You're reading: Hey, where’s all the postcards?

The minor perils of touristing in Lviv

d in at every other shop in the heart of virtually every city I visited – Milan, Florence, Rome and Siena – to buy a postcard to scribble something largely inane on and then mail away. I must’ve sent off at least three dozen in the nine days that I was there. Veni, vidi. They bore simple witness to friends and loved ones of the cool places I traveled. The cards are also great for making people feel jealous that you’re there and they’re not.

The same sort of spirit seized me when my roommate from Brazil cooked up plans to visit the quaint little western Ukrainian city of Lviv this past weekend. I told him what to expect: an old town listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, with lots of nice ancient buildings and churches on every corner and a beautiful old opera house – one of the finest in Europe, my colleague Roman Olearchyk likes to remind anyone who’ll care to listen.

We walked the cobblestone streets there as most foreign tourists do, taking in the history and ambiance. And my roommate, like most first-time tourists to the city, wanted to buy postcards to send to his mom and other family and friends back in Brazil.

“You were right,” he said to me as we spent our second day walking up the trash-littered and glass-strewn hill that is Vysokyy Zamok, a major tourist attraction overlooking the city. “There are no postcards of Lviv.”

In all fairness to this fine city, that’s not entirely true. There are aging, Soviet-era postcards available in booklet form at the open air market near the opera house, and those who look hard enough might find something resembling a postcard in some obscure shop off the beaten path (nowhere close to the downtown). But practically, they don’t exist for the majority of tourists.

Just to see if I wasn’t generalizing about the postcard issue, I visited Lviv’s three largest and best known hotels: the George, the Dniester and the four-star Grand. Not one of them had postcards in their lobby, and only the George had city maps of or books on the city. No photo shops carried postcards. Of the many bookshops just off Lviv’s main street, Prospect Svobody, not one was open on the weekend (when tourists usually arrive in town), and of these, none that I could see were trying to promote Lviv as a tourist destination. Many, by contrast, were still trying to cash in on the formerly photogenic mug of President Viktor Yushchenko. Photos of him and Orange Revolution schlock were available everywhere, as if a one-time political movement will form the backbone of a flourishing tourist industry that will summon foreign tourists with real money to spend.

It’s remarkable that there exists a great old city with deep roots in Central and Eastern European history, with sights and friendly people galore – and that it’s doing its best to keep people from outside Ukraine from knowing about it. Postcards are an indication of a population’s level of civic pride. What greater way is there for a city and its people to promote themselves than with a postcard? What is a postcard but a “Hello” from a wonderful and interesting part of the world? Sadly, there likely isn’t a refrigerator in the world with a postcard of Lviv tacked up on it. Save space under the fridge magnets for more of the Coliseum and St. Peter’s.