The most striking thing to see in Chernivtsi these days is something that you can no longer see.

Down at the station, where Pruth Street meets Gagarin Street, between the main post office and a beauty salon on the ground floor of a Habsburg-era building, a large, empty pedestal looms over the cityscape.

The monument, which had stood on it for decades, was removed in the early days of Russia's recent war against Ukraine.

Michael Martens

Correspondent for Southeast European countries based in Vienna.

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An inscription on the plinth tells in Ukrainian what was or should have been seen here: the tank of a certain Lieutenant Nikitin and his crew.

It was allegedly the first to roll into the city to liberate Chernivtsi from the fascist occupiers, on March 25, 1944. Now emptiness is enthroned on the pedestal, reminding that in Ukraine, in addition to the real war, in which shot and died, a culture war is also raging.

It is a struggle for memory and for the future of the past.

Anatoly Kruglashov knows about such fights.

He is a historian and knows that although the past can no longer be changed, the memory of it is subject to constant change.

The commemoration of the Second World War, which has been drifting ever further apart in Ukraine and Russia since the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014 at the latest, is an ideal example, he said on the phone.

Let's talk about that, meeting point "Grand Café" on Kobylyanska Street, at the corner of Cathedral Street.

Everywhere the stories of the refugees

However, the address is not easy to find.

At least not if you have switched off the roaming function of the mobile phone as a precaution because of the horrendous costs outside the EU and Google Maps does not work as a result.

So only the almost extinct cultural technique of questioning remains to get to the goal.

But many passers-by don't know their way around.

Before the war, Chernivtsi had about 260,000 inhabitants, currently there are said to be more than 310,000.

Refugees from the east swelled the population by the size of a small town in a matter of days.

An elderly couple is walking near the train station, linking arms and taking small, almost anxious steps, as if the ground beneath them could open up at any moment.

grand cafe?

Never heard that they only arrived the day before yesterday, says the man and, without being asked, talks about the last few days, about fleeing from a place in the Luhansk Oblast.

The man was particularly impressed by the dust that flies up when houses are being shot at.

“Dust everywhere, everywhere!” he says several times.

The next two attempts to ask the way also fail due to the passers-by's lack of local knowledge.

A woman from Bucha near Kyiv and a pensioner from Poltava have a lot to tell, but they don't know Czernowitz and the Grand Café.

Only a saleswoman in a bakery points the way.