"And if I were ever to be born again, only in Lviv. It's a waste of talk, because what you want, you say. There's nothing like Lwów," sang the legendary Mieczysław Fogg, as if paying tribute to the city which is the cradle of many Polish walks of life. This includes sport.

Today, Lviv has a population of over 700,000. The city is the capital of one of the oblasts and an important academic centre of Ukraine. The Poles are strongly connected with its history. Suffice it to say that towards the end of the 19th century Lwów became an important point on the map of Poles living under Austrian annexation. All because of the Galician autonomy and the associated freedoms that came from Vienna. Thanks to these, the Polish population living in the city was able to form their own organisations. Including sports clubs. And one of the more important of these was "Pogoń".

Good teacher, bright pupils
If we wanted to start looking for the origins of this club, it could be said that they are a combination of several events. The formation of the Lviv "Sokol" in 1867, or the first public demonstration of football with the participation of teams from Lviv and Krakow on 14 July 1894 can certainly be counted among them. Certainly, an important event occurred in 1891, when Edmund Centar, a great promoter of sport among young people, published a book entitled "Gymnastic games of schoolchildren: games, fights, fixtures, wrestling, competitions, games and processions". It was in its pages that the first and simplified rules of the game, known internationally as 'football', were found.

The popularity of the sport, created and exported by the British all over the world, was growing among the youth of Lvov. The first accounts of matches were also appearing. For example, the one from "Gazeta Sportowa", dated 15 October 1900, in which Kazimierz Hemerling, a pioneer of sports journalism in Poland, wrote as follows:

"To participate in the gymkhana, arranged by the Sports Committee of the Lvov Cyclists' Club and the Cyclists' Society at the track of the Lv. A well-coordinated party of gymnasts from the IV. Gimnayasts from the IV. gymnasium. The referee was Dr. Eugeniusz Piasecki, the boundary judges were Mr Feigl and Mr Hemerling. Within 20 minutes both teams gave one goal each; the party then ended 1:1".

In further lines we learn that the players played very intelligently and knew the rules, all thanks to Dr Eugeniusz Piasecki. And it is the second name at which it is worth mooring for a moment. Piasecki arrived in Lviv in 1899 as a young doctor. He got a job as a gymnastics teacher at the already mentioned IV gymnasium. He organised sports activities for his students, being a kind of counterpart of Henryk Jordan, who infected Krakow with sport. Through sport, he educated.

Doctor Eugeniusz educated his charges in football. The work was so successful that in 1904 "Class IV gymnasium teams" were established, renamed the Gymnastics and Sports Club of the Fourth Grammar School a year later. Red and blue colours were also adopted, reportedly inspired by two famous Liverpool teams. In 1907, after further changes and a spin-off from the Movement Play Society, the Lvov Sports Club "Pogoń" emerged, the third club after "Czarni" and "Lechia" to organise football life in the city. Two decades later, Rudolf Wacek wrote in "Sport":

"The club dared to take a risky step in the relations of the time - it became independent, broke away from the influence of TZR, both moral and especially financial, and, having leased the cycling track, started a hard sporting fight on its own turf. We consider this step to be the most important in the early years".

But it was not only the aforementioned football life that was nurtured there, as several sections developed in "Pogoń"...

Kuchars
Eugeniusz Piasecki became the club's first president, which should not come as too much of a surprise. Ten years later, after the end of World War I, he lived and worked in Poznan, where he continued to instil sporting ideas in the hearts of the already free Poles. But he was not the only one to whom "Pogoń" owed its existence. It was formed by hundreds of people. So much so that when thinking or talking about this club, almost out of the blue, one name comes to mind. Kuchar. For the family made Lviv sport famous on the national and international stage.

Ludwik Kuchar came from Hungary and came to Lviv for work. It was 1893 when he began to find employment in one of the local chemical companies. He was also known as the owner of a chain of cinemas and a great lover of physical activity, with a particular affection for gymnastics and cycling. His passion for sport was shared by his wife Ludwika, who over time was treated by the Pogoń players like a second mother.

