Francis Joseph in Czernowitz

August 18 is the birthday of Francis Joseph, Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary. On this day, the Austro-Hungarian pilgrim house in Jerusalem hangs out on its façade the huge double Austro-Hungarian flag made in 1880, which was seen in 2014 in the Weltuntergang exhibition in Vienna, in the room dedicated to the Austro-Hungarian gunners fighting in the Holy Land. We, however, were able to pay tribute before the statue of the old monarch on this illustrious day only in the “Jerusalem along the Prut”, as Czernowitz was called in his day.


That a statue of Francis Joseph still stands in the capital of the former model Hapsburg province, Bukovina, in itself would be a sensation in the Ukraine, where hardly any monument from the “brave old world” has survived the Soviet regime. Especially not a statue of the ruler of a previous empire, if even that of John Sobieski, King of Poland, who had a much better renown as the scourge of the Turks, whose monument was exiled in 1945 from Lemberg, together with his people. The real sensation, however, is that this statue was erected not a century ago, but quite recently, in 2009. This shows how times are changing in Czernowitz, and how the nostalgia for pre-war Galicia, as the last golden age of the country, has taken over all of Western Ukraine.

Vlodko Kostyrko: Golden Galicia, 2009. From the exhibition Mythos Galizien, Vienna, 2015

The other special feature of the statue is that it was not erected by the city or by the Ukrainian government. Not even by an association, like the  “Verein zur Verschönerung der Stadt Czernowitz”, which in 1998 restored the memorial plaque of 1908 on the “Habsburghöhe” behind the university, originally dedicated to the 60th anniversary of Francis Joseph’s reign. But rather by a private citizen, on his own expense. Maybe for the reason that if the statue caused politically too great a scandal, the city could wash its hands of the matter. But also, if the bold gesture proved successful, it could bring significant political capital to the one who erected it. And this is what happened. The statue was erected by Arseny Yatsenyuk, the recently resigned president of the Ukrainian parliament, at his own expense, according to the inscription, “as a gift to the inhabitants of Czernowitz”, just before announcing his candidacy in the Ukrainian presidential elections, which he would win only five years later, in 2014, after the Kiev Revolution. Yatsenyuk comes from an old Czernowitz family, his father is a vice-dean in the university of the city, originally named after Francis Joseph, where he also graduated, thus the donation can be also considered as a gesture of a local patriot to his hometown. Nevertheless, the leaders of the local and provincial government, as well as the Austrian Embassador in Ukraine also participated in the inauguration of the statue on 3 October 2009. On that occasion, Yatsenyuk emphasized in his speech, that he was inspired “not by a nostalgia for the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, but the recognition of the achievements of the Empire”.

This statue can be also considered the restration of a previous monument. Until 1918, a few streets further south, in the so-called National Park stood the statue of Francis Joseph, which was the model of the sculptors the present one, Segei Ivanov and Volodymyr Tsisarik. The statue depicted the monarch not in a solemn, representative posture, but as a walking figure. This is how the citizens of Czernowitz saw him on his third and last visit to the city, in September 1880, when, after having participated on the Yom Kippur Day ceremony in the Great Synagogue, he traversed on foot the streets of the “Little Vienna” lying on the eastern border of the Empire, and he even spoke to passers-by, which increased in no small measure his popularity in the city’s historical memory. The modern monument omits the pedestal, thus allowing the emperor to mingle again with the passers-by.




The original statue was destroyed by the invading Romanian army. Later National Park was built over. Its area is now covered partly by the city stadium, and partly by Guzar Street. This is why the founders choose a nearby site for the new monument, the former Ferdinand Park next to the former Roman Catholic cathedral.

