Lychakiv Cemetery

Based on Wikipedia: Lychakiv Cemetery

A Cemetery That Refuses to Stay Dead

In the western Ukrainian city of Lviv, there is a cemetery that has been destroyed, desecrated, and rebuilt more times than anyone can count. It has been a burial ground for Polish nationalists, Ukrainian freedom fighters, Soviet soldiers, and victims of Soviet terror—sometimes all at once, in plots separated by only a few meters of contested earth. Today, as Ukraine buries soldiers killed in the war with Russia, this cemetery is once again running out of space, forcing the living to make impossible choices about whose dead deserve to remain.

This is Lychakiv Cemetery. And its story is, in miniature, the story of Ukraine itself.

Beginnings in Imperial Austria

The cemetery was founded in 1787, when the city—then called Lemberg—belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Like many European reforms of that era, its creation was practical rather than sentimental. The Habsburgs had issued an edict requiring all cemeteries to be moved outside city limits. This was public health policy disguised as urban planning: crowded churchyards in city centers were breeding grounds for disease.

A man named Karol Bauer, who ran the botanical garden at Lviv University, designed the original layout. He chose a location on several rolling hills in the Lychakiv district, at the time a quiet borough beyond the city's edge. The site offered good drainage and picturesque terrain—practical for burials, beautiful for mourning.

From its earliest days, Lychakiv was not a cemetery for common laborers. It became the resting place of the intelligentsia, the middle class, and the wealthy. If you were a professor, a merchant, an artist, or a minor noble in late eighteenth-century Lemberg, this is where you expected to end up.

The Cemetery Expands

By the 1850s, Lychakiv had grown cramped. A landscape architect named Tytus Tchórzewski was brought in to expand and redesign the grounds. He created the network of winding alleys and circular intersections that visitors still walk today. The cemetery became less like a field of graves and more like a formal garden—a place designed for contemplation, with monumental sculptures, family mausoleums, and carefully manicured vegetation.

Other cemeteries in the city began to close. The working class had their own burial ground, the Yaniv Cemetery. Jewish residents used the New Jewish Cemetery nearby. But for the Christian middle and upper classes—whether Roman Catholic, Greek Catholic, Protestant, or Orthodox—Lychakiv became the destination.

This religious diversity was actually unusual. Many cemeteries of this era were strictly segregated by denomination. But in cosmopolitan Lemberg, a city that sat at the crossroads of Polish, Ukrainian, Austrian, and Jewish cultures, the cemetery reflected the city's complex identity.

The Polish-Ukrainian War and the Eaglets

The end of World War One shattered empires and drew new maps across Europe. The Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed. Suddenly, the question of who would control Lviv—Poles or Ukrainians—had no imperial answer. Both nations claimed the city. In November 1918, they went to war over it.

The fighting was brief but brutal. The Poles won. And among the dead were hundreds of young Polish volunteers, some of them teenagers, who had rushed to defend what they considered their city. These young fighters became known as the Lwów Eaglets—Orlęta Lwowskie in Polish—and their sacrifice became legendary in interwar Poland.

A special section of Lychakiv Cemetery was set aside for them. In the 1920s, an elaborate memorial complex was constructed: the Cemetery of the Defenders of Lwów, or more commonly, the Cemetery of the Eaglets. It featured a grand colonnaded mausoleum, rows of identical white crosses, and heroic inscriptions. In 1925, the remains of one unknown defender were exhumed and transferred to Warsaw, to the newly created Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

For Poles between the wars, this corner of Lychakiv was sacred ground.

Destruction Under the Soviets

Then came World War Two, and everything changed again.

In 1939, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union invaded Poland from opposite sides and divided the country between them. Lviv fell under Soviet control. The Soviets renamed it and began remaking it in their own image. When Nazi Germany later invaded the Soviet Union, the city changed hands again, becoming part of the German-occupied zone. Soviet forces retook it in 1944.

After the war, the boundaries of Europe were redrawn at the Yalta Conference. Lviv, which had been Polish territory between the wars, was permanently transferred to the Soviet Union—specifically, to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. The city's Polish population was expelled, forcibly relocated to territories that had been German before the war.

What happened next at Lychakiv Cemetery was methodical destruction.

The Cemetery of the Eaglets was not just neglected; it was deliberately demolished. The elaborate mausoleum was torn down. The site was turned into a truck depot. At one point, bulldozers were brought in to flatten what remained. The Soviet authorities had no interest in preserving a monument to Polish nationalism—especially one that commemorated a war against Ukrainians.

