A night at the Sacher Masoch hotel in Lviv

By Matthew Parish, Associate Editor

Tuesday 10 February 2026

I found myself at the Sacher Masoch Hotel for the least romantic reason imaginable: electricity. Central Lviv was again in one of those long, city-wide absences of power that turn evenings into an exercise in stoicism. Lamps glowed faintly in windows, cafés closed early and mobile telephones were conserved like rations. I needed light, heat and a working socket. The recommendation came with a raised eyebrow and a shrug. The hotel, I was told, had a generator. A reliable one.

The generator proved to be the most conventional thing about the place. It hummed away steadily, delivering warmth, illumination and internet access with a diligence absent elsewhere in the neighbourhood. Around this practical core the hotel has constructed something altogether more theatrical. Its theme draws loosely on the legacy of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, a local literary figure whose name has long since escaped the confines of nineteenth-century fiction. The hotel does not attempt reverence; it opts instead for irony, exaggeration and a distinctly Lviv sense of humour.

My room was spotless, quiet and reassuringly bright. It also contained decorative elements that would be unusual in almost any other hotel, presented not provocatively but as part of a deliberately playful aesthetic. Nothing was compulsory, nothing was explained and nothing intruded upon the essential function of the space, which was to offer rest. In the context of a city under strain, the effect was less shocking than surreal. The room felt like a stage set abandoned between performances. I sat at my laptop resting on a bench not designed for work, perched on a short stool intended for some other purpose.

The bar downstairs continued this spirit of stylised absurdity. Drinks were served with a kind of mock ceremony that clearly owed more to cabaret than to any attempt at transgression. Patrons laughed, phones charged and conversations flowed, sustained as much by relief at the steady power supply as by the drinks themselves. Unusual services were offered in the basement, for free, provided you bought a “whipping cocktail”. The theatrics were gentle, self-aware and unmistakably tongue-in-cheek. The real luxury was the light overhead and the hum of machinery in the background.

Even the reception area leaned into this deliberate eccentricity. A small retail display related to the hotel’s theme sat alongside brochures and key cards, treated with the same casual normality as any souvenir stand. Guests glanced, smiled and moved on. In another city, or another moment, it might have felt jarring. In Lviv, a city long practised in irony and layered meanings, it felt almost inevitable.

What stayed with me most was the calm professionalism of the staff. They were courteous, discreet and entirely focused on the basics: comfort, safety and reliability. Outside, the city lived with air-raid alerts, uncertainty and the quiet fatigue of endurance. Inside, there was warmth, working lifts and a refusal to surrender to gloom. The contrast was not disrespectful; it was restorative.

I took the opportunity to catch upon on some sleep after several nights of being frozen awake as the electricity turned off. I was buoyed by the certainty that the lights would stay on. Throughout, coffee was hot, the internet still worked and the streets outside were slowly re-illuminating as power occasionally flickered and returned to the grid. I checked out feeling oddly grateful. The stay had been unusual, certainly, but not in any sensational sense. In a city living through history, the hotel had offered something more valuable than novelty: a functioning generator, a sense of humour and a reminder that Lviv, even in the darkest stretches, retains her talent for defiant, slightly eccentric resilience.