The choice of the site is full of significance. The church of the Heart of Jesus was built by the Jesuit order between 1891 and 1894. The Jesuits arrived in 1885 from Silesia, which at that time still belonged to Germany, while their provincial, Frank Eberhardt – after whom the street in front of the church was named by the grateful city – from Berlin. They undertook the pastoral care of the local Germans, who amounted to 80% of the city’s Catholic population, so this is the time when the earlier Catholic church, the Holy Cross on Main Street definitively became the “Polish church”. When later the secret clause of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact ceded Northern Bukovina to the Soviet Union, and in 1940, before Stalin took his share, Hitler “repatriated” the Bukovina Germans, the church lost its adherents, and the Soviet regime converted it into a state archive. Still today the stumps of the moulded steel supports of the shelves can be seen drilled into the walls.






The church was emptied after the change of regime, and in this year returned to the Catholic church. I just saw it first opened. Inside, a real abandoned places feeling receives us, with crumbling plaster and broken-down organ choir. However, the archival use preserved the church from the worst danger, the penetration of water and fungi. Not much is missing to make it again the Catholic cathedral of the city. And if they do so, the square will also revalorized, and the emperor’s statue will once again stand in a central place of Czernowitz.






That the square already plays an important role in the city’s memory is shown by the small “folk memorial” standing next to it. The wooden panels leaned against the cross decorated with fresh and artificial flowers and wreaths announce: “Here stood the chapel of St. Anthony, preacher of the Word of God from Italian Padua”. The 13th-century Portuguese Franciscan St. Anthony of Padua is still extremely popular in Catholic folk religion as the patron of lost things, affairs and people, of whom over the last century there were plenty in Czernowitz. This “substitute monument” is a remarkably Ukrainian genre. These are established when still there is no money for a real monument, but they already want to indicate the sanctity of the place. As the plaque in Simferopol which announces that “the Armenian church will be reborn here”, or the barely visible stone in the market place of Zhovkva, that “the Shevchenko monument will stand here”.


We line up in front of the emperor’s statue, we take selfies with him, which a century ago would have been impossible to the passers-by of Czernowitz, and not only for technical reasons. Then we congratulate him with the song “God, keep our emperor”, written by another Franz Josef, by family name Haydn. The modern passers-by of Czernowitz stop by, and listen benevolently to our veneration.


F. J. Haydn: Gott erhalte unsern Kaiser

Invisible cities. Czernowitz, where people and books lived

“A Czech architect who studied in Vienna and became immersed in the characteristics of Bukovinian folk architecture and art, builds up with the help of local Hutsul, Polish and Romanian craftsmen and artists the palace of the Romanian Orthodox Metropolite in Czernowitz – can you imagine a more convincing example of a mutual cross-fertilization of cultures?” (Martin Pollack: Mythos Czernowitz)

Czernowitz, wo Menschen und Bücher lebten. This is how Paul Celan, the great poet of Czernowitz remembers his native town, and it’s not sure which of the two is rarer and more flattering for a city. The easternmost large city of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy was created almost from nothing at the end of the 18th century, when Galicia and Bukovina became part of the Hapsburg empire. The Viennese government intended it from the beginning as a model city, where the representatives of all the nationalities of the Monarchy would harmoniously live with each other, united by the enlightened Hapbsburg government and the common German language. Each of the forty-two ethnic groups constituting the population of the city had their own social, religious and cultural institutions, societies, streets and newspapers, while they were proud that in all the empire, it was in Czernowitz where the most beautiful German was spoken. This diversity and unity of the city’s spirit was also reflected in its built texture, where the planned structure, the large public spaces and public buildings were in a harmonious balance with the quarters and institutions of the single nationalities.

This is the structure we will walk through on the next occasion of our “Invisible cities” series, on 17 September 4 p.m. in the FUGA Center of Architecture (Budapest, Petőfi Sándor u. 5.). In contrast to the previously examined cities, Prague and Tbilisi, Czernowitz became invisible not by destruction. Its old town still preserves its turn-of-the-century fabric virtually without change. Only its diverse and sophisticated culture disappeared, which had created this fabric and filled it with meaning. In our presentation we reconstruct this life and these meanings with the help of contemporary photos, descriptions and local press, thereby showing how Czernowitz indeed became a Hapsburg model city, and later a nostalgic “myth of Czernowitz”, still alive in the memory of its former inhabitants.

