“The city of (no) Returns? Ruptures and Mending the Experiences and Spaces of Lviv” Sofia Dyak

Throughout its history, both rich and troubled, the city of Lviv has been a place of coming and going. Throughout the 20th century, the city changed its territorial allegiance no less than eight times. Individual and family stories were dramatically caught up in the big ideologies of the last century: nationalism and socialism. The decisions to leave the city were more often connected with violence: flight, expulsion, deportation, ethnic cleansing, death on an unwitnessed scale. 

The lecture will focus on return, as a practice and as a possibility. With an unprecedentedly well survived built environment the city is a place of ruptures in human lives. It offers a possibility to enter history by entering the buildings and by asking simple yet difficult questions: who lived here, where did they study and work, which places did they leave to, or from which places were they forced to leave, and where might their paths within the city have ended. Asking these questions is a way of opening ruptures but also weaving connections. 

The researcher will guide us on several routes of “returns” spanning over almost nine decades that cross two centuries, from the 1940s into the 2010s. What such returns can tell us about belonging and space, the ways places are imagined and connected. We will wonder if such returns can create spaces that transcending the limits of a given city, a group, a country? What concept can we use to capture relations between a specific place and people who consider it their ancestral homeland while living in different parts of the world and belonging to various communities? How could the stories of return – as a practice and a metaphor – change the ways we see the places we live now and the ways the world is related through such stories?  

Dr Sofia Dyak is a historian (PhD), researcher,  director of the Center for Urban History (Lviv). Dr. Dyak’s research interests include post-war urban recovery and transformation in Eastern Europe, heritage infrastructures and practices in socialist cities, and their legacies. She is preparing a manuscript with the preliminary title “New Lives in Old Cities: Postwar Lviv and the Power of Accommodation.” More about the researcher on the Center’s website.

Photo: Collection of Volodymyr Rumyantsev’s Collection // Urban Media Archive of the Center for Urban History