Travel Guide Ivano-Frankivsk (Івано-Франківськ)

230,500 inhabitants. Ivano-Frankivsk is a rather friendly city, with a pretty city centre and a good base for a visit to the eastern stations of the Ukrainian Carpathians. She deserves a one-day stopover. If you stay there for excursions, the many restaurants and cafés will ensure you a good evening out. It is also a symbol of patriotic sentiment and the desire for independence of the western regions of the country. It is also the gateway to excellent ski slopes. Ivano-Frankivsk is representative of this western part of Ukraine, which has never stopped passing from one hand to the other. As a result, the city has preserved an atmosphere that could be described as a border city, between Austro-Hungarian elegance and Polish romanticism. This region, lost in the confines of the territory, was only very late in the post-World War II period when it became part of the "Slavs". Also, like Lviv, this city seems to mark the boundary between Slavic territories and Mitteleuropa. The city was founded in the 17th century, when the region was still under Polish rule. The Pototsky family decided to create a town around the village Zablotiia and named it Stanislaviv in honour of their eldest son. Then, in 1772, the city came under the domination of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. And at the time of its collapse in 1919, an ephemeral Republic of the peoples of Western Ukraine was proclaimed, during which Ivano-Frankivsk was named capital. But the Poles soon regained control of the region following the Yalta Treaty. It was in 1939, when Poland was invaded, that the region first passed into the hands of the "Slavs" by joining the USSR. In order to appease patriotic claims, the USSR granted in 1962, 300 years after its foundation, to change its name to Ivano-Frankivsk, after the famous Ukrainian poet Ivan Franko. But this will not be enough to calm patriotic claims. In the 1960s, groups of supporters tried to resist Soviet domination. In Western Ukraine, the city is simply called Frankivsk.