Urban Space
Urban space is an essential subject within the field of urban studies, as it allows historians to explore the history of city development from an architectural viewpoint, and how urban design influences community development. Understanding the history of urban spaces provides insight on the evolution of human values and the relationship humans have had with their material or natural environment over the course of history. Our Educational Platform provides historical sources that exemplify how particular urban spaces such as squares, streets, architectural complexes (districts), parks, or avenues shaped contemporary metropolitan life. We also investigate modern practices of urban segregation and the fight for the city’s space, how non-places (such as shopping malls, markets, or airports) differ from heterotopias (such as cemeteries), and how the media can turn urban spaces into vehicles for global movements or how urban spaces can reflect the collective imagination and psyche of a society. The history of urban spaces may show the evolution of the current distinction between places and non-places, which is often derived from the opposition between urban space (i.e. a street) and the agency of place (i.e. a local identity).
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Primary Sources
Excerpt from Chone Gottesfeld’s travelogue ‘My Trip to Galicia’, dedicated to Ternopil
This excerpt is taken from a travelogue of impressions and experiences by the renowned journalist Chone Gottesfeld of the New York Yiddish-language newspaper Forverts (Yiddish: פֿאָרווערטס, English: The Forward), published in New York in 1937. In it, the author recounts a journey to his hometown of Skala, which he had left in 1907. At the time, Skala was an atypical Galician town that had flourished during the Austrian period due to the large number of Hasidic pilgrims visiting local tzaddikim in nearby Chortkiv. However, the town fell into decline during the interwar years. Gottesfeld, known for his humorous newspaper stories and for plays performed in both New York and Warsaw, offers in this...
Heroes and antiheroes in the history of Ukraine, interviews with Euromaidan participants
The quotes from the interview published here are part of the project “The Voices of Euromaidan in Global Protest and Solidarity Studies”. The project focuses on the edited and thematically organized materials from the collection of oral history interviews called “Voices of Resistance and Hope,” that were recorded in two stages, the first in December 2013 and the second in February 2014 (more then 100 interviews). They were gathered in the base “Intimate Chronologies of the Euromaidan”, which is available on Urban Media Archive website. This collection includes 17 themetical categories. The category "Heroes and antiheroes in the history of Ukraine" contains the views of the interviewed participants of the protests about the...
Report of the Intelligence Unit ІІ of the Border Guard Service of Poland on the Food Supplies Situation in the Soviet Kharkiv
The document presents a report of the intelligence division of the Second Unit of the Border Guard Service of Poland in Kharkiv about the situation with food supplies in the city and the mass departure of foreign (German) specialists from Ukraine and the Soviet Union. The document is dated of March 5, 1933, the most critical time of the Holodomor famine in 1932-1933. The document’s author does not use the word “famine,” but the report includes multiple direct testimonies of starvation and food crisis. The author describes them and also adds his sarcastic and critical comments about the nature of Soviet rule and the impact of its political and economic course on the...
Report On The Economic And Food Supply Situation In Kharkiv In The Beginning Of Spring 1933
The document is a report of the Second Intelligence Division of the Border Guard Service of Poland in Kharkiv on the economic and food supply situation in the city as of the beginning of spring 1933. When analyzing this text, we need to consider that the events in question were taking place in the most critical time of the 1932-1933 Holodomor. The text of the document allows for an analysis of the conditions of survival of the urban population, the peculiarities of food supply for the staff of a foreign (Polish) consulate, and domestic animals. The document focuses on the accessibility of food supplies in the urban market that could be bought only...
Identities of Euromaidan participants
The quotes from the interview published here are part of the project “The Voices of Euromaidan in Global Protest and Solidarity Studies”. The project focuses on the edited and thematically organized materials from the collection of oral history interviews called “Voices of Resistance and Hope,” that were recorded in two stages, the first in December 2013 and the second in February 2014 (more then 100 interviews). They were gathered in the base “Intimate Chronologies of the Euromaidan”, which is available on Urban Media Archive website. This collection includes 17 themetical categories. The category "Identities of protest participants" is built around the respondents' thoughts about their identities, which were strengthened during the Euromaidan. During...
