Day 6 -- Lviv

After breakfast we hired a taxi to take us to Zlokiew (Zhovkva).  It is a small city about 20 miles from Lviv and is one of the best preserved renaissance cities in Ukraine. It has a fascinating history. It was created in 1594 by a high ranking Polish nobleman and a chief hetman (admiral?) of the Polish royal army Stanislaw Zolkiewski, who was a big fan of Thomas More’s Utopia. He named the city after himself and based its design on the ideal city described in Utopia. He built a big castle there, which was later remodeled by his grandson, Polish king Jan III Sobieski, who used it as his country residence. The castle still stands, but is in disrepair. There is also a church where the whole Zolkiewski family is buried, including the hetman himself (beheaded by the Turks in the 1620 battle with the Turks and Tatars), and many churches and a synagogue.  The town is small so we easily walked the entire inner city.  We also visited an old wooden orthodox church from 1720, which was beautifully maintained. Today is music day in Lviv so there are small music groups playing music at 50 places throughout the city. At one of them, in the courtyard of the Museum of Natural History (former palace of a Polish count Dzieduszycki), in addition to human audience, there was also a very musical cat who stayed close to the piano and listened attentively. Continuing the celebration of the Music Day, after dinner we went to a concert at the Lviv Philharmonic.  An American jazz violinist, Christian Howes was enthusiastically received in the first set. He had to give 3 encores. The second half was Dvorak’s New World symphony conducted by an American  conductor with the Lviv symphony orchestra. The orchestra is very young. It looks like no one there is over 35.  After the concert we went to our favorite strudel place and were very disappointed when they had no cherry strudel.  So we stopped and had wine.