By the end of the 19th century, Lviv was one of the fastest growing cities in the Habsburg Empire. The numerous dividing lines of its population were national, social and professional. How were these divisions reflected in the housing practices of Lviv residents? What distinguished the middle class and nobility? After legal emancipation in 1867, Jews were free to settle in all quarters of the city, and wealthier members of the community were no longer restricted in their choice of new places to live, places that had previously been inaccessible to them. The nobility was also changing its habits, moving to the cities, but still trying to maintain its lifestyle and holding many social gatherings. The upper middle class, represented by industrialists and bankers, tried to combine a lifestyle combining work with leisure practices borrowed from the nobility.
Did this neighborly life in newly built neighborhoods create its own, an urban culture shared by different national and social groups? Combining statistical data from the tax censuses and ego-documents of several Lviv families - the Hrushevskis, representing the Ukrainian intelligentsia, the Bogdanovichs of the Polish nobility, and the Liliens, Jewish bankers - the researcher reconstructs the city not only as a space of division and rivalry, but also as a space conducive to the emergence of new forms of coexistence.
Vladyslava Moskalets: PhD in history, researcher at the Center for Urban History of East Central Europe, and director of Jewish Studies at Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv. Moskalets was a fellow of the Galician Doctoral Program at the University of Vienna (2013-2016) and a Fulbright Scholar at Northwestern University in Chicago (2018-2019). She taught at the University of Illinois Chicago in 2023. Her research interests focus on Galician social history, Yiddish literature and Jewish-Ukrainian relations.
We cordially invite you to our public lecture which will take place on march 4, 2025 in the Museum of Warsaw.
Moderator: Aleksander Łupienko (IH PAN)