Stanisław Laskownicki on the Work of Lviv Journalists and Publishers at the Turn of the 19th and 20th Centuries
Stanisław Laskownicki (1892-1978), the first Polish professor of urology, stands out as one of the most intriguing memoirists chronicling Lviv. Born into a family of esteemed Lviv journalists, he possessed an extensive knowledge of the city’s notable figures and the inner workings of various editorial offices. Additionally, with a diverse range of interests, he offered insights into the leisure activities of Lviv’s youth, including sports, duels, and academic pursuits. His memoirs, titled Szpada, bagnet, lancet were published in two editions in 1970 and 1979. The excerpts provided here illuminate Lviv’s daily newspapers, recount typical anecdotes from the lives of journalists and their friends and shed light on the founding and evolution of the...
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Celebration at the Stadium of the Ukrainian Sokil-Batko, Lviv, 1934
The event captured in the image takes place at the stadium of the Ukrainian Sokil-Batko, likely during the third and final Regional Sokil gathering in 1934. The first Ukrainian gymnastic society, Sokil (Sokil-Batko [Father Falcon]) was founded in Lviv on February 11, 1894. The model was the charter of the Czech Sokol (1862, founded by Miroslav Tyrš). The goal of the society was fostering national unity, strength, and dignity among Ukrainians while also promoting endurance, agility, entrepreneurship, and discipline. Beyond gymnastics, Sokil placed significant emphasis on firefighting and tourism. The society’s first chairman, serving until 1900, was the renowned architectural engineer Vasyl Nahirnyi. By 1900, Sokil had expanded its activities across Galicia, leading...
View on the Monument to the Soviet Constitution, Lviv 1940
The monument to the Soviet constitution, or the Stalin Constitution, was built in Lviv in October 1939. The authors were the sculptor Serhyi Lytvynenko and Kyiv artist Mykhailo Dmytrenko, it’s possible that, the artists adapted the project, originally conceived in Moscow, to the new city conditions. The sculptors Yevhen Dzyndra and Andryi Koverko carried out the project, but the participation of Lytvynenko’s student the young sculptor Yakiv Chaika is also a possibility. The monument was made in the ceramic-sculpture factory, which opened on Muchna St. in 1939. The location for the monument was chosen in the city centre, the “island” on the boundary mark of the Hetman embankments, between Yahellon’ska st. and Holy...
Olha Maria Zhydacek and her husband Hryhoriy Bandurka, Lviv, spring 1939
This photo is a testimony to a photographic practice popular in the 1930s. It was about making portraits of passers-by on the city streets. Such photos often recorded people in motion in the middle of a large street, and seemed to emphasize the belonging of those depicted characters to urban culture. In view of this, the genre of such photography can be called street portrait, the street and commercial photography. The photo shows the great-grandmother and great-grandfather of Bozhena Pelenska — Olha-Maria Zhydacek and her husband Hryhoriy Bandurka (b. 1899). Based on the Bozhena's memories, the story was recorded of the photograph and of the people in it. The photo was taken on...
“Where Are We Headed?”, film 1989
Where Are We Headed? reflects the ideas of Perestroika. It shows the increasing concern among the grassroots movements over the environmental issues. The film was created at the amateur “Kadr” film studio in Mariupol, Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. It addresses the most pressing environmental problems in Mariupol (in 1984-1989 called Zhdanov, after the Soviet revolutionary, politician, and accomplice in the Great Purge of 1937-1938, Andrei Zhdanov). The filmmakers employed various narrative methods: voice-over narration; shots of city scenes and landscapes; filming near industrial enterprises; landscapes and close-ups of rivers and coastal areas; overlaying visuals with a list of harmful chemicals; and excerpts from expert commentary (including the chairwoman of the City...
Radio Communication: A 1959 TV Story by Lviv television
A 1959 TV story filmed for Lviv Television’s Lvivska Nedilia (Lviv Week) (№19) captures the early years of Lviv television and depicts the Soviet modernization of the city. Although the sound is lost, the visuals effectively narrate the story of public transport operations and how remote communication enabled quick responses to breakdowns, preventing disruptions in the public transport infrastructure. In the context of Lviv at the time, the introduction of the trolleybus was a significant symbol of Soviet modernization. Previously, the city only had a tram network. The new trolleybus routes connected the historic city center with the outskirts, where large enterprises and working-class neighborhoods were located. This report highlights...
