Coming Home to Lviv: Two Weeks in Kharkiv and the Rediscovery of the Austro-Hungarian Empire

By Matthew Parish

Wednesday 7 October 2026

There are several ways of travelling from Kharkiv to Lviv, but whichever one you choose you are not merely crossing Ukraine. You are passing between civilisations. After two weeks in Kharkiv, returning to Lviv feels rather like emerging from an exceptionally long and complicated Soviet administrative meeting and discovering that, while you were away, somebody has restored the Habsburg Empire and opened a coffee shop in it.

Kharkiv is a magnificent city, although it does not always make an immediate effort to tell you so. Kharkiv assumes that if you are sufficiently intelligent you will work this out for yourself. Lviv, by contrast, grabs you by the lapels within five minutes of arrival, presents you with an ornate façade, rings a church bell, hands you an espresso and demands that you acknowledge that you have entered one of the most beautiful cities in Europe.

After two weeks in Kharkiv, the contrast is overwhelming. Kharkiv is broad avenues, enormous squares, Soviet apartment blocks, trolleybuses, mysterious courtyards, broken lifts, concrete, industry, extraordinary resilience and the occasional building of such monumental proportions that one suspects it was designed principally to make the individual human being feel guilty about taking up space. Lviv is balconies, cobblestones, stucco, statues, courtyards, coffee, chocolate, churches and buildings apparently designed by architects who believed that no window was complete without at least three unnecessary decorative flourishes.

Kharkiv’s architectural philosophy might loosely be summarised as: here is a building, it is extremely large and you should not complain. Lviv’s is closer to: here is a building, we have attached twelve cherubs to it and would you like some cake?

This makes returning west after an extended period in Kharkiv an almost hallucinatory experience. You begin noticing things you had previously taken for granted. There are cornices and little stone faces staring down from buildings; there are balconies supported by improbable classical creatures; and there are doors that appear to have been constructed for minor Austrian aristocrats rather than people collecting takeaway pizza. Even the drainpipes occasionally seem to possess a certain imperial dignity.

Then there are the cafés, because no serious discussion of Lviv can proceed for long without encountering coffee. Kharkiv certainly has excellent cafés, restaurants and bars, but they exist against the background of a city whose essential personality remains practical. Kharkiv is a place where people have things to do and, increasingly, those things involve surviving a war. People hurry somewhere, repair something, deliver something, organise something, volunteer for something or explain why something that should have arrived yesterday will definitely arrive tomorrow.

In Lviv, drinking coffee can itself constitute the principal activity of the afternoon, and nobody considers this unusual. A person may sit for two hours over a cappuccino while discussing architecture, philosophy, Ukrainian nationalism, artificial intelligence, the shortcomings of the municipal authorities and whether the waiter has become less friendly since Tuesday. Nobody regards this as idleness because this is Central European civilisation, and Central European civilisation has always understood that some of humanity’s most important business consists of sitting around tables while apparently doing nothing.

There is also a different relationship with beauty. Kharkiv’s beauty often has to be discovered. It lies in the immense scale of Freedom Square, the elegance of constructivist architecture, the parks, the unexpectedly graceful older streets and, above all, the character of its inhabitants. Kharkiv is beautiful partly because it refuses to stop functioning under circumstances in which any reasonable city might have submitted a written application for temporary closure.

Lviv’s beauty, on the other hand, is shameless, and the city knows perfectly well that it is beautiful. Indeed, Lviv sometimes gives the impression that it expects you to congratulate it personally. Walk through the historic centre on a crisp autumn evening and every illuminated façade appears to be competing for attention. Churches emerge from narrow streets at impossible angles, towers rise above tiled roofs and tramcars rattle across cobbles as though somebody has deliberately arranged them for a period film. The entire city centre seems to whisper that Vienna was nice, of course, but have you seen us?

This confidence has historical foundations. Lviv accumulated architectural personalities the way some people accumulate eccentric relatives. Ruthenian, Polish, Armenian, Jewish, Austrian and Ukrainian traditions were layered one upon another. The Habsburg period left particularly conspicuous fingerprints: façades, administrative buildings, theatres, cafés and the unmistakable Central European conviction that civilisation requires elaborate architecture and small cups of strong coffee.

Kharkiv carries a different historical inheritance. It looks eastwards as much as westwards, geographically and architecturally. It was an industrial, scientific and administrative giant of the Soviet Ukrainian world, briefly the capital of Soviet Ukraine and subsequently one of the great intellectual and manufacturing centres of the USSR. Its enormous spaces reflect an age fascinated by scale, production, collectivism and the ability of reinforced concrete to intimidate pedestrians.

Yet the differences between the cities run deeper than architecture, because Kharkiv possesses a particular eastern Ukrainian directness. People can be warm, extraordinarily generous and intensely loyal, but there is often little ceremonial wrapping around any of this. A Kharkiv conversation may begin with somebody telling you precisely what is wrong with your idea, your coat, the government, the road outside and possibly your entire understanding of Ukraine. Ten minutes later the same person may be arranging somewhere for you to sleep, finding you a taxi and insisting that you take some food.

