Day 40: Monday 21st September

It’s a nice morning again as over breakfast we observe the locals emerging for the working day. The factory behind us is not disused but opens up at about 8am. A grandmother carries out her traditional duty by taking the family cow to its day’s grazing along the way somewhere.

Then back to the crap road to Lviv which we reach at 11am. Our luck is in once again as we find a prime parking spot just metres from the city’s own ‘Unter den Linden’ central avenue. Funniest thing here is that the parking attendant has a hi-viz jacket on emblazoned with the logo of Kettering Borough Council – just down the road from where we live!!!

It’s a pleasant city and in the bright sunshine appears a nice place to visit. There are many people around this central avenue and various activities going on. Lviv is at the centre of the small Catholic enclave in the otherwise Orthodox Ukraine (taken from Poland by Stalin as part of the Yalta agreement) and there are several Catholic crucifixes, statues and shrines along the way that numerous locals pause in front of to cross themselves and utter a silent prayer. I look on bemused. Around the corner is the old town hall square where a lion painting competition is being judged by passers-by. The lion is Lviv’s city emblem. It’s all very central European with five -storey buildings, cobbles, museums and coffee shops and many people sitting in the sunshine and chatting on the benches around the square.

Then we investigate the tourist trap churches – lots more crossing going on – and have our lunch at a pavement café. Caesar salad for Jill, potato and mince ‘cakes’ for me, with mushroom sauce.

Next stop, the famous city cemetery. Lychakivske Cemetery is the ‘Père Lachaise of Eastern Europe’ and it’s beautiful in the sunshine. Lots of famous people are buried here (it is huge) and several of the graves are spectacular, none of them ordinary. It has a gothic air to it but it’s not in the least bit mystical or impersonal – many of the more recent statues/headstones have photos attached, there are masses of flowers around, real and artificial, and people can be seen bringing their offerings to their family graves. All in all it feels like a celebration of people’s lives, and maybe that they’ve passed to better things, which after all is the basic Christian belief. A statue of Jesus stands at the front, looking after them all.

Then on to find the border, which eventually we do by taking the same road out to the ring road as we came in on. It takes an hour and three-quarters to cross the border, the first 12 minutes to leave Ukraine, the rest mostly just waiting to enter Slovakia. As an entry point into the EU presumably they are obliged to be rigorous – or rather to be seen to be, taking the form of several people looking at passports and vehicle documents, two people making very cursory checks of the van, and a sniffer dog being led around the cars (without any apparent finds).

By now the light is fading so we quickly find a place to stop, in a small copse near a field.