Lviv: a city profile

Why Lviv matters. A city of many rulers and many communities, with a historic centre on the UNESCO World Heritage List, churches of several traditions, and a long history of books and learning.

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Lviv (Львів) is the largest city in western Ukraine. For seven centuries it has been ruled by different states and shared by different peoples, and its old centre still shows it: a market square with a town hall in the middle, narrow streets, and churches of several Christian traditions. Since 1998 the historic centre has been on UNESCO’s World Heritage List. Lviv also has a long history as a city of universities, books and theatre.

Illustration of a quiet cobbled street with old houses and café tables. — A quiet old-town street with café tables.

Where Lviv is

Lviv is the centre of Lviv oblast and the historic capital of Galicia, a region in the west of Ukraine. The oldest part of the city lies in a river valley below a hill called the High Castle (Висо́кий За́мок, Vysokyi Zamok, 413 m). The river, the Poltva, still runs under the centre, but it has been covered over since 1841.

The site mattered for trade. Routes from the Baltic to the Black Sea and from Kraków to Kyiv crossed here, and they were the main reason the city grew.

Because so many peoples have lived in Lviv, it has several names. In Polish it is Lwów, in German Lemberg, in Latin Leopolis and in Russian Lvov. In English, this site uses Lviv, the official transliteration of the Ukrainian name.

A view over a row of colourful old town houses and red and grey roofs, with a large green church dome on the left and a tall, slender bell tower in the centre, and green wooded hills on the horizon under a cloudy blue sky. — The north side of Rynok Square, the Dominican church (green dome) and the Korniakt tower of the Dormition Church, seen from the town-hall tower, May 2007.Photo: Lestat (Jan Mehlich), Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0, file page.

A city of many rulers

People lived on the site long before the city was founded. Lviv itself dates from the mid-13th century. Prince Danylo Romanovych founded it and named it after his son Lev, so the name means “Lev’s city”; лев is also the Ukrainian word for a lion. Here are the main periods, in brief:

Mid-13th century: founded by Prince Danylo; first mentioned in a chronicle under the year 1256.
From the 1260s: capital of the principality of Galicia-Volhynia.
1349 to 1772: taken by King Casimir III of Poland, then, after a short period of joint Polish-Hungarian rule, part of the Kingdom of Poland. In 1356 the city received Magdeburg law, a German form of town self-government. It applied only to Catholics, so Orthodox Ukrainians had no part in running the city.
1772 to 1918: under Austria, as the capital of the province of Galicia. The old city walls came down from 1777 and were replaced by tree-lined boulevards.
1918 to 1939: Ukrainians and Poles fought over the city in 1918–19. Between the wars it belonged to Poland.
1939 to 1944: Soviet occupation from September 1939, then German occupation from June 1941 to July 1944.
1944 to 1991: part of Soviet Ukraine.
Since 1991: part of independent Ukraine.

A city of many communities

For centuries Lviv was home to Ukrainians, Poles, Jews, Armenians and others. UNESCO’s reasons for listing the old centre say this directly: trade and government drew people of different cultures and faiths, who built separate communities that depended on one another, and the buildings they left are still part of the townscape. In UNESCO’s words, the surviving buildings include “a mosque, a synagogue and a variety of religious buildings from the Orthodox, Armenian and Catholic churches”.

The Second World War and the years after it changed the city’s population radically. More than 200,000 Jews were in the city in September 1939, nearly half of them refugees from German-occupied Poland. In July 1941, in the first weeks of the German occupation, thousands of the city’s Jews were killed in pogroms. The US Holocaust Memorial Museum names the perpetrators as Ukrainian nationalists and militia, encouraged by the German forces, together with German forces and some local residents. Later in 1941 the Germans forced the city’s Jews into a ghetto. Tens of thousands were deported to the Belzec killing centre, others were sent to the Janowska camp, and thousands were killed in the city itself. By the end of the war most Jews in the region had been murdered.

After the war, under a Soviet–Polish population exchange, almost all of the city’s Poles were sent to Poland, and Ukrainians, including people forcibly resettled from areas that became part of Poland, became by far the largest group.

These layers mean that Lviv, Lwów or Lemberg matters to the memory of several peoples, not just one.

The UNESCO historic centre

The World Heritage property is called “L’viv – the Ensemble of the Historic Centre”. It was inscribed in 1998, and it has two parts:

the castle hill and the area around it, known as Підза́мче (Pidzamche, “below the castle”), together with the city centre, середмі́стя (seredmistia);
a smaller area on St George’s Hill, around St George’s Cathedral.

