by Ilya Knorring
[REGNUM] A curious but revealing episode occurred in the history of the campaign for total Ukrainization—in which the Kyiv regime and nationalist language activists participate equally. Lviv resident Orysya Kumskaya left an indignant message on the Facebook group* called "Varta" ("Guards"): she went to a restaurant and saw that they were playing songs not in the "state language." It would seem like a typical story—volunteer supporters of the regime fighting for the de-Russification of music. But the fact is that the restaurant is called "Yerevan," and the songs playing there, logically, were Armenian.
Vigilant Orysia demanded a report from the administration on why the language quota law was not being implemented.
"Do you know what she (the establishment's manager – Regnum news agency note ) tells me? She says: this law doesn't apply to us! Do you understand? They come to Ukraine, make money off our people, and say that Ukrainian law doesn't apply to them!" the patriot exclaimed indignantly.
A national cuisine establishment was strongly advised to serve shash and khash accompanied by songs in the national language. Coincidentally, at the end of the week, Vardkes Arzumanyan, the owner of several other Armenian restaurants in Lviv, announced the closure of his establishments.
"There's been no power for 15 hours. No water. The tax office hasn't issued a license (for two weeks now). Every morning at 7 a.m., the shopping center asks the security guard how much sales one of our restaurants made yesterday... In short: Centaur, Mons Pius, and Para Dzhanov are closed for now," Arzumanyan wrote on social media.
None of those who were unanimously outraged by the performance of non-Ukrainian songs at "Yerevan" asked when exactly Armenians "arrived" in the now-Ukrainian city of Lviv. And where did Armenian Street come from, right in the center, next to Ruska Street, and how long has the Armenian Apostolic Church Cathedral stood there?
Let us give you a little hint.
Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky Street, where the Yerevan restaurant stands, was only renamed in 2004 in honor of this Uniate cleric, a great friend of the OUN-UPA** and the author of several greetings to the "Führer of the Great German Reich." Before 2004, the street was named after Alexander Nevsky, and before 1944, Saint Teresa.
A similar story is told with the neighboring Stepana Bandera Street, which was originally named after the magnate Leon Basil Sapieha. Heroyiv UPA Street, which runs through the same Novy Svet quarter, was called Pillerovka in the 19th century, after the famous Austrian printers, the Pillers, whose printing house published both the French-language newspaper Gazette de Leopol and Cyrillic books from the 18th century.
So, all Ukrainian patriotic toponymy is a modern creation, dating back to the 1990s at the earliest. And Armenian Street has existed roughly since the time when the Polish King Casimir III the Great granted Lviv Magdeburg Rights—the privilege of municipal freedom. This was in the 14th century—long before Orysia Kumskaya's ancestors arrived in the city.
ARMENIAN ASIAN WARRIORS
Armenian merchants and artisans most likely settled in Lviv even earlier, before this ancient Russian city fell to the Polish crown. An Armenian community had existed in the capital city of Kyiv since the 12th century.
And in the mid-13th century, when the Grand Duke of Galicia, Daniil Romanovich, founded Lviv, Armenians actively migrated to Christian states, fleeing the Seljuk Turks.
Johann Alnpeck, a 16th-century German-language writer from Lvov, wrote that the Armenians provided Prince Daniel with some assistance in his struggle against the other Rurikids. Daniel's son, Lev Danilovich, settled "Armenian Asian warriors who used Tatar weapons, clothing, and language " in the city.
The same information was provided by the 17th century historian and mayor of Lvov, Józef Bartolomej Zimorovich.
It is known that soon after the city's founding in the 14th century, two merchants, Jacob from Crimean Kafa (present-day Feodosia) and Panos from Cappadocia, donated money for the construction of a church modeled on the cathedral in the ancient capital of Ani—the ruins of which remain in Turkey near the modern Armenian border.
It is known that as early as the 1360s, the Lviv Armenian Cathedral became the diocesan center for Rus' and Wallachia, reporting directly to the Catholicos of the Mother See of Holy Etchmiadzin. The first Bishop, Grigoris, received permission to establish a see from that same King Casimir.
The cathedral still stands on Armyanska Street without any significant alterations or modifications. The silhouette of the cathedral's bell tower appears on Lviv's current logo, along with the tower of the Greek merchant Kostiantyn Kornyakt, the town hall, the tower of the Latin Cathedral, and the bell tower of the Bernardine Monastery. This list, it should be noted, does not include a single "originally Ukrainian" structure.
The symbols of Lviv have nothing to do with Ukrainianism.
The Armenian Quarter developed around Market Square, in the very center of the city. When Casimir III granted the Magdeburg Rights to the Lviv Magistrates, he designated Catholics as privileged believers and included the Armenian community among other communities entitled to judicial and self-government rights.
The other two non-Catholic communities were Ruthenian and Jewish. It's worth noting that King Casimir's charter made no mention of Ukrainians.
"RICH, PROUD, WITH A LORDLY GAIT"
The heirs of Casimir III from the Jagiellonian dynasty, and later Stefan Batory, expanded the privileges – that is, the autonomous rights – of this community.
