THE EU: Saturday sees the EU expand with 10 new member-states. In the first of three articles, Bridget Hourican looks at places that will be just outside the enlarged EU, while feeling culturally and historically part of it.
Lines of cars queue at the Polish-Ukrainian border. Most of them, like ours, have Polish numberplates. We've been here an hour. Poles, unlike Western Europeans, don't need visas to get into Ukraine, which explains the delay: the border guards are asking the questions normally reserved to the consulate.
We offer a guard $40 and he moves us into a faster line. An hour later we're still there, but closer to the top. We joke that it's like the Mexican border, but admittedly none of us has ever been to Mexico. In another hour we're through.
This will be Europe's Eastern border from May 1st. We drive the 70 km to L'viv, formerly Lvov, Lwow or Lemburg. In Poland you hear a lot about Lwow, at least from the older generation, who wax nostalgic over its beauty and cultural vibrancy.
L'viv has been tossed around by emperors since its foundation, but for over half of its 800 year history it was Polish, and was, with Krakow, the pride of Poland, a university town whose buildings run from 13th century to Renaissance, to Polish Roccoco, to neo-classicism. The Austrians took it after the partition of Poland in 1772 and ran it in their haphazard Hapsburg fashion until Poland regained it after the first World War.
L'viv is in Galicia, one of the centres of Ukrainian nationalism, so ownership of the city was always going to be in dispute, but the question wasn't decided by Poles or Ukrainians, but by Stalin. In 1939 he moved in and in 1945 refused to move out again.
At Yalta, Roosevelt pleaded for L'viv's return to Poland but he was in no position to refuse the Russians. Stalin solved any future ethnic problems by ruthless population exchanges across the border. L'viv was incorporated into Ukraine which was incorporated into the USSR until, in 1991, it gained independence.
This is the city we're approaching - cut off from Poland by 60 years, 70km, one hour time difference, three hours border wait, $40 in bribes and, soon, by Schengen. At night, by the very dim lights strung from wires over the roads, it looks like another Eastern European glory, like Budapest, Krakow, or Prague.
By daylight it looks more like an illustration for "poverty in grandeur". All of Eastern Europe is poorer than the West, but L'viv isn't Eastern European poor, it's Russian poor. Crowds of babushkas (grandmothers) line the lovely cobbled streets, patiently selling bags of apples or bunches of flowers. Every second building houses an exchange office, all offering identical rates.
The magnificent buildings are crumbling where they stand. Open drains release waste water onto the streets. Legs and noses have crumbled off statues. Columns have fallen off buildings. A coat of dirt covers everything.
In one sense, however, it's miraculously well-preserved. Nothing has been torn down, no Soviet blocks put up. The only sign of the USSR is a few statues in the brute realist style. Moscow ignored L'viv. If the Party had held onto it much longer neglect would have finished it off. As it is, there's nothing a massive injection of cash couldn't resolve.
Cash, however, is the problem. I walk the streets with Andrey Salynk, head of an NGO for the preservation of L'viv's heritage. He is gallant as a cavalier in the face of imminent ruin and given to sudden paroxysms of mirth. "There are 1,000 concerned citizens in L'viv" (pause) "out of 800,000" (explosive laughter). "I have $6,200 for Boims chapel." (pause) "I need half a million dollars" (explosive laughter).
The Ukrainian government has earmarked $5 million for L'viv in this year's budget, which is enough to restore three buildings. Salynk estimates $3 billion would halt the process of decay. That figure doesn't include renovation.
The EU is the Ukraine's biggest donor and has given €1.2 billion in aid over the past 10 years but this money is for technical assistance, administrative reform and nuclear safety. Ukraine has poverty and Chernobyl. There isn't money for buildings.
L'viv has the surreal, glazed look of a city which has changed hands too often. Outside our hotel is a 19th century statue to the Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz. To the Poles, Mickiewicz is a kind of Moore, Yeats and Joyce rolled into one but in L'viv the people I ask have only the vaguest idea of him. In the adjacent square is a massive recent black statue to the Ukrainian poet, Taras Shevchenko.
Today, unsurprisingly, L'viv is putting out Ukrainian colours. Of the seven main museums, three are devoted to Ukrainian peasant art and ethnography. I look for the Scottish café, where in the inter-war Polish years, L'viv's mathematicians, including Stanislaw Ulam, who later helped invent the atom bomb, hung out and drew equations on the marble-topped table. I can't find it. The tourist office says it's a bank; the internet says it's a bar.
Jewish L'viv was obliterated by the Nazis. The city used to have the third largest Jewish community in Poland. Now only stones of the 16th century synagogue remain. There was a concentration camp here, called Janowska. In Poland I'm told the camp is now a prison, but the tourist office disputes this. They say it's been "absorbed" into other buildings. In any case it can't be visited, but there is a plaque.
Austrian L'viv survives in the buildings. The authorities are resisting erecting a statue to Leopold Sacher-Masoch, L'vivian author of Venus in Furs and inventor of masochism. Maybe his just isn't an image they want for their city.
Polish-Austrian-Jewish-Ukrainian. What everyone agrees is that it's a European city. Ukraine, despite having cities, whose names - Odessa, Yalta - are familiar to Western readers through Chekhov and whose inhabitants only speak Russian, has distanced itself from Russia and applied for EU membership. The EU is being coy about this application. Agnes Schubert of the EU delegation in Kiev says "we support Ukraine's strategy for entry" but "integration isn't on the agenda yet". The Ukrainian press has noted bitterly that the EU always uses words like "rapprochement" for the Ukraine, never "integration". The latest EU word is "Neighbourhood Policy".
Says Schubert: "The Neighbourhood policy means Ukraine, and other countries, like Belarus and Moldova, could have access to the internal market but not yet to the EU institutions".
Ukraine isn't joining any time soon. In the meantime, its borders are being regulated. On May 1st it will border three EU countries, Poland, the Slovak Republic and Hungary.
All three are currently implementing the necessary visa restrictions.
Ukraine's Polish minority are indignantly flooding their consulate but they're insignificant in numbers - about 5,000 in L'viv.
Ukraine's ex-foreign minister, Anatolii Zlenko has called the borders a "Schengen Wall" but says Schubert: "The EU doesn't want dividing lines between Ukraine and its neighbours." It's financing lots of cross-border initiatives to smooth things over. These include a bridge into Poland.
In Auden's 1930s line, "where Poland draws its Eastern bow" was where Europe began. This is still the case. Its bowis justbeing drawnfurther west. L'viv is Ukraine's window onto Europe.
Tomorrow: Bridget Hourican explores Transylvania, part of Romania, but Hungarian at heart