Until missiles struck within walking distance of cathedrals and downtown cafes, Ukraine’s cultural capital was a city that could feel remote from the war. The initial panic had subsided and the growing response to the sirens of the morning air raids was not to descend the stairs but to turn over in bed.

But Friday’s dawn Russian airstrikes in Lviv, just outside the international airport, rattled nearby buildings and shook any sense of comfort as thick black smoke billowed out.

Yet the hours after the airstrikes were absent from scenes in other Ukrainian cities that horrified the world: destroyed buildings and people fleeing under fire. Lviv was already rediscovering its age-old role as an ever-changing crossroads.

“In the morning it was scary, but we have to keep going,” said local restaurant worker Maria Parkhuts. “People arrive with next to nothing, and where is it worse.” The city has been a refuge since the start of the war almost a month ago, the last outpost before Poland and hosts hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians who transit or stay there. On the other side come aid and foreign fighters.

Midstream is a city that, on the surface, continues amid World Heritage churches and coffee kiosks. Food-delivery cyclists with backpacks from global brands teeter on the cobblestones. Yellow trams wind through narrow streets lined with the history of one occupation after another, from the Cossacks to the Swedes to the Germans to the Soviet Union.

The threat of a new occupation by Russia, after such a long fight to break with its influence, and so close to the rest of Europe, is at the origin of the new Lviv.

“This is war,” Maxim Tristan, a 28-year-old soldier, said of Friday’s attack. “It only motivates us more to fight.” At the corner of a street, young men line up in front of an arms store, passing around a sight. Everything is available if you have the money, said one man, drawing smiles from the others. On the same block is a target practice range, with the face of Russian President Vladimir Putin spot on. Elsewhere in the city, military veterans teach civilians how to shoot.

In a popular city park, a WWII bunker has been reopened a short walk from the playground. In front of an architecture academy, men fill sandbags. Some churches in the city have wrapped their statues and covered their stained glass windows. Others leave their fate to God.

In the military section of the main cemetery are more than a dozen graves too new for marble crosses. The earth is covered with frosty flowers. The floor is marked with boot marks. Behind the graves is open ground ready for several more rows.

Hours after Friday’s attack in Lviv, activists placed 109 strollers in the square in the heart of the city to represent children killed in the war.

Tattoo artists prick their clients with patriotic symbols. A brewery turns to making “Molotov cocktails”. A street poster shows a woman in the yellow and blue colors of Ukraine, shoving a gun into the mouth of a kneeling Putin. In the living room of a local trade, a young woman sketches the drawing of a dove.

Volunteering has taken over the city. People are opening their homes and local media are reporting that locals are cutting up old clothes to make camouflage netting for checkpoints.

“War is not just about people fighting,” said Volodymyr Pekar.

The 40-year-old local businessman is behind a campaign to dot the countryside around the town with yellow and blue billboards with slogans such as “God save Ukraine” and ” Don’t run, defend yourself.” He was uncomfortable with the profane language that emerged in early wartime messages, and he said the more religious villagers were too.

At the same time, Pekar used crowdfunding to raise money for what he called two of Ukrainian soldiers’ greatest needs: bulletproof vests and cigarettes. “After you fight, you have to smoke,” he said.

In the shadow of slogans and bravado are the nearly 200,000 people who have fled to Lviv from the hardest hit regions of Ukraine. Adopted by the townspeople and absorbed into homes and shelters, they seem the most nervous of them all.

Displaced people rummage through boxes at aid collection points, scan notices, check their phones. Their presence has led Lviv to evolve from a getaway to a haven: instead of promoting local sweets and romantic spots, the city’s official tourism website now shares information about bomb shelter locations and radiation alerts.

Promising “warmth for the soul”, locals on Friday launched a separate Lviv series of free cultural walks for internally displaced people, aiming to visit galleries, the medieval quarter and more.

Just days ago, thousands of new arrivals crammed into Central Station at the height of the flood of refugees heading west. Now the station’s platforms are sometimes almost empty, waiting for the millions of people who continue to wander Ukraine in search of a place to rest or a new purpose. There was the furniture maker from the bombed-out capital, kyiv, who had trained in air defense years ago and was on his way to a military post. Standing alone on the platform with a backpack and sleeping mat, he planned to visit his family in the western region of Transcarpathia before heading east again.

Further down the platform was a young couple, staying relentlessly in Ukraine because the 20-year-old man is of fighting age and banned from leaving.

“I haven’t traveled much in my country. Now I have to do it,” said the woman, Diana Tkachenko, 21. Their journey began last month in kyiv on a crowded train and not knowing where they were going.

Their arrival in Lviv was terrible. The traveling companions pushed and shouted, Tkachenko said. Some came from so far east, from Russian-speaking areas, that they didn’t speak Ukrainian.

Their train had stopped in the most Ukrainian of towns. For Tkachenko, it was his first visit to Lviv.

“I walked a lot,” she says. “I tried to take advantage of the place. It’s really beautiful. We feel much safer. But there were too many people and no place to live, she said. She and her boyfriend decided to return east, to kyiv.

As their train prepared to depart, another arrived. (AP) OR

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