Lviv

On a hill west of the old town, a short walk from the main railway station, this golden-yellow Rococo cathedral of the 1740s to 1760s was for centuries the mother church of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, which follows Byzantine rites while being in communion with Rome. A statue of St George slaying the dragon crowns the façade, and the crypt holds the tombs of church leaders including Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky, whose name recurs all over the city. Services are sung, and the interior is full of candlelight and icons.

This grim building, named after the street it stood on before the war, served as a prison under three regimes: interwar Poland, the Soviet NKVD and the Nazi German occupiers. In June 1941, as German forces advanced, the NKVD murdered the prisoners held here, and the occupiers who followed used the same cells. The memorial museum preserves the corridors and cells and tells the stories of those held, from Ukrainian nationalists to Jews and Poles. It is a sobering but essential visit for understanding the 20th century in this region.

TipCheck the museum's website for current hours and guided tours before going, as opening times have changed under martial law.

At the head of Svobody Avenue, the city's grand boulevard, stands the opera house of 1900, a confection of columns, gilded statues and winged figures representing Glory, Poetry and Music. Inside, the auditorium is a riot of gold and red, with a painted curtain depicting Parnassus. Performances of opera and ballet have continued during the war, with an interval routine for air-raid alerts, and tickets are cheap by European standards. Svobody Avenue, with its central promenade and the Taras Shevchenko monument, is the city's main meeting place.

TipThe theatre's website lists the current programme and any building tours; schedules can change after night-time alerts.

The city's main museum of Ukrainian art was founded by Metropolitan Sheptytsky in 1905 and holds one of the largest collections of icons in Europe, from medieval Carpathian panels to the towering Baroque iconostasis from the Church of the Holy Spirit in Bohorodchany. Its main building on Svobody Avenue, a former museum of industry, also displays Ukrainian painting and sculpture of the 19th and 20th centuries. Parts of the collection were packed away and moved for safety after 2022, so displays may be reduced.

The Roman Catholic Cathedral of the Assumption, begun in the 14th century, is one of the few Gothic buildings to survive in a city that burned and was rebuilt several times. Its exterior is clad with later chapels and epitaphs, and the interior is Baroque, with richly painted vaults and a gilded high altar. The cathedral stands just off the south-west corner of Rynok Square.

Beside the cathedral, this small funerary chapel built in the early 17th century for the Boim family, wealthy merchants of Hungarian origin, has one of the most extraordinary façades in Central Europe. Its blackened sandstone is covered from ground to cornice with carved scenes from the Passion, prophets and saints, and inside, the dome is coffered with carved heads of cherubs and saints. It is now part of the Lviv Art Gallery.

A few minutes' walk east, this early 17th-century church and monastery once stood just inside the city walls and doubled as a fortress. Its Mannerist façade and lavish Baroque interior, with sculpted altars and painted walls, are among the finest in the city. It is now the Greek Catholic Church of St Andrew, and the monastery courtyard has a well and a column with a statue of St John of Dukla.

The heart of Lviv is a large market square surrounded by 44 merchants' houses, each with its own façade, from the black-stoned Renaissance Black House to the Korniakt Palace, where the Polish king Jan III Sobieski once lived. A fountain with a statue of a classical god or goddess stands at each corner. In the middle rises the 19th-century City Hall, and its tower, about 65 metres high, has an observation deck reached by around 400 steps, with the best view over the domes and roofs of the old town.

TipThe tower's hours and access can change at short notice under martial law; the official tourism site lists the current position.

On the north-east corner of the square, the pharmacy "Under the Black Eagle" opened in 1735 and still sells remedies at its front counter. Behind and beneath, a maze of rooms and cellars displays historic apothecary jars, scales, distilling equipment and herbal stores. It is one of the oldest working pharmacies in the region and a curious, atmospheric little museum.

TipThe front counter is a real pharmacy, so keep voices down while locals are being served.

Lviv claims to be the coffee capital of Ukraine, and the city's coffee house tradition goes back to the Habsburg era. Around Rynok Square, playful themed venues have grown into attractions of their own: one coffee house roasts its beans in "mines" in the cellars beneath the square, where you can descend to drink coffee by lamplight, and a handmade chocolate workshop on Serbska Street lets you watch chocolatiers at work before buying from the shop. They are touristy, but genuinely fun, and the coffee is good.

Lviv's Armenian community, merchants on the trade routes to the east, built this cathedral in the 1360s, and it is the oldest of the city's great churches. Through a gate on Virmenska Street you enter quiet courtyards paved with gravestones, and the dim interior is covered with Art Nouveau frescoes and mosaics added in the early 20th century by Polish artist Jan Henryk Rosen. It is still used for Armenian Apostolic services.

East of the square, the great green dome of the Dominican Church of Corpus Christi, built in the mid-18th century, is one of the landmarks of the skyline. Its oval interior has paired columns and white marble sculpture. Used as a museum of religion and atheism in Soviet times, it was returned to worship and now serves as the Greek Catholic Church of the Holy Eucharist.

Lviv was founded around a castle on this wooded hill in the 13th century, by King Danylo of Galicia, who named the city after his son Lev. Only a fragment of wall survives, but a park of winding paths climbs to an artificial mound at the summit, raised in the 19th century to commemorate the Union of Lublin. From the viewing platform the whole city spreads below, with the tower of City Hall and the church domes picked out above the roofs.

TipAllow about 20 minutes' walk uphill from Rynok Square; go towards sunset for the best light.

In a hilly forest park on the eastern edge of the city, this open-air museum gathers more than a hundred wooden buildings brought from villages around western Ukraine: farmhouses, windmills, a school and several wooden churches, the oldest from the 18th century. The cottages are grouped by region, from the Boyko and Hutsul highlands of the Carpathians to the lowlands of Bukovyna, and the peaceful setting makes it a welcome break from the cobbles.

Founded in 1786, Lychakiv is one of the oldest and most beautiful cemeteries in Europe, a shaded hillside of tombs, angels and mourning figures, many by the city's finest sculptors. Here lie writers, scientists and patriots, among them the poet Ivan Franko under a monument of a stonemason, and Polish and Ukrainian military memorials of the 20th century. Since 2022 it has become a place of national mourning, with a new military section, the Field of Mars, filled with fresh graves of soldiers killed in the war, decked with flags and photographs.

TipBe quiet and respectful around the new graves, where families often visit, and do not photograph mourners.