chants and horns (mostly at night) - real-time responses to the broadcast of whichever parliamentary representative happens to be speaking. It feels a bit like a World Cup match shown on a town square.

The Old Town, where our sightseeing was concentrated, begins immediately east of Prospekt Svobody. We might have mistaken it for any central European city if the Greek gods on the city square fountains had not chosen to don the colours of the European Union.

It has a very compact centre, which makes for a very comfortable half-day ramble. And to the north-east stands Visoky Zamok, the High Castle, of which only a mound and a couple of broken walls remain and which commands a fine view of the Old Town and the surrounding Galician plains.

A couple of nights ago in Minsk, we were watching France24's take on the events taking place in Kyiv. This American pundit mentioned that "if you look at the history of the Ukraine, you find that it has always been firmly in the Russian camp." I remember the words clearly for its blatant lack of historicism. Lviv's history actually places it, and western Ukraine, firmly in the Mitteleuropa orbit. For six hundred years it belonged to the Polish and Austro-Hungarian spheres. Lwow was its Polish name, and Lemberg the Austrians called it. From the Habsburgs it received its Romanesque appearance, Roman Catholicism and its subsequent westward cultural gaze.

At the same time, eager to promote a counterweight to Hungarian influence in these parts, the Austrians in the later part of the nineteenth century cultivated the then nascent Ukrainian nationalism. Whilst not the only seedbed of nationalism in Ukraine, the strand which developed in Galicia was distinctly anti-Russian. It was also in western Ukraine where a short-lived West Ukrainian National Republic was declared in the chaotic interregnum between the ends of the First World War and the Russian Civil War. Its unhappy existence was terminated by a Polish invasion. But western Ukrainians today pride themselves on the fact that their land suffered the shortest time in any part of Ukraine under the Russian yoke.

We met a few interesting groups atop the High Castle lookout point in the afternoon. First an Orthodox monk by the name of Yevgeny started a conversation with us. He was in Lviv with his fellow monks from the Pochayivska Lavra, to celebrate a festival of St George at the cathedral with the same name, to which event we were eventually invited. Then we struck up another conversation with a group of Ukrainian youths, who were photographing themselves with the Ukrainian and OUN flags like Himalayan mountaineers.

Now, the nationalist black and red of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) standard were not colours we saw often on the streets of Kyiv, where the ubiquity was blue and yellow. It could well be that we had not hung around long enough yet. Set up in 1929, the OUN's historical role has always been steeped in controversy because of their perceived collaboration with the Nazis in the Second World War under Stefan Bandera, and their complicity in the massacre of Ukrainian Jews. Viewed internationally as yet another opportunistic quisling leader, in Ukraine and especially western Ukraine he was and still is feted.

Bandera was the Aung San of Ukraine, yet only his subsequent notoriety approached the scale of Aung San's fame. The British beat a hasty retreat in post-war Burma, never staying long enough to demonize the memory of Aung San. Besides, Aung San's Burmese National Army had not been involved as the OUN was in an international cause célèbre such as the Holocaust. Aung San's public assassination also granted him untouchable martyr status. It meant that he didn't live long enough to potentially suffer a fall-out with his political allies or a fall from grace.

Bandera and his Ukraine were not so lucky on both accounts. Ukraine was steamrollered by the Soviets who didn't take too keenly to Bandera's strong nationalistic tendencies, with Bandera choosing exile. He then fell out with his OUN colleagues who started to oppose his authoritarian leadership style. In 1959, in one of the last cases in which the KGB used violence to dispose of political undesirables, he was assassinated, rather unsensationally, in Germany by cyanide gas.