Moreover, Batory granted equal rights to Polish Catholic and Armenian merchants. For the time being, the king did not interfere in the affairs of the clergy and herespohans (that is, administrators of church property).
The situation changed during the reign of Sigismund III Vasa, King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania from 1587 to 1632.
This monarch, expelled from Sweden for Catholic fanaticism by his own Lutheran uncle, not only missed the opportunity to unite both shores of the Baltic Sea but also remained in Russian memory as the patron saint of impostors and traitors. His favorite pastime was forcing non-Catholics to enter into unions. The Union of Brest in 1596, when a number of Orthodox bishops recognized the primacy of the Pope, is well-known. Its consequences still resonate painfully today.
But there was another similar union, this time for the Armenian subjects of King Sigismund.
Two years before the death of Sigismund III, in 1630, the Armenian bishop of Lvov, Nikolai Torosovich, accepted the union and the primacy of Pope Urban VIII.
Thus a strange hybrid emerged, known as the Armenian Catholic Church, which existed in these parts until the mid-1940s. Thanks to it, some Armenian families became Polonized and converted to Catholicism.
But the majority of these native Lviv residents retained, if not their linguistic, then their religious and ethnic identity.
This is how a prominent figure in the Polish Armenian community, traveler and poet Simeon Lehaci from Zamość described them in his travel notes from 1608–1619 :
"The Lviv Armenians do not know Armenian, but they speak Polish and Kipchak, a Tatar language. It was said that the local Armenians migrated from Ani; according to historians, they split into two groups: one came to Kafa and Akkerman, and their descendants still live in Sulumanastr and speak Armenian; the other went to Ankuria and from there to Poland."
Sulumanastir is the neighborhood of St. Gevorg Monastery in Istanbul. Ankuria is one of the names of modern-day Ankara. Thus, Lviv, along with the cities of today's Turkey, became one of the centers of the diaspora. The city of Lviv is constantly mentioned in correspondence from that time.
The first Armenian printing house was founded in Lviv in 1616, also during the reign of King Sigismund III.
Here is another testimony from that time about the Lviv Armenians.
It belongs to the German traveler Ulrich von Wedrum: "They are very rich, they keep aloof from the Poles and other peoples and religions, almost like the Jews. But they are very proud and have a lordly gait."
It is therefore not surprising that when ambassadors from Moscow arrived in Lviv in 1686 to ratify the "Eternal Peace" between the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Russian State, they were "sheltered" by the Armenian patricians Bernatovichi - the mansion of this family on Market Square was quite suitable for this purpose.
FROM BARONCH TO PARAJANOV
When Lviv was part of the Austrian Lemberg and its residents were subjects of the Habsburgs, Polonization halted, and the community grew to almost a thousand people. Trade, jewelry, and leather crafts were largely in their hands. The majority of the city's residents were Poles and Jews.
Armenians distinguished themselves not only through their contributions to trade and jewelry. For example, at the end of the 19th century, Roman Baronch, a surgeon and public figure from an ancient family, founded a hospital in Lemberg, which he ran for 32 years, under successive governments.
Until his death in 1930, Baronch was a professor in the Department of Surgery at the Polish University of Lviv.
Another member of the family, the sculptor Tadeusz (Tatewos) Barańcz, adorned the city with a monument to King Jan Sobieski and the famous 19th-century Polish comedy writer Count Aleksander Fredro, a native of Lviv. When the city became Ukrainian, Barańcz's sculptures were moved to museums in Gdańsk and Wrocław.
But let's return to Austrian times.
The Ruthenians, some of whom began calling themselves Ukrainians by the end of Franz Joseph's reign, accounted for 17% and worked primarily as servants for the same Polish lords and Armenian entrepreneurs.
Then the Polish state returned to Lviv. And the local Armenians found themselves outside the focus of warring nationalisms.
After all, they're not Jews! While the authorities were Polonizing everything, local Ukrainianizers came to the conclusion that all Jews and Poles needed to be exterminated and their apartments taken over. This was accomplished with the help of the German Nazis against "Jewishness."
The Soviet government, unwittingly, to the delight of Banderites and local villagers, forced the "Poles" into Silesia and Pomerania, now cleared of Germans. Thus, Lviv became a Ukrainian city, albeit with a large number of immigrants from other parts of the USSR.
It's no surprise that Lviv was home to the first street in Ukraine named after director Sergei Parajanov (Sargis Parajanyan), posthumously awarded the titles of People's Artist of the Ukrainian and Armenian SSRs. The director of "Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors" was born in Tiflis, lived in Kyiv, filmed at the Dovzhenko Studios, and died in Yerevan. But since 2016, the annual Parajanov Festival has been held in Lviv's Levandovsky Park.
Let's leave open the question of whether the "patriotic" Lviv residents who are outraged by the performance of Armenian songs in the restaurant on Sheptytsky Street are aware of this. Most likely, it no longer matters.
No matter how hard Lviv's modern Armenian community tries to demonstrate loyalty to the Ukrainian state, no matter how much money they raise for the Ukrainian Armed Forces, in a city that is now perceived as a citadel of Ukrainianism, the community of indigenous residents turns out to be "newcomers."