Little Vienna in western Ukraine — Habsburg palaces and blooming sakura
Chernivtsi is western Ukraine's most architecturally complete Habsburg city — a 'Little Vienna' of Austro-Hungarian palaces, eclectic facades, and a famous university complex (now UNESCO-listed) designed by the Czech architect Josef Hlávka in 1882 in a Byzantine-Moorish-Gothic fusion that has no equal in Europe. The central pedestrian street Kobylyanskaya is flanked by fin-de-siècle buildings; the city centre is compact enough to walk in an afternoon. The spring sakura blossom in Chernivtsi (the city was famous for its Japanese cherry trees planted in Soviet times) has become a social media p…
Chernivtsi has been Romanian (as Cernăuți), Austrian (as Czernowitz), Soviet, and Ukrainian in turn — its population before the Holocaust was one-third Jewish, one-third German-Austrian, and one-third Romanian and Ukrainian, making it one of the most culturally mixed cities of pre-war Central Europe. The poet Paul Celan was born here in 1920; the writer Joseph Roth described it as 'a city where four languages spoke at once.' The Jewish population was devastated during Romanian occupation in 1941–44; the German-speaking Bukovina Germans were expelled after the war. What remains is a city of ex…