Day Ten. The same poet. The city where it all began.
Before Everything Else
Every other story in this series has been about arriving somewhere. A train station, a bus stop, a tram that carries you through an unfamiliar city toward a bronze face you have read about but not yet seen. The encounter has always been a discovery, a finding, a moment of recognition across distance.
Lviv is different in every way that matters.
Lviv is where I was born. Lviv is where I went to school, where I learned to read, where I first understood what it meant to be Ukrainian in a city that had been many things under many empires and had kept its soul through all of them. The monument on Prospekt Svobody did not require a journey to find. It was simply there, in the centre of the city that was the centre of my world, from the first year of my memory old enough to hold it.
I did not go to Shevchenko in Lviv. I grew up with him.
The Summer of 1992
Ukraine had been independent for one year. The declaration of independence had come on August 24, 1991, the day that changed the calendar of Ukrainian public life permanently, the day that every subsequent anniversary would be measured against.
On August 24, 1992, the first anniversary, they unveiled the monument on Prospekt Svobody.
I was there. Or I was nearby, in the city, in the crowd, at the age when the significance of what you are witnessing is felt more than understood, absorbed into the body before it can be articulated in the mind. What I remember is the energy of it: the particular electricity of a city celebrating something it had waited for without being entirely certain it would come. The clergy of four churches, Orthodox, Greek Catholic, Armenian, Roman Catholic, blessing the same monument together, the sound of that, the sight of it, the understanding that something consecrated in four languages at once had been given a permanent address in the heart of my city.
And then I heard, for the first time in a public setting with a crowd around me rather than in a classroom or at home, the words I already knew:
Реве та стогне Дніпр широкий, Сердитий вітер завива, Додолу верби гне високі, Горами хвилю підійма…
The Dnipro roars and groans. The angry wind howls. I had learned these lines as a child learns things that matter, by hearing them so many times that they stop being learned and become simply known, part of the internal weather. But hearing them in the open air of Prospekt Svobody in August 1992, in the year Ukraine had its first anniversary as a free country, with the bronze figure newly unveiled and the wave of the stele rising behind him, that was something I carried forward into everything that came after.
Prospekt Svobody and Its Logic
The location of the monument was not assigned by officials. It was chosen by the people of Lviv, and the choosing happened the way Lviv things happen, through an act so persistent and so certain of itself that the authorities eventually had no choice but to agree.
In 1988, a gathering place called Kliumba, the Flowerbed, came into existence on Prospekt Svobody. It was not an official institution. It was simply the place where Lviv people came to talk, to protest, to sing, to read forbidden literature out loud, to do the things that people who have decided to stop being afraid do in the open air of the centre of their city. When Shevchenko Day came in 1989, they brought flowers, enormous quantities of flowers, to the Kliumba. A poet named Bohdan Stelmakh, standing in the Opera Theatre that same March 9, read aloud a new poem he had written called simply Пам’ятник, The Monument. And a sculptor named Mykhailo Dzyndra made a stone with the inscription: Тут стояти пам’ятнику Шевченкові. Here shall the Shevchenko monument stand.
They put the stone where the flowers were. And then they kept bringing flowers. And the stone remained. And eventually the officials, confronted with the accumulated evidence of what the people of Lviv had already decided, agreed.
The spot had previously held a monument to the Polish King Jan III Sobieski, unveiled in 1898 and removed after World War II. Before that, it had been the edge of the old city fortifications. The ground had held many things. What it holds now is the poet who told an entire people that they had the right to exist in their own language, on their own land, with their own memory intact.
Born in Argentina, Carried to Lviv
The story of how the monument arrived at its place is one of the most remarkable diaspora stories in this entire series.
The Ukrainian community in Lviv could not afford to build it alone. The late Soviet period had produced many things but not surplus funds for large-scale public art. And so a man named Vasyl Ivanytskyi, who had connections in the Ukrainian diaspora of South America, did what diaspora communities have always done when the homeland needs something: he organized, he raised funds, he made it possible from a distance.
The sculptors, brothers Volodymyr and Andriy Sukhorsky, both Lvivians, both in their early thirties, went to Argentina. To Monte Grande, in the suburbs of Buenos Aires, to a foundry that was not quite a studio, where they worked under the open sky of the Southern Hemisphere, building scaffolding with their own hands, fabricating the armature themselves, casting 4.45 metres of Shevchenko in bronze far from the city where he would stand. Volodymyr Sukhorsky later recalled the strangeness and the beauty of it: creating their Lviv’s Shevchenko on the other side of the world, in another hemisphere entirely, in a language neither he nor his brother spoke.
