IHT Article -- Zhovkva, Ukraine

Here's at link to my article for the International Herald Tribune on Zhovkva, Ukraine.

FOR A FORTRESS TOWN, A SECOND RENAISSANCE

BY RUTH ELLEN GRUBER

Jan. 12, 2009


In Renaissance Italy, artists and master architects theorized that the ideal proportions for a city could be derived from those of the human form. Some even made drawings superimposing town plans onto the bodies of men.

Half a millennium later, Lubomyr Kravets, the director of the tourist office in the little town of Zhovkva, just north of L'viv, unfolded a local map to show me how that theory had been put into practice here in western Ukraine.

"See" he said, pointing. "Zhovkva looks like a human body. The castle here is the head, and the big church over this way is the heart. The four entrance gates in the town walls were the arms and legs."

Zhovkva was founded in 1594 as a private fortress town by the Polish military commander Stanislaw Zolkiewski. It was one of several fortified towns in what was then the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth that were conceived as "ideal cities" and built by architects and master masons from Italy.

The most famous, and best preserved, is Zamosc, across the border in Poland, which was founded in 1580 by the powerful Polish noble Jan Zamoyski and designed by the Padua-born architect Bernardo Morando. It is included on Unesco's roster of world cultural heritage as "a perfect example of a late-16th-century Renaissance town."

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