In plain English, UNESCO lists it for two reasons. The streets and buildings mix the building traditions of Eastern Europe with those of Italy and Germany. And the many communities that came to the city left a townscape where their different traditions can still be seen side by side.

A great fire in 1527 destroyed most of the Gothic town, and another followed in 1571, but the medieval street pattern and the narrow building plots survived. The old town came through the Second World War largely intact, though with some losses. In September 2023 UNESCO added it to the List of World Heritage in Danger, because of the threat from the Russian offensive.

Rynok Square and the old town

At the heart of the old town is Rynok Square (пло́ща Ри́нок, “Market Square”). It is a rectangle with the town hall, the ра́туша, standing in the middle. The present town hall and the four fountains around it were built in 1827–35.

A long, pale-yellow building with rows of tall windows and arched doorways at ground level, and a tall square clock tower rising from its centre with a blue-and-yellow flag on top, under a clear blue sky. — Lviv's town hall (ratusha) on Rynok Square, November 2014.Photo: Aeou, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0, file page.

Around the square stand rows of old houses. Some date from the Renaissance, after the fire of 1527, such as the Black House (1577–88) and the Korniakt House (1580). Of the towers that once guarded the city walls, only one survives, the Gunpowder Tower.

Churches of many traditions

The old town has churches of different Christian traditions, among them:

the Latin Cathedral, Roman Catholic, begun in the 14th century and rebuilt in 1761–76;
the Armenian Cathedral;
the Dormition Church (1591–1629), with the Korniakt tower beside it.

The Golden Rose Synagogue (1582) was built in the same period. The Nazis plundered it in 1941 and blew it up in 1943, and since 2016 its remains have been part of a memorial on the site.

South-west of the old centre, on its own hill, stands St George’s Cathedral (UNESCO calls it St Yuri’s, after its Ukrainian name). It is a rococo church, built in 1744–59 and finished in 1764. From 1817 to 1946 it was the seat of the metropolitans, the leading bishops, of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. The Soviet authorities abolished that church in 1946. It was recognised again in 1990, and the cathedral was returned to it.

A pale-yellow baroque church with a large dome and ornate towers, glowing in low golden sunlight against a dark cloudy sky, above a yellow wall with a gate and wide stone steps. — St George's Cathedral in Lviv in early morning light, December 2015.Photo: Ryzhkov Sergey, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0, file page.

According to Lviv’s profile in UNESCO’s Creative Cities Network, in the early 20th century Lviv was the seat of three Catholic archbishops at once: Latin, Greek Catholic and Armenian Catholic.

Books, learning and the stage

Lviv’s university traces its origins to 1661, when the king of Poland gave the city’s Jesuit college the rank of a university. The modern university was founded under Austrian rule in 1784; today it is the Ivan Franko National University of Lviv. Lviv Polytechnic and the Ukrainian Catholic University are among the city’s other universities.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries Lviv was a centre of Ukrainian learning and publishing, home to the Shevchenko Scientific Society, founded in 1873. According to the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, in 1913 65 of the world’s 83 Ukrainian periodicals were published in Lviv. At the same time the city was a Polish political and cultural centre.

The city still describes itself as a city of writers, publishers and readers. Since 2015 it has been a UNESCO City of Literature, and according to its profile in UNESCO’s network, the Lviv International Festival of Literature has been held since 1997.

A large, cream-coloured theatre building with columns, arched windows and a carved pediment, topped by three dark bronze statues of winged figures, on a wide square under a blue sky. — The Lviv Theatre of Opera and Ballet (built 1897–1900), August 2012.Photo: Jorge Láscar, Wikimedia Commons (cropped), CC BY 2.0, file page.

The opera house was built in 1897–1900 as the city theatre. Since 2000 the Lviv Theatre of Opera and Ballet has carried the name of the soprano Solomiia Krushelnytska.

More than the old town

The World Heritage property covers 120 hectares, only a small part of today’s city. Lviv is not a museum: the old centre is one layer of a large, living city, and its story is one where Ukrainian, Polish, Austrian, Jewish and Armenian histories meet.

If you want to read about Lviv in Ukrainian, the A2 story A weekend in Lviv follows two friends around the old town.

A little Ukrainian

Words for walking round an old town. Notice how Львів changes: у Льво́ві, in Lviv; до Льво́ва, to Lviv; зі Льво́ва, from Lviv.