The figure was shipped by sea from Buenos Aires to Hamburg. From Hamburg it was transported to Lviv. When it arrived at the Lviv ceramic factory, the welders reattached the arm that had been removed to fit the sculpture into the container. The Wave of National Revival, the twelve-metre stele, was cast in Kyiv in sections, transported to Lviv, and assembled on site.
I think about this journey often. The figure that stands at the centre of my city, the one I grew up beside and showed to everyone who ever visited, was made in Argentina by two Lviv brothers in their thirties working under an open sky, funded by Ukrainians who had never met the city they were giving a monument to, carried across an ocean and then across a continent to arrive at the place where the people of Lviv had already put a stone saying: here. This is where he stands.
My Grandfather and the View from the Tower
I need to tell you about my grandfather.
He was the timekeeper of the Lviv Ratusha, the city hall tower. This was not a metaphor. It was his job, his responsibility, his decades-long practice: twice a year, when the clocks changed, he would make his way through the pre-dawn streets to the tower, climb the 365 steps he knew by heart, and adjust the great clock that kept time for the entire city. Every citizen who looked up at the tower through their day, every worker who listened for its chimes, every child who learned to read time by its face, all of them were synchronized by his hands. He held this duty until 1999, when he made his final journey home.
From the top of the Ratusha tower, Prospekt Svobody spreads below like an open book. You can see the entire promenade, the buildings on both sides, the linden trees in summer, the tramway lines, and at the far end of the prospect: Shevchenko.
My grandfather could see the monument from his tower. Every time he went to adjust the clock, in the spring when time moved forward, in the autumn when it fell back, he would look down from the place where he held time in his hands and see Taras Shevchenko standing in the avenue below, with the Wave of National Revival rising beside him into the Lviv sky.
I did not fully understand, when I was a child, what it meant to have a grandfather who kept time for an entire city. I understood it better as I grew older, and I understand it differently now that he is gone. There is a particular kind of service, quiet, faithful, performed in the hours when the city sleeps, not for recognition but because someone has to do it and he had agreed to be that someone, that I recognize in myself and trace back to him. The Saturday gatherings in Kamloops. The weekly standing in public when it would be easier to stay home. The commitment to showing up not because it is always easy but because the showing up is itself the thing.
He did not need anyone to thank him. The clock ticked. That was enough.
And below his tower, in the avenue where the people of Lviv had put flowers and then a stone and then a monument, Shevchenko stood through every adjustment, every season, every year of my grandfather’s remaining decade, looking out across the city with his arm slightly raised, the way he stands in Lviv, not the older Shevchenko of the heavy coat and the downcast gaze that Kaganovich wanted to moderate in Kyiv, but a different figure: a man in mid-speech, mid-gesture, mid-thought, still in the middle of saying something that has not yet finished being said.
Showing Everyone
Lviv is the city you want to show people. If you are from Lviv, you know this: the moment a visitor arrives, you feel the particular responsibility and pleasure of a person who has something exceptional to offer and wants the other person to understand what it is.
I showed everyone the monument. Friends from university. Colleagues who came for conferences. Anyone who visited and would let me be their guide. The tour always included Prospekt Svobody, always stopped at the monument, always involved some explanation of the Wave, the Orans at the top, arms raised in blessing; the hetmans and the queens and the guelder rose of the lower registers; the back panel with its millstone of dates, the Holodomor, the Second World War, Chornobyl, the broken crack that separates a portion of the Ukrainian people from the continuity of history; and above all of that, behind bars, the faces of the dissident poets, Vasyl Stus, Vasyl Symonenko, who went to prison rather than be silent.
I always recited. Реве та стогне Дніпр широкий. And Заповіт. These are the poems that come automatically in Lviv, the ones you learned before you knew you were learning them, absorbed from the air of a city that had been saying them since before you arrived.
What the Monument Is
The Lviv Shevchenko is unlike any other monument in this series. It does not stand alone. It stands with the Wave, the great curving stele that rises beside him like a wave breaking, like the force of history itself rising alongside the man who put it into words. Together, the figure and the stele form a composition that is less about a single man than about everything a single man contains: the full arc of Ukrainian history from Kyivan Rus to independence, the ghetmans and the queens and the conquerors and the defenders and the Holodomor and Chornobyl and the dissident poets behind their prison bars, all of it gathered into one place on the central avenue of the city that kept Ukrainian culture alive when Kyiv could not.
