Bohdan Cherkes

The paper's objective is to shed light on the issue of sacralisation and desacralisation of space in cities with Kraków and Lviv as examples. The cities had been part of Poland for hundreds of years. They jointly suffered from the Partitions of Poland and were separated politically after the Second World War. Lviv joined the USSR and Kraków remained a Polish city. After 1990, Lviv became a major city of independent Ukraine. Several decades of Soviet (Lviv) socialism and Polish communist (Kraków) socialism have left a profound impression on their ‘sacred’ spaces, including the creation of new and the devastation of existing ones. The historical analysis of Kraków's and Lviv's urban spaces exhibited a continuous process of sacralisation, desacralisation, and sacralisation of some areas according to the current prevailing ideology or sociopolitical or religious doctrine. At the same time, a city, Kraków for example, can have certain ‘holy’ places that have remained unaffected by times of turmoil. To demonstrate what an urban sacred space is, the authors attempted to propose a scientific methodology for identifying such places.

Ukraine’s independence in 1991 changed the direction of society’s development, the most important of which was the revival of the spirituality of the Ukrainian nation, which is connected with thousands of years of religious traditions. The purpose of the article is to demonstrate the development of sacred construction in the environment of modern Ukranian cities as an important factor of reviving the nation and building a new national identity. The article analyzes selected realized objects in the residential environment, systematizes architectural prototypes, which architects turn to nowadays in search of a modern image of a sacred building. Based on the methods of comparative, synchronic and semiotic analysis, the significance of new sacred objects for the formation of the image of the city was revealed, and their social and symbolic meanings was also clarified.

Sacral architecture in Western Ukraine, first of all in Galicia, since the beginning of the twentieth century defined by the obvious search and articulation of local identity, arose in terms of the general process of political nations in Eastern Europe. The long break both in the continuity of generations and in the practice of sacred buildings design between periods at the turn of XIX–XX and at the turn of XX–XXI centuries, led to significant losses in the theoretical and practical use of the experience of the galaxy of Galician architects of the Austrian and Inter-War periods, which formed morphological basis of the architectural definition of a church in Ukrainian-Byzantine tradition.

The subject of the article is the study of works, created by architect Ferdynand Kasler in the interwar period in the city of Lviv/Lwów/Lemberg, Galicia. It depicts the urban and residential development of the city and the role of modern architecture. Using examples of the works built by Kasler and other architects, the author demonstrates, that Ferdynand Kasler was the founder of the direction of “harmonious modernism” in the mainstream style of architecture of modernism. Unfortunately, he was murdered during the holocaust and forgotten as a very important architect of his time.