Lviv Interactive

The old Jewish cemetery was first mentioned in the municipal records on May 27, 1414. By the seventeenth century, following the acquisition of surrounding private land plots during the previous centuries, the cemetery covered the territory between today's Rappoporta, Bazarna, Brovarna and Kleparivska Streets. For many years the old cemetery was shared by the two Jewish communities of the city. The cemetery was officially closed on August 22, 1855. The old Jewish cemetery, which no longer exists today, was one of the oldest and most renowned Jewish cemeteries in Europe. Old gravestones were eventually used for paving streets and constructing walls of the “New” Market, also known as Krakivskyi (Cracow) Market. Gravestone plates from the old Jewish cemetery were also used to pave the courtyard of the prison in former Lonskiego St.

Petra Doroshenka Street lies between Svobody Boulevard and Bandery Street. Its previous names were: Sykstuska (or Sixtuska Gasse up to 1938), Obrony Lwowa (1938-1940), Sykstusstrasse (1941-1944), and Zhovtneva (1940, 1944-1992). This street arose in place of a road that once led from the medieval city walls to the estate of Erasm Sikst/Erazm Sykst, mayor of Lviv in the early seventeenth century and famous medical doctor. In the early twentieth century, the Historicist rental houses were partly replaced by Jugendstil buildings, and later Constructivist ones. 1894 saw an electric tram line being laid in the lower part of the street, leading from the Central Train Station to the Hetmanski Bulwarks, where it forked, leading to the Galician County Fair in Sofijówka, and through the Rynok Square to Lychakiv/Łyczaków. In November 1918 bitter fighting went on for the building of the Main Post Office between Ukrainian and Polish troops.

In 1862, the marble statue of Virgin Mary (sculpted in 1859 by the Munich sculptor Johann Nepomuk Hautmann), was installed in place of a well which had previously stood here. The statue was a gift to the city from Countess Seweryna Badeni, wife of Kazimierz Badeni, the governor of Galicia. The Virgin Mary statue initially stood in the center of Mariacka Square. In 1904 it was moved off the center of the square, in order to free space for a monument to poet Adam Mickiewicz.

The synagogue was constructed in Renaissance style in 1582-1595 from brick and stone by architect Paweł Szczęśliwy (Pavlo Shchaslyvyi) and funded by the wealthy Nachmanowicz family. The synagogue would have been one of the oldest within the current borders of Ukraine. Yet in August 1941, all its religious objects were plundered and in 1943 it was demolished by explosives by the Nazis. The ruins that remain today, long neglected but undergoing some preservation efforts recently, are a symbol of the tragedy of Lviv’s Jews.