Throughout the broader cemetery, monuments were vandalized, sculptures destroyed, inscriptions effaced. Up until 1971, the degradation continued largely unchecked. Only in 1975 did Soviet authorities finally declare Lychakiv a historical monument, putting an end to the most egregious destruction.

From that point forward, the cemetery was reserved for the burials of prominent citizens and for families who already owned plots. The casual devastation stopped. But the damage had been done.

The Field of Mars

The Soviets did add one major element to Lychakiv: a war memorial they called the Field of Mars, built in 1974 on the cemetery's northern edge.

This memorial honored Soviet soldiers who died fighting the Nazis during what Soviet ideology called the Great Patriotic War. But it also included soldiers who had fought against the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, a nationalist guerrilla force that continued resisting Soviet rule into the mid-1950s. For the Soviet state, these were all equally heroic defenders against fascism and separatism.

The memorial included poetic inscriptions:

At the middle of the planet
in the storm clouds thunder
the dead are watching the sky
believing in the wisdom of the living

After Ukrainian independence in 1991, local authorities had these Soviet-era verses removed. The memorial remained, but its meaning became contested. To many Ukrainians, the soldiers buried there were not liberators but occupiers—members of a force that had suppressed Ukrainian independence and deported millions of Ukrainians to Siberian labor camps.

Ukrainian Independence and Contested Memory

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Ukraine became independent for the first time since a brief period after World War One. And immediately, the question of memory became urgent. Whose heroes would be honored? Whose villains would be condemned? Whose graves would be preserved, and whose forgotten?

Lychakiv Cemetery became a battleground of symbols.

The Ukrainian Insurgent Army, known by its Ukrainian initials UPA, had fought against both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union during and after World War Two. Its leader, Stepan Bandera, was assassinated by Soviet agents in Munich in 1959 and became a martyr figure for Ukrainian nationalists. In post-Soviet Ukraine, Bandera's status was—and remains—deeply controversial. To some Ukrainians, he was a freedom fighter who resisted foreign domination. To Poles, Russians, and many Jews, he was complicit in wartime atrocities, including massacres of Polish civilians in Volhynia.

In 2006, Lviv's city administration announced plans to relocate the remains of Bandera, along with other key figures of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, to a new dedicated section of Lychakiv Cemetery honoring the Ukrainian national liberation struggle.

A separate memorial had already been established for soldiers of the Ukrainian National Army, including members of the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS, also known as the SS Division Galicia. This unit, composed primarily of Ukrainian volunteers fighting under German command, has been the subject of intense historical debate. Its defenders argue the volunteers were motivated by anti-Soviet nationalism, not Nazi ideology. Its critics point out that it was, nonetheless, part of the SS—the organization most responsible for the Holocaust.

These memorials exist in the same cemetery, meters away from Soviet war graves and the restored Polish Eaglets memorial. The proximity is deliberate. It is also deeply uncomfortable.

Rebuilding the Eaglets Cemetery

The restoration of the Cemetery of the Eaglets is a story of persistence bordering on stubbornness.

In the late 1980s, as Soviet control weakened, workers from a Polish company operating in Ukraine began quietly rebuilding the destroyed memorial. Their work was not always legal. Ukrainian authorities tried to stop them multiple times. But the Poles kept coming back, reconstructing the colonnades, replacing the crosses, restoring the inscriptions.

After Ukrainian independence, negotiations between Poland and Ukraine over the site continued for years. The memorial's existence touched raw nerves. To Poles, it honored heroic young defenders of their city. To many Ukrainians, it commemorated an occupation force that had denied Ukraine's right to exist.

A compromise was eventually reached. In 1999, a monument to the Sich Riflemen—a Ukrainian military unit that had fought against the Poles in 1918-1919—was erected just outside the Polish mausoleum. The two memorials now face each other, honoring soldiers who killed each other in the same battle.

The fully restored Cemetery of the Eaglets was officially reopened on June 24, 2005. Polish and Ukrainian dignitaries attended the ceremony, speaking of reconciliation and shared European values. Whether the dead would have approved remains an open question.

The War Comes Again

In February 2022, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The war that followed has killed tens of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers, with more dying every day.

Lychakiv Cemetery, once again, is running out of space.

