The Battle of Zadviry (now Zolochiv District), known as the “Polish Thermopylae”, took place on August 17, 1920.
A battalion of several hundred Polish volunteers, the so-called Lviv Eagles, under the command of Captain Bolesław Zajonchkowski, stopped the advance of the Bolshevik forces of Semyon Budyonny’s First Cavalry Army and prevented the Bolsheviks from advancing on Lviv. Out of 330 Polish volunteers, 318 died. Some of them are buried in a mass grave in Zadvirya, others in the Orlyat military cemetery in Lychakov.
The battle took place during the then Polish-Soviet war (1919-1920), in which the Polish Republic and the Ukrainian People’s Republic opposed Soviet Russia.
Today, representatives of Poland and Ukraine honored the memory of the fallen volunteers near the mound in the village of Zadvirya, where the battle continued. Among the participants of the event are the deputy chief of the Lviv OVA Oleksandr Kulepin, the Consul General of the Republic of Poland in Lviv Eliza Dzvonkiewicz, the president of the Polish Society for the Protection of War Graves in Lviv Janusz Balicki, the director of the department of international technical assistance and cooperation of the Lviv OVA Roman Shepeliak and others.
The participants of the event joined the Holy Mass and laid flowers at the monument to the Polish soldiers who died in the battle of 1920. Also, everyone together performed the Anthem of the Republic of Poland and Ukraine.
The event was organized by the Polish Society for the Protection of War Graves in Lviv in cooperation with the Consulate General of the Republic of Poland in Lviv.