Purim in Czernowitz

In turn-of-the-century Czernowitz, the easternmost city of the Monarchy, the “little Vienna”, or, from another perspective, “Jerusalem on the Prut”, forty-two nationalities coexisted, thereby modeling on a small scale the diversity of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The paralel is even more fitting, because the city’s residents proudly declared, regardless of nationality: in all the Empire, the most beautiful German is spoken here. Indeed, after the disintegration of the Monarchy, those poets of the city who did not choose to write in the languages of the successor states, from Paul Celan through Rose Ausländer and Karl Emil Franzos to Gregor von Rezzorii, became great figures of German literature, before they also disappeared, and the city became Stadt der toten Dichter.

In turn-of-the-century Czernowitz, however, the individual nationalities aspired to develop not against each other, but side by side. The smaller ones – the Serbs, Greeks, Armenians, Bulgarians – traditionally had their cultural centers in their churches, merchant’s and boyar’s houses. The larger ones, however, after the turn of the century built their own Nationalhäuser, national houses of culture. First the Romanians, then the Poles, the Ruthenians, the Germans, and finally, in 1908, the Jews.


The Jüdisches Nationalhaus was built not far from the Town Hall, along the long promenade which first was called Fischplatz, and later, when all the squares of Czernowitz were named after the members of the Hapsburg dynasty, this one also was baptized Elisabethplatz. In 1904-1905, in the focus of the square was built the new pride of the city, the city theater, a work of the Viennese office Fellner and Helmer, who designed the fifty most representative theater buildings of contemporary Europe. The Jewish “national house”, standing in a highlighted place, next to the theater, was designed by an architect invited from Lemberg, T. Lewandowski, by repeating the acclaimed motif of the Fellner-Helmer theaters, the monumental column-arch-frame embracing several stores. But while the arch of the theater is only two stories high, that of the Jewish national house unites four stores, thereby actually stealing the show from the theater, and although it pulls aside, nevertheless it becomes the most spectacular building of the square.



Since the late 19th century, this area became the center of Reform Judaism, whose followers tried to assimilate and move upward into the city’s elite, by breaking with the traditional Orthodox center established much lower, in the Synagogengasse along the Prut river. The following postcard displays, to the right of the Nationalhaus, the large green dome of the Reform synagogue, the “Tempel”, and below it, the condition when the Fischmarkt was not yet reformed into a representative urban square. The Tempel is still standing today. Although in 1942 the Germans blew up its dome, they could not overcome its massive walls, so they left it to its fate. In Soviet times it was transformed into a movie theater, which is still functioning, so the Czernowitz slang refers to it as “the cinegoga”.




The Soviets also took over the Jewish national ouse, and they established here the textile workers union center. In order nothing should remind of the former builders, they removed all the six-pointed stars from the rich interior decoration of the building. Among other things, they sawed this central motif out of the iron railing of the stairs, whereby the stairs became dangerous. Only after 1990, when the building was returned to the three-thousand-strong Jewish community of Czernowitz, were the stars of David welded back into the railing, so now you can safely climb the stairs. But we do not need to do so, as on the higher stories there are only offices closed to us. The museum commemorating the Jewry of Czernowitz and Bukovina is on the ground floor, to the right of the entrance.

A prayer for Emperor Franz, 1792. In the Jewish Museum of Bukovina

In the two rooms of the museum we mainly find photographs about the former synagogues, cemeteries, and prominent members of the Jewish community. The few original objects include, in a glass case, this painted tin label, which appears to the untrained eye as an inn’s shop sign, as if the memory of an old fish restaurant returned here, to the former Fischmarkt.


