In Lviv, an initiative has been launched to return part of the historic garden near the building at 4 Yuliana Dorosha Street to municipal ownership. The head of the Lychakiv District Administration and Lviv City Council councillor Yuriy Lukashevskyi has appealed to the Office of the Prosecutor General in this regard.
According to the councillor, the plot of land behind the building at 4 Yuliana Dorosha Street has historically been attached to this building, and residents have been using the garden for more than a hundred years. A few years ago, they found out that part of the area had been registered as private property, when trees started to be felled and works carried out on the plot.
On the instructions of the mayor, the City Council set up a commission to examine the circumstances. It established that a small premises of about 17 sq m had initially been allocated as service accommodation and later privatised. After this, the owners approached their neighbours for consent to reconstruct and extend the structure. Some residents signed such permissions, but the reconstruction never took place. According to Yuriy Lukashevskyi, these signatures were likely used in 2006 to persuade city councillors to allocate a separate plot of land under this building.
The councillor stresses that he considers the situation unfair and that no new construction should appear on this land, and the garden should remain for the use of the residents who have historically used it.
The Mayor of Lviv, Andriy Sadovyi, has instructed that options be explored for representing the residents’ interests in court and for finding legal mechanisms to preserve the garden. He has asked the relevant deputy mayor, the Department of Urban Planning and the Environmental Department to analyse all legal instruments so that the area remains a garden and, if possible, is granted an appropriate status. The mayor also stated that if the decision on privatisation was taken using falsified documents, it should be challenged in court and annulment sought.
The residents of the building at 4 Yuliana Dorosha Street had previously raised the issue during a personal meeting with the mayor. They say they learned about the private ownership of part of the garden in 2023, when the owner of the plot decided to put up a fence.
Resident of the building Markiyan Roslyuk said that between 1999 and 2006, several consecutive decisions transferred part of the garden into private ownership. First, a small premises of less than 15 sq m, where a chimney sweep lived, was registered as a residential house, and later a plot of land was allocated for it. The residents appealed to law enforcement agencies, but, according to them, consideration of the case is complicated by the expiry of the limitation period. People want to return the land to common use and preserve the garden.