Last minute Lemberg

Today was finally made up the team which will leave in a week, on 20 Friday early morning for the Klezmer festival of Lemberg/Lwów. A small but select company, with such participants as the historian Krisztina Kurdi, who is almost the only author to regularly publish in Hungarian on Lemberg and the Jewish culture of Galicia, Tamás Deák, a connoisseur of inter-war Poland, the historian Catherine Darley from France, who made research in Russia a number of times (including in the former gulag of the Solovki Islands), or Balázs Rafael, who himself guided groups in Soviet Lvov. I count on the contribution of all of them, and I’m going to let them guide the group from time to time, to take advantage of this unique opportunity to learn more about the city. Whoever else would like to take advantage, can do it now: still there are three more places in the 16-person bus.


The advantage of the small bus is that we will be more mobile, and if all goes well, we will reach by daylight Drohobycz, Bruno Schulz’s home town before arriving at Lwów. On Saturday we will walk about the downtown of Lemberg, the main square and its surroundings, the old Armenian and Jewish quarters, the once famous cafés, the old book and antique market, the Krakow suburb and its Polish and Yiddish inscriptions appearing from under the plaster, the historic brewery and the Baczewski alcohol factory where the first vodka was made, and finally the competing Polish and Ukrainian pantheons in the Łyczakówski cemetery as well as the open air museum of Greek Catholic wooden churches. Sunday morning we set out on a tour around the city, beginning with the former death camp of Janowska and continuing with the beautiful Renaissance town and Jewish shtetl of the nearby Zhovkva/Zolkiew. We come back for lunch to Lwów, where at two o’clock begins and lasts into the night the gala program of the klezmer festival in the Old Jewish Street and the market in front of the Golden Rose Synagogue.


The final booking of the hotel rooms will be realized the day after tomorrow, on Friday: until then you can join the tour. The detailed program and all the necessary things to know will be, as was until now, gradually published on the Facebook page of the tour.