However, Két Sheng gives a more accurate report on it:

No shop label, but a so-called Purim table or Adar table. Purim is celebrated on the 14th of Adar, and, as a joyful expectation to it, a table is usually hung in the Jewish houses on the eve of the first day of Adar, with this Hebrew inscription: “Adar is coming, joy is multiplying” (Talmud Bab., Tractate Taanit 29a.) This is what the upper, red-letter line says in the Czernowitz table (“Mi-she-nichnas adar marbin be-simha”). Traditionally, one or two fishes are also displayed on the table, because Adar stands in the sign of Pisces in the zodiac. This is written in the black-letter text of the table: “Adar, sign of Pisces” (“Adar mazal dagim”). The wine bottle to the right is an alternative complement to the composition, for at Purim it is a mitzvah [a meritorious deed] to drink so much that at the end one is unable to tell Haman from Mordecai. The Yiddish text on the bottle is especially gemütlich: “Lechaim, brider!”

“Reb Burech Bendit drinks lechaim”, not far from here, on the stage of the Yiddish theater of Czernowitz. See here

In the lower right corner of the table, there is a date: (5)687, which corresponds to the civil year of 1927. The lower left corner commemorates the artist’ name: Yitzhak Eisikowicz.

The table has two unusual features. First, that it was made of enameled metal, not paper, and second, that the appeal to drinking is particularly stressed in it. On this basis, and the emphasized date and signature, I suspect hat it might have been pending in a restaurant or wine shop.

Jewish restaurants and wine shops were plentiful in the hundred-thousand-strong Czernowitz, the Jerusalem on the Prut. To provide so many places with Purim tables at the beginning of Adar, and to refresh their shop signs during the year, might have given enough bread for a small painting company.

And the small company did exist. If we descend to the shore of the Prut, the old Synagogengasse, from where the Nationalhaus and the Tempel climbed up to the main square, we see a small house, in one row with the big Orthodox synagogue, the Jewish hospital, the mikveh and the Hassidic synagogue, which shows its importance. And on the facade of the house, you can read a ghost text which has survived the adversities of the century, with the same name as on the Purim table in the museum: “J. Eisikowicz signboard painter. Established in 1910”.

The fate has mysteriously selected what to preserve from the old Jewish Czernowitz.


Elmer Bernstein: Trinkt Le Chaim! (4'23") (From the film Thoroughly Modern Millie)

The Synagogengasse in Czernowitz around 1930, just when Yitzhak Eisikowicz painted the Purim table. The red dot marks the sidewalk in front of the Eisikowicz shop, behind which the Orthodox great synagogue rises. The street view has changed almost nothing in the last eighty years.

East Unlimited

Only two more days, and we will publish the travel plans of Río Wang for this year. But to give a foretaste to our readers, we already publish the program of the “East Unlimited” tour, organized by us for the Hungarian Jewish Cultural Association from April 4 to 11, during which we will mainly track down the forgotten Jewish past of the region over the Carpathians. For the readers of Río Wang we will announce the same route for the end of April.


The thousand kilometers long road, which, at first glance, meanders back and forth with the irresoluteness of the billiard ball over the borders of the countries apparently invented by Shakespeare, is in fact the most resolute route from the Ukrainian border to Odessa. The way through Cluj and Chisinău would be about a hundred kilometers less, but who is willing to enter the Eastern Moldovan or Transnistrian Republic, not recognized by anybody and therefore not marked on the map, where you are suspicious if you enter without smuggled goods, and will taken to pieces together with your vehicle? Or, some might say, why do we make such a detour after h Hotin, why don’t we go along the Moldovan border to o Odessa? Well, apart from the fact that in this way we would miss k Kamenets-Podolsk and the Hasidic Jewish pilgrimage sites m Medzhibozh and n Uman, we have already done this trip through the poorly maintained mountain roads of the Pre-Carpathians, through the impressive dam of the hydroelectric plant of Novodnestrovsk, across the border station of Mogilov-Podolsk rivalling Ádám Bodor’s famous Sinistra District in depression, and we would frankly not want anyone else to do it, only to make a half-day extension to visit the intactly preserved shtetl of Shargorod, which we will be therefore forced to miss. Again others after d Terebesfejérpatak/Dilove usually put the obligatory question as to why we would not make a sixty-kilometer abbrevation towards g Kuty. Well, not because the shorter road offered along the swift water of the Cheremosh exists only on the Ukrainian road maps, while in the reality the Cheremosh washes off at least half of it at every spring thawing, so in the rest of the year it works as a dirt road viable at a maximum speed of 5-10 km. And oh well, we could spare the forth three, back two-day long bus trip in a primitive way, to take a flight or an overnight sleeper, say, from Lwów, but then between a and o we would not see all the many letters, which are the most beautiful, historically most memorable Jewish sites of this Subcarpathia-Bucovina-Black See journey, and which we describe below.