For the Family Hearth, a 1970 film
The film is an adaptation of the novel of the same name by Ivan Franko, written in 1892. In his story, the problem of sexual slavery (or “white slavery” in the terms of those times) and women’s engagement as its victims and enablers. The author’s choice of topic must have been influenced by the lawsuits against human traffickers that were actively taking place in Galicia at this time. One of the most high-profile cases was the Lviv trial in 1892 against 27 traffickers (men and women) accused of organizing sexual traffic abroad. The investigation confirmed 29 cases of selling girls from Galicia to brothels in Constantinople, Egypt, and India. The “white slavery” usually...
The Soviet government aimed to profoundly transform the styles and structures of people’s everyday lives, encompassing housing, leisure, and work. Particularly ambitious projects were conceived and executed during the 1920s and 1930s. Workers were at the forefront of Soviet social policy, with the Bolshevik Communist Party depicted in Soviet discourse as the avant-garde of the proletariat, primarily serving the interests of the working class. Did these ideas correspond to practice, and at what cost were they realized? This will be discussed in the module by historian Roman Liubavskyi.
In the 19th century, the gender pact dividing public and private spheres, as man-owned and women-inhabited, found its most solid reasoning. In this vision, the city as the most obvious embodiment of public life, seemed to be male by default. Women in the city were taken as potentially threatened. This was evidenced by a number of prohibitions, which could include not only certain places inaccessible to women, such as universities in Lviv until the late 1890s, but also ordinary everyday experiences that they could claim only at the cost of their own reputation. In this module, historian Ivanna Cherchovych will try to look at the city from its women's experiences.
The "The City as a Stage: When Politics Takes to the Streets" project focuses on mass events in the public space of Lviv during the Habsburg period, which took place in the open air – on the streets and squares of the city. As the political center of Galicia, the "royal capital city" of Lviv was simultaneously considered the "capital of the freest part of Poland" and the "capital of Prince Lev." Political and national confrontations were concentrated here. Although the population of Lviv at that time consisted mainly of Poles and Jews, followed by Ukrainians, it was the competition between Ukrainians and Poles that was most significant. These two groups declared their...
The three stories presented in this text are dedicated to three different women united by one city. Sharing a common urban space, they experienced it in different ways, given their different social positions, status and starting opportunities. The time in which they had to live their lives was in one way or another reflected in microstories from the life of each of these women. The first story is dedicated to Maria Hrushkevych, a long-time employee of the Lviv post office, who was among the "first" women employed by the state. In the second, Maria Linchak will be talked about, who was a maid in the house of Teofil and Liudmyla Hrushkevych, a chorister...
At the time of autonomy, the General Regional Exhibition was the third attempt by Galician elites to show their achievements in the industrial, economic, and cultural development of the region. The first such attempt took place in Lviv in 1877, the second in Krakow in 1887. In turn, the next one was to open its gates to visitors in 10 years in Lviv. The official countdown to the beginning of its opening began in June 1892, when the Main Exhibition Committee was formed. The monetary fund of the exhibition was filled with donations from county communities, government subventions and the Provincial Office, the City Council of Lviv, individuals, and organizations. Most of the...
This research focuses on three women: 20-year-old Maria Shutek from Znesinnia [the area of Lychakivskyi District in Lviv, t\n], put on trial for the murder of her daughter Sofia in Lviv in May 1870; a 45-year-old midwife from Virmenska st. [Armenian street, t\n] named Klara Weisshaar, accused of complicity in the crime of abortion, which she helped to perform on a servant named Katarzyna Słodka in March 1905; and 35-year-old Elżbieta Wenne, convicted of pimping out her daughter in 1887. The stories told by these women are not the stories of victims. At least, it would be hard to call them that. These stories are about choices made, mistakes and their consequences, human...
On Sunday, September 10, 1893, at about 11 p.m., in the vicinity of ul. Rappaporta, Maria Kopańska, a maid, was attacked by four men — Stanisław Julian Starzewski, Michał Bendyk, Antoni Równy and Emil Bilo. The company was returning from a restaurant on ul. Szpitalna. As they later admitted, they "had been drinking vodka and beer" there. On ul. Rappaporta they saw Maria, who was walking home alone from a wedding. For the woman, the encounter ended in a gang rape. The court proceedings, which soon began on the victim's claim, although confirming the fact of violence, released three defendants from criminal liability. The fourth one, Emil Bilo, was never brought to trial,...
