Ukraine Pipe dreams

摘要

Three bits of pipe at the water company's headquarters explain the city's history better than any textbook. The first, more than a century old, is a magnificent piece of Habsburg ironwork installed in the Austro-Hungarian provincial capital, Lem-berg. Next to it is another solid piece of pipe, laid down in the years between the world wars, under Polish rule, when the same city was Lwow, pronounced Lvoof. The third exhibit looks as if it had been attacked by metal-eating weevils. Installed only 20-odd years ago in Soviet-ruled Lvov—as the Russians, and most West Europeans, still call the city—it was poorly cast in cheap, soft iron. Now it is red with rust and full of holes. Such leaky pipes mean that many households in today's Lviv, the Ukrainians'name for their leading western city, have water for only a few hours a day.