With his greying brown hair flowing down below broad shoulders, decaying teeth grinning from behind a thick beard, and pale feet wrapped in worn leather sandals, Alik Olisevych stands out from the crowd in Lviv (Lvov), a mid-sized city in western Ukraine, 70km from the Polish border.
‘I am the patriarch of Ukrainian hippies,’ Olisevych proclaims inside a café in the medieval Old Town, promptly ordering me a Turkish coffee and a glass of Armenian brandy. ‘This café opened here 30 years ago, and Virmenskaya [‘Armenian’] Street became one of our meeting places – it was our street.’
Back then, Seventies-era Soviet hippies risked arrest for printing anti-establishment pamphlets or exchanging banned literature as they strummed guitars and sang folk songs in this narrow cobblestone alleyway – for centuries home to the city’s Armenian community. Detention often meant a roughing up and a quick haircut, along with an entry into a KGB dossier.
That version of Lviv passed into the history books when Ukraine achieved independence in 1991, and since then Virmenskaya Street has successfully leveraged its reputation as a counter-cultural haunt to rival any lively Bohemian quarter, with cafés, bars and art galleries multiplying inside its ancient walled storefronts. Today everyone is welcome, regardless of hairstyle or political persuasion and Americans and western Europeans are increasingly part of the mix, thanks to a recent government decree abolishing the stringent visa restrictions of the recent past.
It is quite a change from the Cold War, when visitors from the other side of the Iron Curtain served as valued pop-culture emissaries, introducing forbidden music, blue jeans and other sought-after contraband officially scorned as bourgeois decadence by the Soviets.
‘In those days, most of the tourists were from other [Soviet] republics, but we also had some guests from Canada and Poland,’ the 49-year-old Olisevych remembers. ‘That’s how I got my first Rolling Stones albums.’
Olisevych is one of the many colourful characters who inhabit this all-but-forgotten borderland city in Galicia, once a multicultural kingdom within the Austro-Hungarian Empire that standson territory now split between Poland and Ukraine. In that earlier era it served as a cultural and intellectual outpost where Slavic, Germanic, Jewish and a host of other cultures mingled. Each left a mark on the city, and visitors will detect hints of Vienna, Krakow, Moscow and Prague in the Old Town, which became a Unesco World Heritage Site in 1998.
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