Lviv operates according to subtler rituals, and here there are layers. There are introductions, acquaintances, friends, old friends, people who claim to be old friends, people who dislike one another but nevertheless drink coffee together twice a week and people who have been engaged in an argument about something that happened in 2017 but remain impeccably polite about it. Kharkiv tells you what it thinks, whereas Lviv invites you for coffee so that you can gradually discover what it thought three weeks ago.

The war has sharpened these differences while simultaneously drawing the two cities together. Kharkiv lives extraordinarily close to Russia and therefore experiences the war with a physical immediacy that western Ukraine cannot entirely reproduce. Air raid sirens are not abstractions, explosions are not distant news and buildings bear scars. People know somebody serving, injured, displaced or dead, while conversations repeatedly return to electricity, drones, missiles, evacuations and what happened last night.

After two weeks there, one begins unconsciously to absorb this atmosphere and the extraordinary becomes ordinary. An explosion interrupts a conversation and the conversation continues. Somebody checks a telephone application, decides the danger is not particularly close and orders another drink. A damaged building becomes a navigational landmark and an air raid alert becomes part of the rhythm of the day rather than an exceptional interruption to it.

Then one returns to Lviv and discovers a different tempo of wartime life. Of course Lviv is also at war: missiles and drones reach western Ukraine, soldiers are everywhere, funerals pass through the city and almost every family has been touched somehow by the conflict. Yet geographical distance creates a different psychological texture. Lviv can sometimes preserve fragments of European normality that feel almost luxurious after extended periods in the east.

You step from the railway station and suddenly there are those façades again, accompanied by trams, tourists taking photographs and people arguing about where to have brunch. Somebody is carrying an absurdly small dog wearing an expensive-looking coat and, after Kharkiv, the dog itself seems Austro-Hungarian. One half expects it to have a minor title, a bureaucratic position in the imperial administration and strong opinions about the Compromise of 1867.

None of this makes one city superior to the other. Indeed, spending time in both reveals something important about Ukraine that outsiders frequently misunderstand. Ukraine is not culturally uniform and never has been. Its diversity is not an unfortunate defect awaiting correction but one of the country’s defining characteristics.

Kharkiv and Lviv represent different historical experiences that have been forced into ever closer conversation by Russia’s invasion. One grew substantially within the cultural and industrial orbit of the Russian Empire and Soviet Union. The other retains the unmistakable imprint of Poland and Habsburg Central Europe. One traditionally contained Russian as an everyday language for much of its population, while the other has long been a centre of Ukrainian cultural and national consciousness. Yet today both cities are unmistakably Ukrainian, and neither needs to resemble the other to prove the point.

That may be one of Vladimir Putin’s more remarkable unintended achievements. He imagined that Ukraine’s regional differences represented fractures that Russia could exploit. Instead, the invasion has demonstrated that a country can contain Kharkiv and Lviv simultaneously without requiring either to become the other. Kharkiv does not need cherubs on every façade, Lviv does not need Freedom Square and Ukraine needs both.

This is perhaps why returning to Lviv after two weeks in Kharkiv produces such a peculiar mixture of relief and affection. One misses Kharkiv almost immediately: its toughness, humour, directness, vastness and astonishing capacity to continue living under bombardment. Yet there is also something wonderfully comforting about returning to a city where the Austro-Hungarian sublime remains stubbornly embedded in the masonry.

The first walk through central Lviv after returning from the east can therefore become embarrassingly sentimental. Buildings one has passed hundreds of times suddenly look magnificent, the Opera House seems more extravagant, the old streets seem narrower and more mysterious and the churches seem taller. Even the cobblestones, ordinarily responsible for destroying shoes, ankles and wheeled luggage with impartial enthusiasm, acquire a certain charm. One starts forgiving them for crimes that would ordinarily justify proceedings before an international tribunal.

One remembers that this city survived empires, occupations, wars, revolutions and ideological experiments, yet somehow retained its peculiar personality. Lviv remains simultaneously Ukrainian, Polish, Jewish, Armenian, Austrian, European and entirely itself. Its history is complicated, frequently tragic and occasionally impossible to reconcile into a single narrative, but perhaps that is precisely why its streets possess such depth.

Kharkiv has achieved something similar through entirely different historical materials. Beneath its Soviet monumentalism and battered residential districts lies a city with a ferocious civic identity, one strengthened rather than erased by the attempt to destroy it. Russia expected Kharkiv to fall quickly in 2022 because Moscow misunderstood the difference between speaking Russian and wanting to be Russian. The city answered that misunderstanding rather decisively, and it has been answering it ever since.

Perhaps the best way to understand contemporary Ukraine is therefore to travel repeatedly between these two places. Spend two weeks in Kharkiv and you begin to understand why Ukraine survives: through stubbornness, improvisation, humour, courage and the ability to carry on with ordinary life while extraordinary events take place overhead. Return to Lviv and you remember what Ukraine is surviving for: the right of its different cities, communities and traditions to remain gloriously, inconveniently and unmistakably themselves.

Then order a coffee beneath an unnecessarily elaborate nineteenth-century balcony, listen to a tram protesting loudly as it negotiates the cobbles and contemplate the extraordinary good fortune of living in a country sufficiently complicated to contain both cities. After two weeks in Kharkiv, even the Habsburg ghosts seem pleased to see you, although naturally they would prefer to discuss the matter over coffee.