• Українська
  • Русский
  • English
Where there is no law, but every man does what is right in his own eyes, there is the least of real liberty
Henry M. Robert

Ghosts of Old Lviv

13 November, 2012 - 00:00

This was a specific world, freed from mass notions, healthy rationalism, and the accepted pragmatism. The darkness ruled there along with the dungeon cold and total loneliness, mirrored on a wet wall in candlelight. And a whispers of museum workers, who “heard something”, “saw something,” or “he came today again,” or “he was in a good mood today.” The stories are private, told only “our own” people, stories of haunting in old Lviv, rich with universities, associations, and monuments. And more, the city is rich in ghosts.

This is the collection of stories about people who are different from us because they live in between past and present, and the name for this time period has not yet been found. These are mainly museum workers, archive workers, and guards. History and an all too serious attitude toward various supernatural events unite them.

The Ghost of the Dominican Cathedral

“I do not intend to maintain a monopoly on cheap magic.”

Gadfly

They saw him in a white dress with a black cross on his back, a Dominican monk, who started showing up behind the turns of narrow cathedral walkways seven years ago, when they found the dungeon. The ghost has his own favorite routes and places – the dungeon, concealed library, and sometimes the choir gallery.

Poetess and Museum of the History of Religion worker Iryna Vovk says:”I do not want it to look like sensationalism. We try not to disturb our Dominican, because he is loyal to us and does no harm. We guess that he comes when a curtain gets pulled aside just like a man would do to come in. I am certain that there cannot be any drafts in the cathedral. Our ghost rarely visits the gallery. On Monday when coming up to my workplace I find the plants have been watered (it is hard for me to bring water all the way up). Under the gallery there is a place where a library used to be. From time to time you can hear his steps there.”

The gallery is fifty meters high and if you go down from there, you will be amazed with a contrast of how the gallery is sunlit and how dark it is below, in the dungeon. Olena Luzan, the dungeon keeper thinks that the ghost lives there.

“I have not been lucky enough to see him, probably because I am very skeptical about such things. But when neatly packed books start falling from the highest shelves one after another, I cannot find a logical explanation for it. I had to accept that we do have something. Young militiamen are scared to go to the lavatory sometimes, because you have to cross the whole cathedral to get there. But in the nights invisible but very loud services take place there, an otherworldly choir sings in now forgotten Latin, and the guards know that there is no point in checking – the service will go on all the same and they will not see anyone. After one of the guards saw the Dominican coming out of the closed door during the night, not many people agreed to guard us.”

But they still do. And they reconsider their abilities and soul force. “Do not go straight to God; go to church first,' they used to say,” Ms. Luzan continues, “The Roerichs used to say that a man had to be very good, with a very clean soul to go to God. No one knows how many souls that sinned on earth remained here after death. All this happens because there is a lack of peace. As has been already proven, this has an actual basis: energetic influence, cellular disintegration at the nuclear level is a very dangerous thing. And people put it simply: God does not accept souls, because they have unfinished business.”

However, the militia has no time for philosophizing. Sergeant Yuri admits, “I did not believe before, but I do now. You would also believe if you heard the service. Or when a typewriter works in a closed room with nobody there. You either do not trust yourself or accept that there is something there. We even want to keep records of when, where, and how it comes to us.”

The ghost so far leads a quiet life. Before the militia started its record, energy company workers come for a check and museum employees stay overnight under a full moon, the white specter can water the plants, leaf through books, learn to type, conduct services, and look for a chance to complete his unfinished business.

Medieval “Revenge and Law”

Specialists consider this case a falsification, but Lviv dwellers would never refuse to tell it to you. Back in the fifteenth century the municipality of Leopolis unjustly sentenced to death a young boy. The executioner beheaded him paying little attention to his protestations of innocence. The body was put to coffin, which started to fly in the city hall. It flew for three nights while they reconsidered the case. It turned out that the boy was innocent. The coffin stopped flying.

Exhibit +313

The back armchair of such strange form calls forth hidden fears. Two years ago in the historical museum storehouse it affected nothing and nobody, although it had the number 313. Then a black wizard came to Serhiy Bohdanov, a museum employee. He looked ordinary: no black dress, no claws, and no beard. This modern man said simply: “Do you have this armchair-dragon? Do you know that it belonged to the Satanists and served as a throne for the King of Darkness in their Black Masses? I came to warn you that its owner will come for it soon.”

