Vul. Shevchenka – Yanivsky (Yaniv) cemetery

The cemetery was founded in 1883 for the western section of the city. At first, the deceased from legal medicine institutions and the poor from Lviv hospitals were buried there. In 1937 the cemetery numbered 54 fields that were divided by lanes and paths intersecting for the most part at right angle. According to the cemetery register books of that time, 115 thousand persons were buried there.

In 1962, after the Jewish community had been dissolved, the nearby Jewish cemetery founded as early as 1855 was attached to Yanivsky cemetery. In the early 1980s the cemetery was officially closed because of lack of free area. Burials take place there by way of exception for members of those families who have their own vaults or a special permission for burial in the graves of close relatives. The area of the cemetery reaches 38 hectares now; over 200 thousand persons are buried in its 68 fields.

There are numerous military and civil graves from the times of the First and Second World Wars in the cemetery. Before the First World War special places were assigned in Yanivsky cemetery for military graves. Fields 42 and 43 were set aside for the military personnel of the Lviv garrison. The victims of the First World War, the Polish-Ukrainian war of 1918-1919 and the Polish-Bolshevik war of 1920 are buried in field 42. 226 soldiers of the First Cavalry Army of Budyonny who were killed during the attack on Lviv were buried there; in the cemetery, there were also graves of soldiers who served in the armies of Denikin, Vrangel and Balakhovich and died in emigration in Lviv.

At the main lane intersection, between fields 13, 14, 31 and 16, there is the grave of Roman Catholic Archbishop Józef Bilczewski (d.1923; beatified by Pope John Paul II in 2001) who ordered to bury himself there to draw Lviv citizens’ attention to the new cemetery.

In fields 38 and 38a one can find a military memorial of the Ukrainian Galician Army riflemen who were killed in battle for Lviv in November of 1918 and in the following years of the Polish-Ukrainian war. Ukrainian Sich Riflemen who were interned and later died of wounds and infections in Polish prisons in 1919-1920 are buried there too. In 1971 the memorial was destroyed with bulldozers by the Soviet authorities; in 1997-1999 it was restored. The UGA commander-in-chief Myron Tarnavsky (d.1938) and the Prime-Minister of the West Ukrainian People’s Republic Kost Levytsky (d.1941) were also buried there. Near the restored grave of Myron Tarnavsky Vasyl Ben (d.1941), a lieutenant colonel of the Ukrainian People’s Republic Army and Symon Petliura’s aide-de-camp, who was murdered by the Bolsheviks in “the prison on Lontskoho street” (now Stepana Bandery street 1), was reburied in 1994. In the neighbouring field 39, Bronislav Yaniv (d.1931) was buried; Mykhailo Peresada-Sukhodolsky (d.1938), a general of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, general-cornet of the UPR Army and a member of the committee for the establishment of the UPR military schools and academies, was buried in field 20.

A little Polish military memorial from 1918 was located in field 37. Along with the UGA riflemen memorial, it was destroyed in the early 1970s and the place was assigned for new civil graves. Now a field monument altar in the shape of a high black marble cross integrated into a concrete stele stands there. A few military graves have been preserved nearby.

At the beginning of the cemetery to the left of the main lane, there are graves of the victims of the events of April 1936 in Lviv when Władysław Kozak (d.1936) was killed by the Polish police during a riot of the unemployed. His funeral developed into an antigovernment demonstration and 48 more demonstrators were killed by the police. A memorial to the casualties was constructed in 1956. Above this pantheon, in field 13, Marian Nikodemowicz (d.1952), a known Lviv architect, is buried in the family vault. The grave of Naftali Botwin (d.1925), a member of the underground executed by the Polish authorities for killing a police agent, is situated to the left of the killed demonstrators’ graves.

In 1941-1944 a part of the cemetery adjoining Shevchenka street was used for burying the Nazi army soldiers. In 1941 a separate cemetery for the Slovaks was founded there; it was destroyed by the Soviet authorities in the 1970s. Only a stele with a half-erased inscription has remained from it now.

In the first days of the Second World War, massacres were carried out in the prisons of Lviv. Near field 55 in Yanivsky cemetery, there is a common grave called The Three Crosses where the unidentified victims from the Brygidky prison were buried. A memorial cross (stylized as a birch tree) to the victims of the NKVD terror in June of 1941 was set up there in 1990.

During the Second World War mass executions were carried out in the territory of Yanivsky cemetery. On 25 November 1942, because of an assassination of a Gestapo general by members of the Ukrainian underground twenty eight Ukrainian prisoners were executed there, including Andriy Piasetsky, a prominent scientist, professor of Lviv Politechnic and member of the Ukrainian State Administration. The common grave of the Gestapo victims that had been repeatedly destroyed in the Soviet times was restored by the Student Brotherhood of Lviv Politechnic in 1990.

A Holocaust memorial tomb with an inscription in Russian saying “Soviet citizens who fell victims of fascist crimes in Lviv in 1941-1943 are buried here” is situated above field 37. Only the year (1943) reminds of the date when the Yaniv concentration camp was liquidated.

On the western outskirts of the cemetery, outside field 53, a cemetery of German prisoners of war who stayed in Lviv in 1945-1949 is situated. Numbered graves have been preserved there.

Some Studite monks are buried in field 40. Particularly, archimandrite Nykonor (d.1982) and p. Yosyf Kladochny (d.1994), a Ukrainian political prisoners’ guardian and a long-term GULAG prisoner, are buried there.