Translated by Theodosia Robertson
Hot and silent, dusty and deserted, the town of Drohobycz seemed, during the few summer days I spent there some years ago, like a place forgotten in time. The houses had a certain faded, Austro-Hungarian glamour, but seemed to have been built for different people, in a different era. The central market square had a certain pleasing symmetry, but practically no business was conducted there. The peasant women who had carved small vegetable gardens out of the tangles of weed that passed for shrubbery looked up suspiciously when a stranger passed, and then looked quickly down again. The curse of Drohobycz is not merely that it is a provincial Ukrainian town, on the edge of what used to be the Soviet empire. The curse of Drohobycz is that it has always been a provincial town, on the edge of something else.
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