The Ukrainian National Army Memorial within the cemetery walls is full. New burials of soldiers killed in the Russo-Ukrainian War have been directed to the Field of Mars—the Soviet war memorial on the cemetery's northern edge. The irony is bitter: Ukrainian soldiers fighting Russian invasion are being buried in a memorial built to honor Soviet soldiers who conquered this same land.

In May 2022, the Lviv regional council announced an architectural competition to redesign the site. The goal is to transform the Soviet memorial into a monument honoring contemporary Ukrainian defenders. This is part of a broader process of decommunization—the systematic removal of Soviet symbols from Ukrainian public life, which accelerated dramatically after the 2022 invasion.

In August 2022, Lviv authorities approved the exhumation of Soviet remains from the Field of Mars. The process uncovered something unexpected: bones that predated the Soviet era entirely. Mixed in with World War Two burials were remains from World War One, belonging to soldiers of the German, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, and Russian armies. Lviv had been fought over so many times that even the dead were layered like sediment.

The Soviet-era remains are being transferred to a different cemetery. The older remains will be moved to a dedicated section within whatever new memorial emerges.

The Famous Dead

Beyond the contested memorials, Lychakiv Cemetery remains what it was always meant to be: a resting place for the prominent citizens of Lviv across centuries.

The Polish section includes Stefan Banach, one of the twentieth century's most important mathematicians, who helped establish functional analysis as a field. There is Maria Konopnicka, a beloved poet whose works are still taught in Polish schools. Artur Grottger, a Romantic painter. Gabriela Zapolska, a novelist and playwright. Zygmunt Gorgolewski, the architect who designed the Lviv Opera House—one of the most beautiful theaters in Eastern Europe.

The Ukrainian section includes Ivan Franko, a poet, writer, and political thinker so revered that the city's main university bears his name. Solomiya Krushelnytska, a soprano who performed at La Scala and the Metropolitan Opera, is buried here. So is Volodymyr Ivasyuk, a composer whose song "Chervona Ruta" became an unofficial anthem of Ukrainian identity during the Soviet era; he was found hanged in 1979, at age thirty, in circumstances that many Ukrainians believe were murder by Soviet security services.

Also present: Andriy Parubiy, a politician who served as Chairman of the Ukrainian Parliament from 2016 to 2019 and who died in 2023. And Myroslav Skoryk, a contemporary composer whose works are performed internationally.

An American is buried here too: Edmund Pike Graves, a pilot who flew with the Kościuszko Squadron. This was a unit of American volunteer aviators who fought for Poland in the Polish-Soviet War of 1920—part of the same conflict that produced the Lwów Eaglets. Graves died in combat and was buried far from home, in a country most Americans couldn't find on a map.

The 1863 Rebels

In a back corner of the cemetery, marked by original steel crosses, lies "the 1863 rebels' hill."

These are participants in the January Uprising of 1863, when Poles rose against the Russian Empire in a doomed bid for independence. The uprising failed. Thousands were killed, exiled, or executed. But the rebels who fell in or near Lviv—which was then in Austrian territory—could be buried with honors. Among them is Benedykt Dybowski, a zoologist and ethnologist who had been active in the rebellion and later became a renowned scientist.

The presence of these graves is a reminder that Lviv's history of national struggle predates both world wars. The city has been a site of resistance to empire for centuries.

A Cemetery for the Living

Lychakiv Cemetery is a museum now—officially titled the State History and Culture Museum-Reserve "Lychakiv Cemetery." It is one of the most visited tourist attractions in Lviv. Visitors walk the tree-lined alleys, photograph the elaborate nineteenth-century monuments, and try to make sense of the competing memorials.

But it is also still a working cemetery. Families with ancestral plots still bury their dead here. And soldiers killed in the ongoing war are still being interred in the Field of Mars, their fresh graves marked with Ukrainian flags and photographs.

The ground of Lychakiv holds the bodies of people who killed each other in battle: Polish Eaglets and Ukrainian Sich Riflemen. Soviet soldiers and Ukrainian Insurgent Army guerrillas. It holds victims and perpetrators, heroes and villains—categories that shift depending on who is telling the story and when.

Perhaps that is the truest thing about this place. Cemeteries are supposed to be where the past is settled, where the dead can rest. Lychakiv offers no such peace. Its memorials have been built, destroyed, and rebuilt. Its remains have been exhumed and relocated. Its meaning has been contested by empires, nations, and ideologies.

The living keep fighting over the dead. And the dead, as the Soviet inscription once said, keep watching the sky—believing, perhaps foolishly, in the wisdom of the living.