“At first I didn't believe him. He said that during Satanic services somebody invisible, probably the devil himself, used to sit in it. Then I started to examine this chair. It turned out that if you put it on the raised place and sit in it, you immediately get horns and the dragon tail. Then I experimented at night. I put the armchair at a certain angle to the moonlight and below the horns I saw eyes, a nose. It is strange that with such an imperfect work (nineteenth century German) this face seems to flow down the spine and keeps changing. If you turn the armchair upside down, it will look like a flying dragon and from behind it looks like a jumping goat. The man explained to me that Satanists used to put cut off heads in the space between the horns and underneath there was a small basin for blood.

After some time a group of psychics came to examine it. One of them touched the tail and badly burned his hand because of the strong energy it emitted. Other researchers found out that the chair was treated with special preparations and if you look at it in the full moon night through the ultraviolet lights, you will see some figure. But special equipment is needed for the purpose.

In any case, Serhiy Bohdanov included it in his exhibition: let people look at it. So you can find it in the hall of the king's jewelry in Lviv.

Myth and Reality

The city of the lion has more secrets of this kind. Who knows if such legends are based on fact? Scientists all over the world keep arguing over it, but they have not found an answer yet.

There is yet another something in old Lviv. We see the past, preserved by history, better than did our predecessors. This is about the house of Ivan Franko, where he spent the last years of his life, wrote his best books, suffered from ill hands, and spoke with spirits. This house was built on a geopathogenic zone.

Autumn of a Patriarch

“Have you ever spoken to the spirits?”

Ivan Franko (From the memoirs of Olena Hrozikova)

The air in the Franko Museum at 152 Franko Street is always heavily humid and cold, even on the hottest days. Yakym Horak, the son of well-known writer Roman Horak and an expert on Franko's life, was sitting in Franko's favorite wicker chair.

“All his life Ivan Franko dreamt of having his own house. That is why when he had an opportunity and money, he bought a piece of land and started construction. This place was called Sofiyivka and was full of marshes. That is why it was hard to start construction immediately - the land would not hold the blocks. Franko paid much money to finish the house. It was his wife Olha Fedorivna who managed (or interfered with) the construction process. She was already mentally ill, which also affected the atmosphere in the house. The house gave the impression of a monastery. According to various memoirs, Franko looked like a monk when meeting guests. In winter the ink would freeze in the house even with every stove and fireplace ablaze and smoke filling the rooms. Franko looked tired, and his disease was getting worse. The poet suffered from hallucinations, where Drahomanov would come to torture him.

According to Olena Hrozdik-ova's Memoirs on Franko, shortly before his death Franko said, “All the patience and all the joy will be finished with natural death. I speak with spirits every night about it. They come to my room through windows, doors, and sit on my bed around me. If you could only hear our talks, especially with Russians and Dnipro Ukrainians! They have a different mentality and are very interesting. Have you ever spoken to the spirits?”

He was fond of psychology and liked to read Freud. He spoke to Jesus Christ before he died. And what is interesting, he loved fishing. Later they saw that everybody who went fishing with him, would then become the prophet of Ukrainian culture: Hrushevsky, Samiylenko, and Stefanyk. There was something to it. I do not know if he brought caught many fish on their trips, but he definitely caught people.

Now with evening coming on, we are hearing somebody walking in the nearby rooms. It is quite possible that he is walking; his soul never found peace after death, perhaps because of his reburial.

The Spirits of Ancient Lviv

They say bad things always happen to those who go outside the bounds. Actors, who played Mephistopheles, would suffer from severe sicknesses. People still talk of Gogol's and Bulgakov's deaths. They also speak of those who excavated the pyramids in Egypt, but they are silent about those who buried Chornobyl, for there the supernatural found a new form and scale.

There are legends and fantasies. There are things that have been scientifically proved. There is also protection from the evil. There have been souls that could not simply disappear, could not leave for nowhere. When they say they hear heavy steps in the house of Franko and that Solomiya Krushelnytska patrons her old house, this is why I tend to believe them.

Photo by Mykhailo Markiv,The Day:

“Satan's Throne"

 

Rubric: