En this first anniversary of the Russian invasion, many parents and relatives come to gather at the Champ-de-Mars in Lviv. This esplanade, in the south-east of the city, has indeed become, since February 24, 2022, a constantly expanding military cemetery. Lviv is however located so far from the front that embassies, including those of France and the United States, had withdrawn there during the battle of kyiv. But this ephemeral capital of the People’s Republic of Western Ukraine, in 1918-1919, remained a nationalist stronghold, with a high proportion of volunteers. And it is a certain story of a year of conflict that such alignments of tombs, sometimes still fresh, tell.
An old Soviet memorial
The Champ-de-Mars adjoins the Lytchakivsky cemetery, readily presented as the Ukrainian equivalent of Père-Lachaise, with its 40 hectares of graves of local personalities, in the forefront of which the poet and activist Ivan Franko (1856-1916). Novelist Andrei Kurkov has set the scene for his Jimi Hendrix posthumous concert, imagining that the hand of the legendary guitarist would have been buried there to better enchant his fans beyond death. More seriously, the cemetery developed, from 2014, a wing dedicated to soldiers who fell during the “undeclared war” that Russia then unleashed with the occupation of Crimea, then the destabilization of Donbass. As for the Champ-de-Mars, a monument there has honored Soviet soldiers since 1974, with a bronze star weighing one and a half tons, struck in its center with a hammer and sickle.
It was only in October 2021 that this legacy of the USSR was dismantled, in order to join the communist propaganda collections of a municipal museum. Four months later, the esplanade began to house the remains of soldiers who fell in the face of the Russian invader. The losses are very quickly overwhelming and no one has time to carve a tombstone, and even less to engrave a stele.
The first square, with six graves out of eight, is occupied from May 2022, with around fifty graves in raw earth, held by a modest wooden partition, with a named cross. Burials are carried out in the urgency of war, along a line going from right to left, before moving on to the next alignment. A second square is saturated from July 2022, then a third in October. This is where rests, among others, the “private first class” Andriy Krijanivsky, killed at the age of 20 years. Two lanterns flank his tomb, decorated with several cherubs and a plastic fir tree. The humidity has already eaten away at his portrait, barred with a black band.
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