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Laurence Mitchell unravels Lviv and discovers that despite lying within Ukrainian territory, the former capital of Polish Galicia has a coffeehouse culture and character that is resolutely Central European.

I’m standing in Rynok (‘Old Market’) Square, soaking up the warm morning sun as I get my bearings. A gaggle of beautifully dressed young women in high heels and long gowns are elegantly clip-clopping across the cobbles – on their way to a wedding, perhaps. A street cleaner parks his cart nearby and begins to brush a little dirt about although, to be honest, the square already looks spotless to me. I glance up at the skyline where a jumble of building styles compete for my attention: Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque and neoclassical. Is this some sort of architectural theme park? No – although it was given UNESCO World Heritage status in 1998, this is a real-life, working city: in the streets just beyond the square, trolleybuses rattle by, crowded with workers from the suburbs. So, where am I? Prague? Poland? Krakow, perhaps? No, again. This is Lviv in western Ukraine.

Lviv may not be the ‘new Prague’ but if Krakow has recently surfaced to fill that role, then perhaps Lviv is destined to become ‘the new Krakow’. The comparison is not entirely frivolous: Lviv stood in for Krakow in the filming of Spielberg’s Schindler’s List and the city has served as a setting for the book and film Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer. It is, undoubtedly, an illuminating sort of place. Other famous sons include Nazi hunter, Simon Wiesenthal, and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, author of Venus in Furs, of whom the term ‘masochism’ was first coined. Lviv may currently be overlooked in favour of other Eastern European hotspots but, like Sacher-Masoch, it certainly deserves a fair crack of the whip.

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