Львів: Lvivmasculine; the і becomes о in the other forms: Льво́ва, Льво́ві
пло́ща: squarefeminine; пло́ща Ри́нок, Rynok Square
ву́лиця: streetfeminine
ра́туша: town hallfeminine
собо́р: cathedralmasculine
це́рква: churchfeminine; plural церкви́

Ра́туша стої́ть на пло́щі Ри́нок.

The town hall stands on Rynok Square.

на + locative: пло́ща → на пло́щі.

У Льво́ві бага́то церко́в.

There are many churches in Lviv.

бага́то + genitive plural: це́рква → церко́в.

Де собо́р?

Where is the cathedral?

Words without a native-speaker recording are read by a computer-generated voice (OpenAI text-to-speech); the written form, with its stress marks, is the reference.

Read about it in Ukrainian

A short text on this topic, with a word list, a translation, audio and questions.

Picture credits

Illustration of a quiet cobbled street with old houses and café tables: made for Blabober with Recraft.
A view over a row of colourful old town houses and red and grey roofs, with a large green church dome on the left and a tall, slender bell tower in the centre, and green wooded hills on the horizon under a cloudy blue sky: Photo: Lestat (Jan Mehlich), Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0, file page.
A long, pale-yellow building with rows of tall windows and arched doorways at ground level, and a tall square clock tower rising from its centre with a blue-and-yellow flag on top, under a clear blue sky: Photo: Aeou, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0, file page.
A pale-yellow baroque church with a large dome and ornate towers, glowing in low golden sunlight against a dark cloudy sky, above a yellow wall with a gate and wide stone steps: Photo: Ryzhkov Sergey, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0, file page.
A large, cream-coloured theatre building with columns, arched windows and a carved pediment, topped by three dark bronze statues of winged figures, on a wide square under a blue sky: Photo: Jorge Láscar, Wikimedia Commons (cropped), CC BY 2.0, file page.

