Lviv

Lviv is the city where Ukraine drinks its coffee: a Habsburg old town of forty-four biographies around a market square, an Armenian cathedral from 1363, a Renaissance chapel, an opera house from 1900 built over a river the city buried, and more than four thousand carved lions — on doors, fountains, balconies, gravestones — because the city was named for a prince's son called Lev. On the hill above it, the High Castle keeps the view; on the hill beside it, the Lychakiv cemetery keeps the poets and the soldiers, and now keeps more of them. It has belonged to Poland, Austria, Poland again, the Soviet Union and, since 1991, to itself, and it has kept, through all of it, the habit of coffee at four and the conviction that a chocolate can be an argument.

This is a postal written with love and patience in the same hand: the country is at war, the sirens reach Lviv too, and the Guide does not send travellers where an air-raid app is part of the morning. What we counsel instead is what Lviv itself would counsel — read her (Zabuzhko, Andrukhovych, the poet Antonych who is buried on the hill), brew her coffee the long way, learn why the lions, keep her name spelled Lviv — and let the longing accumulate interest, as her savings banks once did.

The Guide's honesty, which here is a vow: this page is a promise. When the sky over the Rynok belongs to swifts and church bells again, this postal will open like the others — the doors beneath it will fill with coffeehouses, courtyards, day trips to the castles of the Golden Horseshoe and the Carpathians beyond — and the first travellers back will find a city that was, through the worst of it, the country's front door and its kitchen. Few places will deserve the visit more, or serve a better cup when it comes.