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Tamara Zlobina
Anyone who was there a year ago would now get definitely lost. There were
bushes then, and now there are floors of a future beautiful school. Not far from there
like mushrooms after the rain appear apartment buildings. Some of them already
have got residents. A little less than a year ago the first nine-floor block was inhab-
ited. By this time hundreds of families have had house-warming parties in the Syhiv
residential district. 10 – 15 years will pass and here, on these neglected grounds there
will be a new city – as big as Ternopil, Ivano-Frankivsk or Lutsk – inhabited by 200
thousand people
2
.
The project was glorious. Numerous articles about it were published in local news-
papers, informing about the new so called micro districts, schools and shops. It was an
ordinary story about Soviet achievements. In 1987 Syhiv was mentioned in the guide-
book’s story about Lviv (on the guidebook’s cover as well as in the article about Soviet
architecture
3
).
It wasn’t a lovely place to live in the 1980s because of transportation problems and a
poor consumer infrastructure. But now Syhiv has an excellent infrastructure (shops, su-
permarkets, movie theaters, cafes, beauty salons, etc.) and efficient transport connections
The title page of Syhiv site
V.Vujcyk, R.Lypka. An Encounter with Lvov. – Lviv, 1987.
91
Cultural Markers of Ukrainian Public Space: Mixture and Instability. The City of Lviv Case
with other parts of the city. Famous market “Shuvar” which finances the local newspaper
“Syhiv Info” is also located in the area.
Syhiv possesses a strong local identity. It can be distinguished from other post-Soviet
residential areas because of its separate location and big size. Syhiv wasn’t built as a couple
of streets; from the very beginning it was a well-planned separate district. Since 2001 it has
been an administrative district of the city of Lviv inhabited by 145 932
citizens
4
.
Analysis of the Internet sites content about Syhiv shows two specific groups of people
with opposite opinions about it: one group loves Syhiv, enjoys its space and calls it “the
native place” while the other hates it and calls it boxes of matches. There are few slang
names of Syhiv: “Psyhiv” (allusion to two meanings: “psy” (dogs) and “psyhy” (mad peo-
ple); ghetto, nigger’s district (offensive ones); and famous comparison with New York (I
have heard it many times from Syhiv (and non-Syhiv) dwellers; this proud remark can be
found
in newspapers
5
).
In fact one can spend all his life in Syhiv without ever going anywhere else. Once
I made a small inquiry among Syhiv inhabitants asking them if they were Syhiv or Lviv
residents. I was surprised that most people answered that, first of all, they are Syhiv resi-
dents. Obviously, this small inquiry couldn’t be taken into consideration as a sociological
research but the result is still quite remarkable. There is also some confrontation between
Syhiv and Levandovka young inhabitants. Both districts are excluded from the official
myth about the ancient city and communicate with each other in their own alterna-
tive reality. At the same time the historical center seems to be alien and hostile to them.
Clearly, there are no exact borders between the outskirts and the center. A lot of people
go to their working places and educational institutions in the center or other districts of
the city, but their feelings of belonging and identity are formed by their everyday life and
local subcultures as well as by the mythological city discourse. This local experience shall
not be ignored. The city can be seen in different ways and all personal images have a right
to exist.
Usually the beauty of Lviv is evaluated after looking at its different buildings:
More soul and creation are put into one old building than into the whole Soviet
micro rayon (micro district). Can you imagine modeling at the front porch of a block
building? And these two holes in each granite footstep (for carpets, by the way), and
copper door handles, and wrought banisters? And stained-glass windows? No, be-
cause what can a proletarian need such architectural extravagances for?
6
This is a traditional opinion that explains the dislike by people of block districts and
their anxious attitude towards the historical center. But if one starts to think on a larger
scale of urban modules one can see that Syhiv is beautiful, that silhouettes of block build-
ings have their own rhythmic and dynamics of space, that there is a lot of free space, a
lovely forest and a wide sky.
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Tamara Zlobina
Syhiv develops rapidly. A few supermarkets were constructed there during the last
few years. This perspective district is waiting for big investments. An international contest
for the best conception of the Syhiv public center was announced by city officials in May,
2007. Yuri Kryvoruchko, the chief of Lviv’s architecture department, expects that famous
European architecture schools will
take part in this contest
8
.
Commercial potentialities are not the only attraction of Syhiv. A girl from Dniepro-
petrovsk left a peculiar remark about the resemblance between Syhiv and her own district
at the Lviv Internet forum
9
. Soviet residential districts are alike all around Ukraine and sub-
cultures of these districts have certain similarities. This feeling of similarity and common-
ality can be used to cover dramatic differences between
Ukrainian regions. Another great narrative which can be
somehow connected with Syhiv is Central Europe.
Of course, at first sight, there is nothing in common
between Milan Kundera’s ideas about countries, which
used to think that they are in the West, but one morning
realized that they are in the East. Syhiv is not a part of
the discussion about Central Europe, because this discus-
sion concerns the heritage of the Austro-Hungarian Em-
pire, traditions of peaceful coexisting of different ethnic
groups, multiculturalism and the ancient history of the
region. The Central European myth is central for tourist
rebranding of the region and is the base used to man-
age the cultural heritage of historical downtowns. But the
problems of post-Soviet (post-socialist) residential and industrial areas are also common
for all Central European cities. These areas are thought unimportant in relation to histori-
Photo of Syhiv taken from the Internet
7
.