The Orans, the Theotokos with arms raised, presides over all of it from the top of the stele, her transparent halo rising from the wings of angels with trumpets, the ancient image of protection and intercession and the refusal of erasure.
This is not a monument to a poet. This is a monument to Ukraine. The poet is the figure it gathers around, the voice it organizes itself beside, but the full weight of what the stele carries is the whole history, the whole grief, the whole stubborn survival.
Standing before it now, I understand why my grandfather could look at it from the tower every time he went to adjust the clock. Some things hold time the way clocks do, not by measuring it but by standing in it, accumulating what passes, remaining while everything else changes.
Заповіт in the City Where I Was Born
There is no version of this visit without Заповіт. There never has been. Even in 1992, when the monument was new and Ukraine was one year old, the words were already mine, already memorized, already part of the interior landscape.
I say them on Prospekt Svobody the way you say a prayer in the church you grew up in: not because you have decided to, but because the place calls it out of you before the decision forms.
Як умру, то поховайте Мене на могилі Серед степу широкого На Вкраїні милій…
When he wrote these words, Shevchenko was in exile in Kazakhstan, imagining a burial place he was not certain he would reach. He was thirty-one years old. He did not know if Ukraine would survive, if the language would survive, if anything he had written would outlast the empire that was trying to erase it. He asked to be remembered with a kind and quiet word in the great free family that he could not quite see from where he was but insisted on believing in.
He is buried at Kaniv now, above the Dnipro, in the place Заповіт described. The great free family is still in the process of becoming. And here in Lviv, on Prospekt Svobody, the monument that was made in Argentina and carried across an ocean stands in the avenue where the people put flowers until the authorities had no choice but to agree — the avenue my grandfather watched from his tower, keeping time for a city that kept its soul.
He was here before I was born, in some essential sense. He will be here after.
He always is.
——— 🇺🇦 ———
One more city. The same poet, looking back.
Слава Україні. 🇺🇦
About this monument: The monument to Taras Shevchenko on Prospekt Svobody in Lviv was unveiled on August 24, 1992, the first anniversary of Ukrainian independence, and blessed by the clergy of four churches: Ukrainian Orthodox, Greek Catholic, Armenian Apostolic, and Roman Catholic. The bronze figure, 4.45 metres tall, was created by sculptors Volodymyr and Andriy Sukhorsky (architects: Yuriy Dyba and Yuriy Khromei) and cast in Monte Grande, near Buenos Aires, Argentina, funded by the Ukrainian diaspora under the leadership of Vasyl Ivanytskyi. The sculpture was shipped by sea to Hamburg and transported to Lviv, where it was assembled on site. By 1996, the monument was completed with the twelve-metre bronze stele Khvylia Natsionalnoho Vidrodzhennia, the Wave of National Revival, cast in Kyiv and installed on Prospekt Svobody. The stele’s front face depicts the history of Ukraine from Kyivan Rus to the early 20th century through figures from Shevchenko’s works and Ukrainian history, crowned by the Orans figure of the Theotokos. The reverse face depicts the tragedies of 20th-century Ukraine: the 1918–1922 wars, the Holodomor, World War II, and Chornobyl, with portraits of dissident poets imprisoned behind bars. The monument stands on the site formerly occupied by a monument to Polish King Jan III Sobieski (1898–1950). The location was chosen by the people of Lviv themselves, who from 1988 onward brought flowers to the Kliumba gathering place and placed a stone with the inscription: Тут стояти пам’ятнику Шевченкові. In 2018, a miniature tactile copy of the monument with a Braille plaque was added by the same sculptors.
References
Lviv Center. (n.d.). Monument to T.H. Shevchenko in Svobody Boulevard. https://lia.lvivcenter.org/en/objects/monument-shevchenko/
Suspilne Lviv. (2024, March 9). “Тепер це надбання суспільства”: як у Львові з’явився пам’ятник Тарасові Шевченку. https://suspilne.media/lviv/701440-teper-ce-nadbanna-suspilstva-ak-u-lvovi-zavivsa-pamatnik-tarasovi-sevcenku/
Tvoe Misto. (2026, March 9). Як у Львові з’явився пам’ятник Шевченку і як львів’яни самі обрали для нього місце. https://tvoemisto.tv/blogs/chomu_u_lvovi_pamyatnyk_shevchenku_bilya_klyumby_a_dudaryk_shchoroku_spivaie_tam_akafist_118109.html
Wikipedia. (n.d.). Пам’ятник Тарасові Шевченку (Львів). https://uk.wikipedia.org/wiki/Пам’ятник_Тарасові_Шевченку_(Львів)
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