a) Beregszász / Beregove / בערעגסאז. Within less than ten kilometers after crossing the border, we arrive to one of the major centers of Subcarpathian Hungarians and former Subcarpathian Jews. We stop by only for a short time, to change money, and to look around in the main square, still determined by the impressive building of the former Great Synagogue, in 1969 converted into a socialist realist house of culture.

b) Huszt / Khust / חוסט. The places marked in blue on the map – which could be much more – indicate those major sights where we cannot stop or only for a shor while, due to the lack of time, but along the way we will give a detailed report on them, and most of them we will see from the bus. Besides the ruins of the medieval castle, popularized by the most emblematic Hungarian romantic ode, Huszt also has a beautiful medieval church and an orthodox synagogue, about which we will also speak. Along the way we will also present Nagyszőllős / Vinogradov / סעליש, which was recently presented in a beautiful album of archive photos by a native collector now living in Israel, commented with his memories, about which we will soon write in Río Wang.

c) Técső / Tyachiv / טעטש. Here we just pass by the impressive synagogue converted into a sports club, and recall the old Rusyn musicians of the Band of Técső, who preserved for us the Jewish folk repertoire of the region – similarly to the Gypsy musicians in the southern, Romanian part of Maramureș, visited by the Muzsikás Ensemble –, and with whom the renowned klezmer musician Bob Cohen used to play live and publish common albums of folk music albums.

d) Terebesfejérpatak / Dilove, center of the world. Or at least of Europe. Here was established – according to the label of the obelisque, “with an extremely precise Austro-Hungarian leveler, according to the European grades of longitude and latitude” – the geographic center of Europe, marked by an earlier Latin, a later Russian, and a modern Ukrainian inscription. The exalted sense of the Mitte will be increased by the adjacent large and splendid Rusyn restaurant and folk art museum, where we will spend the first day lunch.

e) Kőrösmező / Yasinya / יאסנעה. Although marked in blue, if time permits, we will stop to commemorate and to say Kaddish in front of the memorial plaque of the local railway station to the eighteen thousand Hungarian “stateless” Jews, who in the summer of 1941 were handed over here, at the old-new border of Hungary, to the German authorities who then deported and killed them in Kamenets-Podolsk. Time now will not allow us to visit the beautiful nearby Jewish cemetery or to walk up to the source of the Tisza, the second largest river of Hungary, but we hope that we can make up for it soon at a Maramureș tour.

f) Kolomea / קאלאמיי. By leaving at the Tatar Pass the territory of the former Kingdom of Hungary, we arrive to the historical region of Podkutia, situated between Galicia and Bukovina, whose center was Kolomea, a trading town inhabited by a Jewish majority and a Hutsul minority. The Jewish historical monuments of the city were completely destroyed by the Germans and the Soviets, thus we only pass through it, so that we can arrive to Kuty at daylight.

The center of Kolomea before the war

g) Kuti / קוטוב, but we may safely add also its Armenian name, Կուտի, as this little town was mainly inhabited by Hasids, Armenians and Rusyns, had the glory of  becoming, in the last days of September 1939, the capital of Poland, before the Polish government emigrated from the coordinated attack of Soviet-German forces over the bridge of the Cheremosh to Romania. The Cheremosh, which from 1920 until WWII was the border between Poland and Romania, in particular between the settlements of Kuty and Vizhnitsa, whose Hasidic community was undivided in Austro-Hungarian times, gave a boost to smuggling, whose monopoly was in the hands of the two half-communities. The Hasidic population of Kuty, occupied by Germany in 1941, disappeared, but that of Viznitsa, which fell under Romanian occupation, has survived to this day. Both villages have a wonderful Hasidic cemetery, which are among the most beautiful ones in the whole Ukraine. At the cemetery of Kuty we will stop for a visit.