Transport Mobility in Eastern Europe: Political Designs and Lived Experiences (mid XIX – XX Century)
The course invites to explore East-European History of mid XIX - late XX cent. through the concept of mobility, which encompasses movement of people, goods and ideas. Students will deal with a corpus of texts on social history of transportation, as well as with a rich array of visual materials. Of special interest will be cases, specific to the region, for example cultures of Christian and Muslim pilgrimage, Socialist rallies, trolleybus infrastructures or “destalinization” of metro stations. Cases of imported western technologies will provide ground for interregional comparisons, not only in aspects of introduction of transport system, but also in aspects of their exploitation and disintegration. The course is built on a premise...
This course forms a part of Jewish History and Culture of East Central Europe in the 19th-20th Centuries summer school. The syllabus is availible only in Polish.
In our mini-course we will explore cultural interaction between Jews and non-Jews (Ukrainians, Poles, Russians) in the borderlands of the Habsburg and Romanov empires. This is interaction that may have been conscious or unconscious, and may have involved encounter, appropriation, negotiation, exchange and destruction.
The course intends to show the possibilities afforded by applying the gender (cultural sex) perspective in the study of Jewish culture. Proceeding from the analysis of the role of the woman and man in traditional Jewish society, we will present gender difference in the process of modernization among Jewish women and men. In looking at autobiographical materials, we will trace characteristic stages and stories, as well as life’s choices of Jewish maskilim (advocates of Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment). We will use the examples of the life and work of Pua Rakowska (known as "the Grandmother of Zionism") and Sara Szenirer (reformer of the traditional education system of Jewish girls) to analyze the problem...
When the well-known German author Alfred Döblin visited Lviv in 1924 he wrote: “Lviv is a lively, medium-sized, western, modern town; its streets are peaceful and bustling with life. But suddenly something strange confronts me. This city lies in the arms of two enemies, each of whom wants to dominate it. Subterranean enmity and violence are fermenting in the background”. Döblin, the son of assimilated German Jews from Stettin, also commented on the undercurrent of antiSemitism and voiced his fears, especially for the many poor Jews living in the city. (Alfred Döblin, ReisenachPolen).
This seminar explores ideas and practices of heritage in Eastern and Central Europe between 1945 and now. The course is designed as a set of five meetings, which will include short lecture introductions, seminar discussions, and at the end – practical workshop. Our meetings will be about discussing the texts, addressing cases you will read about or already know. Thіs the seminar will be our common effort in reading, asking questions and searching for answers. Therefore it is crucial that you will read assigned parts of selected texts and also consult texts from the recommended reading list. While reading assigned texts, please keep a short track of your ideas and formulate several questions...
This short course looks at Jewish history in the context of two multinational empires: the Russian and the Habsburg. Both of these states must be understood as fundamentally pre-modern, non-national (even anti-national) political structures, a fact that is crucial for understanding Jewish history here. In the mid-19th century, the great majority of world Jewry made its home in this region and even at the end of the First World War, after the great wave of emigration to the Americas, western Europe, Erets Israel / Palestine, and South Africa, the Jewish presence here was considerable. In 1918 even antisemites could hardly imagine a Warsaw, Wilno, Lwów, Odesa (etc.) without Jews.
From Lviv to New York City, walking tours are a unique form of teaching and public history, transcending the everyday interactions of the classroom. On an urban walking tour, students go to the city but the city also comes to them, often in unexpected ways. This course will provide students with a focused analysis of the walking tour as a tool for higher education and for public history.
This intensive 5-lecture mini-course (12 academic hours) takes a close look at various urban centers (sometimes the shtetl-like and sometimes the city-like) that shaped Jewish-Polish-Ukrainian cultural encounters that inspired the rising literary figures to explore East European multi-cultural urban legacy and make this legacy central in their creative writing. Students will explore various forms of East European urban culture—a shtetl (Chortkiv and Berdychiv), a provincial center (Chernivtsi and Ternopil), a city (Kyiv), a metropolis with a strong East European diaspora presence (Montreal and New York). This course will provide students with methodological tools at the intersection of the literary and cultural studies, urban studies, and social history.
The course offers a short introduction to some of the key concepts and literary and cultural practices that shaped the represenations of modern Jewish spaces in Eastern Europe as well as their contemporary reconstructions and exhibitions. While focusing on (Jewish) Poland and Yiddish culture, this course introduces critical tools for understanding and interpreting modern (Jewish) contructions and experiences of space and place.