Tracing Patterns — Lviv, Sunday 12 March
The 17th century Saints Peter and Paul Church — known as the Garrison Church — in downtown Lviv is being carefully restored. During the Soviet era and beyond, it was used as a document storage facility and went into decline and decrepitude. Since around 2010, though, it was returned to the Ukrainian Catholic Church, re-opened, and is now the official church of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, or ‘ZSU’.
It is has become my habit to start my work visits to Ukraine by attending services at ‘Garrisonska’, and that’s what I did today as Lviv is dusted with light snow. There, I pay tribute to the men and women who have fallen in this grotesque war waged against them, their values and their country. I pray for a peace that seems so improbable now due to Putin and his like.
As its visitors know, Lviv is ever vibrant, fashionable, and quirky — the ‘chocolate box’ city of alley ways, mod cafes, young creatives and IT gurus, and Ramen soup and Borscht together on the menus. But even here, the war is now present. Near the military hospital, I see young soldiers with bandaged hands and on crutches going out to the convenience store for Cokes and chocolate bars. The walking wounded are, perhaps, among the fortunate.
At Prospekt Svobody (the Avenue of Freedom), Russian-speaking female refugees from the east push their prams past the Opera House. It’s where — when we were both young men — my cousin and I watched the Lenin monument come down in 1990. Somewhere, I still have a piece of marble we grabbed that day to mark the death of old ways.
There is a sense of that this place in now in another chapter of its own epic — a chapter that is awful but also necessary in the arc of this nation’s story.
Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, funerals of soldiers are a very often occurrence at the Garrison Church. Lviv people solemnly mark the passing of their sons, husbands, brothers, friends and neighbours. They kneel on Pekarska Vulytsia (the Bakers’ Street) as corteges rattle up the cobblestones to the Lychakiv Cemetery where countless patriots and heroes from Ukraine’s previous wars and bloody history lie buried. It has been remarked by others that Ukrainians understand death and suffering, and maybe that’s a strength for their survival now.
As the funeral processions pass, I have watched as those Ukrainians stand up and wipe their knees. Perhaps, they then go to work. Or, to visit at friends’ houses, or to take care of errands. Just as some of their countrymen fall, they keep going. And even as the epic continues around them, they write their own small stories of normalcy and humanity. Stories I hope to convey on this trip.
The duty that has come to me is simple. To listen and to share. To hear how this war has changed people and to let other humans know about that. Because I believe that in that process there’s something that’s important, even if I’m not always sure exactly what. Maybe, it’s what the priest said today at the Garrison Church: ‘Faith is to do’.