Sources

Lviv (A. Figol, V. Kubijovyč, A. Zhukovsky (updated 2016), Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine, Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies)
In English. Used for: Lviv is the centre of Lviv oblast, the historic capital of Galicia and the largest city in the western oblasts; The city's names in other languages (Leopolis, Lwów, Lemberg, Lvov); The old town lies in the valley of the Poltva below the castle hill, Vysokyi Zamok (413 m); the Poltva has been covered over since 1841; The city grew where trade routes crossed, from the Baltic to the Black Sea and from Kraków to Kyiv; Founded in the mid-13th century by Prince Danylo Romanovych and named after his son Lev; first mentioned under the year 1256; capital of the Principality of Galicia-Volhynia from the 1260s, under Prince Lev Danylovych, until the 1340s; Taken by Casimir III of Poland in 1349; Magdeburg law in 1356, which applied only to Catholics; part of Poland until 1772; Austrian from 1772 to 1918, as capital of Galicia; the walls torn down from 1777 and replaced by boulevards; the university of 1784; A centre of Ukrainian cultural life and publishing (the Shevchenko Scientific Society, 1873; the 1913 publishing figures) and also a Polish political and cultural centre; The Ukrainian-Polish war over the city in 1918–19; part of Poland between the wars; Soviet occupation 1939–41, German occupation 1941–44, Soviet rule again from July 1944; After the war Ukrainians, including people from areas that became part of Poland, became by far the largest group; The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church abolished by the Soviet authorities in 1946; recognised again in 1990, when St George's Cathedral was returned to it; The market square and town hall at the centre of the street grid; the town hall and its four fountains (1827–35); Renaissance houses on Rynok Square (the Black House, 1577–88; the Korniakt House, 1580), the Dormition Church (1591–1629), the Golden Rose Synagogue (1582); The Gunpowder Tower, the only surviving tower of the old walls; The Latin Cathedral (built from the 1340s, rebuilt 1761–76); the Armenian Cathedral; Lviv Polytechnic and the Ukrainian Catholic University among the city's universities; The old town came through the Second World War with little damage; For centuries the city was home to Ukrainians, Poles, Jews, Armenians and others; the war and its aftermath changed this composition radically; The Gothic town was destroyed by fire in 1527. Accessed 7 November 2026.
Saint George's Cathedral (Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine)
In English. Used for: St George's Cathedral is a rococo church built in 1744–59 and finished in 1764; seat of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic metropolitans from 1817 to 1946. Accessed 7 November 2026.
Lviv National Academic Theater of Opera and Ballet (Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine)
In English. Used for: The opera house was built in 1897–1900 as the city theatre; since 2000 the theatre has been named after the soprano Solomiia Krushelnytska. Accessed 7 November 2026.
L'viv – the Ensemble of the Historic Centre (UNESCO World Heritage Centre)
In English. Used for: The exact name of the World Heritage property, inscribed in 1998; it covers 120 ha; The property has two parts, the castle hill with the area around it and the city centre, and St George's (St Yuri's) Hill with its cathedral; Why it is listed, criteria (ii) and (v), in paraphrase; UNESCO's wording that the surviving buildings include "a mosque, a synagogue and a variety of religious buildings from the Orthodox, Armenian and Catholic churches"; A settlement existed on the site long before the city was founded; Fires in 1527 and 1571; the medieval street pattern and plots survive; some losses, mainly in the Second World War; On the List of World Heritage in Danger since 2023. Accessed 7 November 2026.
Ukraine: UNESCO sites in Kyiv and Lviv are inscribed on the List of World Heritage in Danger (UNESCO)
In English. Used for: On 15 September 2023 the historic centre of Lviv was put on the List of World Heritage in Danger because of the threat of destruction from the Russian offensive. Accessed 7 November 2026.
Lvov (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia)
In English. Used for: More than 200,000 Jews were in the city in September 1939, nearly 100,000 of them refugees from German-occupied Poland; Encouraged by German forces, Ukrainian nationalists killed about 4,000 Jews in early July 1941; in a second pogrom in late July, Ukrainian militants killed more than 2,000; From November 1941 the Germans forced the Jews into a ghetto; from March 1942 they deported them to the Belzec killing centre (more than 65,000 by August 1942); thousands were sent to the Janowska camp; thousands were killed in the city itself, including when the ghetto was destroyed in June 1943. Accessed 7 November 2026.
The Lwów Pogrom of July 1, 1941 (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia)
In English. Used for: The pogrom was carried out by German forces, a new Ukrainian militia, Ukrainian nationalist activists and some local residents; By the end of the war, most Jews in the region had been murdered. Accessed 7 November 2026.
Poles in Ukraine (Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine)
In English. Used for: After the new Soviet–Polish border of 16 August 1945, a massive exchange of borderland population followed; in 1946 virtually all Poles were deported from Western Ukraine to Poland. Accessed 7 November 2026.
Resettlement (Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine)
In English. Used for: After the Second World War nearly 500,000 Ukrainians from the Sian, Kholm and Lemko regions were forcibly resettled in western and northern Poland or in Soviet Ukraine, and Poles living in Ukraine were resettled in Poland. Accessed 7 November 2026.
Lviv opens Jewish memorial on former historic synagogue (Cnaan Liphshiz, JTA (Jewish Telegraphic Agency), 5 September 2016)
In English. Used for: The Nazis largely destroyed the 16th-century Golden Rose complex in the 1940s; a memorial with commemorative stone slabs on part of the site, keeping some of its foundations and relics, was unveiled in September 2016. Accessed 7 November 2026.
Golden Rose Synagogue (Lviv Interactive, Center for Urban History of East Central Europe)
In English. Used for: The synagogue was plundered in August 1941 and blown up by the Nazis in 1943. Accessed 7 November 2026.
History of the university (Ivan Franko National University of Lviv)
In English. Used for: The university traces its origins to 20 January 1661, when King Jan II Kazimierz granted the Jesuit college the rank of a university. Accessed 7 November 2026.
Lviv, UNESCO Creative City of Literature (UNESCO Creative Cities Network (the city's member profile))
In English. Used for: Lviv has been a UNESCO City of Literature since 2015; The profile says the Lviv International Festival of Literature has been held since 1997; In the early 20th century the city was the seat of three Catholic archbishops (Latin, Greek Catholic and Armenian Catholic). Accessed 7 November 2026.
Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine)
In English. Used for: Ukraine became independent on 24 August 1991. Accessed 7 November 2026.
Горох — онлайн-бібліотека словників української мови (Словозміна) (goroh.pp.ua)
In Ukrainian. Used for: Stress and forms of every Ukrainian word on this page (Львів, Льво́ва, Льво́ві, лев, пло́ща, ву́лиця, ра́туша, собо́р, це́рква, церко́в, ри́нок, Висо́кий За́мок, Підза́мче, середмі́стя, стої́ть, бага́то). Accessed 7 November 2026.

Last updated 7 November 2026