i) Czernowitz / Chernivtsi / טשערנאוויץ. Should I talk much about it? Yes, but in many separate posts, and also along the way, as it deserves. The capital of Bukovina, the most Jewish city of the former Monarchy, “Little Vienna” and “Jerusalem along the Prut” at once, where they nevertheless cultivated the purest German-language literature, and where Jewish community life lives its renaissance today. We will spend a whole day by visiting the once multi-ethnic city, and will also meet the Jewish community who are waiting for us with great joy.

j) Sadagura / סאדיגורא. The luxurious palace of the Tsaddik of Ruzhyn over the Prut, which has survived for several decades as a canning factory, but today is in the possession of Czernowitz’s Jewish community again. Its renovation was just completed in last autumn, so in the spring we will see it in its renewed splendor.

h) Hotin / Khotin’s castle on the bank of the Dniester: the most important Polish border fortress, which for centuries withstood the Ottoman conquest, and which played a decisive role in assembling the Polish army, with which in 1683 King Jan Sobieski liberated Vienna, besieged by the Turks. Today it is counted among “the seven wonders of the Ukraine”: we will see, why. The letter h – before others notice it – should stay of course before the i and j, but these twin letters were just as suitable to mark the twin towns of Czernowitz and Sadagura, as the h to indicate Hotin. A similarly stirring-up change of rhythm, so necessary on the long bus route, will be induced once more, by carrying forward the m indicating Medzhibozh.

k) Kamenets-Podolsk / קאָמענעץ. We are actively working to make this wonderful town known not just from its black fame of 1941, at least in Hungary, and this stop is also in the service of this PR. Nevertheless, we will also commemorate our “stateless” Jewish compatriots executed here.

Secretly taken photo by the Hungarian Jewish forced laborer and  lorry driver Gyula Spitz, on the Hungarian Jews taken to execution, Kamenets-Podolsk, 1941.

m) Medzhibozh / מעזשביזש. Grave of the founder of Hasidism Baal Shem Tov, around which an entire Hasidic pilgrimage center has been built up in recent years. A beautiful little town, melting into the surrounding nature, and boasting with a centuries old fortress and monuments, and perhaps the only one in the Ukraine, where the street labels are both in Ukrainian and Hebrew!


l) Vinnyica / ויניצא. Before WWII one of the major Jewish settlements in the Ukraine, whose complete extermination is documented by the infamous SS-photo bearing the inscription of “the last Jew of Vinnitsa”. Hitler wanted to make it the center of the conquered Eastern territories, and thus he built up the gigantic Werwolf-Führerhauptquartier, whose ruins are still visible next to the city. We will just pass through this city of bad memory and an impressive example of socialist realist architecture, and will have a lunch after it.

n) Uman / אומאן. The Hasidic center also known as “the little Jerusalem”, the largest Jewish center of modern Ukraine was established above the grave of one of the most important figures of Hasidism, Rabbi Nachman of Breslav, the great-grandson of Baal Shem Tov. On the occasion of Rosh Hashahah, as we have already written about it, Hasidic pilgrims come here by ten thousands from all around the world. We will also visit the lively Jewish quarter and Rabbi Nachman’s grave at our last stop before moving on to the Moscow-Kiev-Odessa highway, the smoothest route of our journey.

AAAND only three hundred more kilometers…

o) Odessa / אדעס, our trip destination, the city of the Black Sea Mediterranean, Neo-Classicist promenades, thieves’ songs, gangsters of the Moldavanka, once the third largest Jewish community in the world. How could we write briefly about it? In fact, we will write long, in the time before the trip, every two-three days. Until then please read the common post by the participants of our autumn tour to Odessa, which followed the same route.