I spent a couple of days in Chernivtsi in the summer of 2026, on my way out of Ukraine through Moldova. I had first visited the city ten years earlier, in the spring of 2016. Situated in the southwest of the country, close to the border with Romania, Chernivtsi has a complicated history, having changed hands repeatedly over the course of the 20th century. Chernivtsi is the main city of Bukovina, a region which straddles the border between Ukraine and Romania. While today it has a significant Ukrainian majority, for much of its history it also had large Romanian and Jewish populations, as well as Poles and Austrians. With its various names, Czernowitz in German, Cernăuți in Romanian, Chernivtsi is one of those many cities in eastern and central Europe that were once notable for their rich multicultural diversity, but which in the upheavals of the 20th century succumbed to the logic of the largely mono-ethnic nation-state.
The region had been part of the Principality of Moldavia, which was under Ottoman suzerainty from the 16th century. After the Ottoman defeat in the Russo-Turkish War of 1768-1764, Austria annexed a slice of territory in the north-west of Moldavia, which came to be known as Bukovina. Following the collapse of Austria-Hungary at the end of the First World War, Chernivtsi was briefly under the control of the short-lived West Ukrainian People’s Republic before the town, together with the rest of Bukovina, was taken over by Romania.
Chernivtsi National University
Chernivtsi in all its multicultural colour and disorder in the years after the First World War was the subject of An Ermine in Czernopol, a novel by the Austrian writer Gregor Von Rezzori, a native of the city. The novel’s name only thinly disguised its location in Chernivtsi. It depicts the tragicomic efforts of a rigid Austrian officer in Romania’s post-war army to maintain his honour and the virtue of his conspicuously unvirtuous sister-in-law in a riotously chaotic city where he is out of time and place. His confusion is unsurprising. Someone born in Czernowitz before the First World War who lived a long life in the city and survived all its population shifts would have been a subject of successively Austria-Hungary, Romania, the Soviet Union and independent Ukraine.
The city’s greatest architectural glory is the building of the Chernivtsi National University. Built in the late 19th century, it was originally the residence of the Orthodox Metropolitans of Bukovina and Dalmatia, whose ecclesiastical jurisdiction encompassed the Romanian and Ukrainian Orthodox believers of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, as well Serbian Orthodox believers in Dalmatia. Under Soviet rule, it was transferred to the city’s university. It is a wonderfully eclectic combination of styles, including Byzantine, Gothic and Moorish. Since 2011, it has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site. When I visited in 2016, the building was hosting a conference, under cover of which I was able to wander around its grounds and the magnificent interior. It is surely one of the most beautiful university buildings anywhere.
Chernivtsi Synagogue, then and now
As a result of the holocaust and emigration to Israel, Jews form a small part of Chernivtsi’s population today. They had once been the largest population group in the city, reaching nearly 40 per cent in the 1930s. There are several reminders of their once significant presence. Chernivtsi was an important centre of Jewish culture. In 1908, the Czernowitz Conference was held there, which promoted the Yiddish language. This was despite the fact that much of the Jewish elite of the city had assimilated into the German-speaking population by the end of the 19th century. In the centre of the city is a former Reform Synagogue which has, since Soviet times, served as a cinema. German and Romanian soldiers burned the building in 1941, and the Soviets tried to blow it up after the war. But while the dome of the building was destroyed, the walls stayed standing, and the building was repurposed as a cinema.
Jewish cemetery, Chernivtsi
In the outskirts of the city is a sprawling Jewish cemetery. Today it is neglected, overgrown with tall weeds and bushes, its gravestones tilting at different angles. While most of the graves are from the heyday of Chernivtsi’s Jewish community, a few are more recent. I find such run-down cemeteries, monuments to once thriving communities that have subsequently whittled away, strangely moving. I had similar feelings walking around the Saxon cemetery on the hill overlooking Sighişoara, in Romania, among the graves of a German community that has largely disappeared (see post of 15 September 2022). The Karaite cemetery in the woods next to the abandoned cave city of Chufut Kale in Crimea is especially moving, the simple headstones higgledy-piggledy among the tree roots, dappled by the sunlight through the trees (see post of 28 July 2011).
The devastation of the holocaust was preceded in Chernivtsi by the brutal Soviet occupation in 1940-41, when thousands of intellectuals and prominent and wealthy citizens, including many Jews, were deported to Siberia and Central Asia. Following the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Romanian rule returned to Chernivtsi, now under the dictator Ion Antonescu. The Jewish population faced severe repression, forced on Antonescu’s orders into a ghetto. Today there is a monument to the Chernivtsi Ghetto near where its main entrance had been. In 1941 and 1942, the majority of the Jews of Chernivtsi, more than 30,000 people, were deported to Transnistria, where it is estimated around 60 per cent of them perished. The city’s Romanian mayor, Traian Popovici, interceded with Antonescu, and managed to save some 20,000 Jews from deportation. More than 3,000 Jews were killed in Chernivtsi itself, by German SS Einsatzgruppen as well as Romanian troops and police. Later in the war, many who had survived the deportation to Transnistria returned to Chernivtsi, but most subsequently emigrated to Israel or elsewhere.