The Kuchars had six sons. Tadeusz, Karol, Władysław, Wacław, Kazimierz, Mieczysław and Zbigniew took a lot from their father. They also devoted their free time to physical exercise and sporting competition. Seeing his children's activity, Ludwik decided to support "Pogoń" financially, contributing strongly to its development.

Support is support, but the Kuchar children really showed a flair for sports. And lots of them! Tadeusz, for example, was a skilful athlete. He was fond of middle distances. Resilient and ambitious, he was even offered a place on the Austrian and Hungarian Olympic teams. In 1912, he could have gone to Stockholm. He declined because he did not want to compete under a foreign flag. Instead, after Poland regained its independence, he became a sports activist. A sports activist of the highest order! He was one of the founders of the Polish Olympic Committee. He was the first president of the Polish Athletics Association.

Mieczysław and Władysław played football. The former defended access to the Pogoń goal, the latter was responsible for defence on the right side. But Władysław additionally skated very well and played tennis. Zbigniew Kuchar was seen at ice rinks playing hockey matches. But the most famous of the Kuchar brothers was Wacław.

Born in 1897, Wacek was uncommonly versatile. He played football, did athletics, skated and played hockey. He won national titles in each of these sports. In 1920, at home in Lvov, he won the cross-country in Poland's first athletics championships. But it was football that made him most popular. It was the most important thing for him. Thanks to it, he went to the 1924 Olympic Games in Paris.

"My first sporting love was football, I started a relationship with it as early as the age of 8 and, despite tempting offers from elsewhere, I have remained faithful to it to this day. (...) I nurtured athletics insofar as I needed to practice football. I did not take to it seriously until 1915. I had very good hopes in athletics. I did not want to let go of football, and the two were not compatible," he said in 1926, the year in which he became the first sportsman of the year in the Przegląd Sportowy poll.

He never walked away from sport. He was associated with it to the end of his life. He died on 13 February 1981 in Warsaw.

A stadium that gave a 'kick '
The club was growing and needed its own larger venue. The resilient activists began efforts to build their own pitch. The city helped by giving land. After that, everyone worked. In 1927, a photograph in 'Sport' showed a dozen people of all ages standing with wheelbarrows and tools, helping with the construction. And on 1 May 1913 the "Gazeta Lwowska" published the news:

The opening of the playing field of the Lviv sports club "Pogoń" will take place on Thursday at 3 p.m. behind the Stryisky turnpike, right next to the Park of the "Playing Fields". The consecration will be performed by Bishop Bandurski, followed by a speech by the president, Mr Misiewicz, and the delegates. The third point will be a football match between "Cracowia "and "Pogoń".

The venue was built near Park Kilińskiego in Lviv. Referred to as the Stadium behind the Stryisk turnpike, it was renamed the Edward Śmigły-Rydz Sports Park in 1938. It was an arena for football matches and more. It was on it that the premiere edition of the Polish athletics championships was held. It could accommodate 10,000 spectators, but history was made with the so-called "green stand", i.e. the chestnut trees growing around it, which fans climbed to watch the sporting struggles. It was decommissioned in the late 1940s and was no longer a Polish stadium. Instead, it was still a place that made up the club's remarkable history.

In 1938, on the twentieth anniversary of Poland's regaining independence, the Association of Polish Sports Associations awarded Pogoń the title of "the best and most deserving sports club in Poland". Well deserved! The footballers won the Polish championship four times (1922, 1923, 1925, 1926). The club also trained gold medallists in other sections. The thriving, large centre, which was the cradle of Polish sport, was preparing for war on 31 August 1939. Many of its members, both then and during earlier armed conflicts, grabbed weapons to defend the homeland. And then the club's activities were suspended.

History writes interesting scenarios. After 1945, all the places connected with Pogoń remained within the borders of the then USSR. But the memory of its former alumni, and of Lviv sportsmen in general, survived. Wacław Kuchar led the Polish national football team to a 3:1 victory over Czechoslovakia in 1948. Kazimierz Górski, the coach who guided the Poles to third place in the world in 1974, was also from Lviv, having previously been a footballer himself at the local RKS.

"In Lviv, football had a rich tradition and its greatness - Pogoń, every one of us dreamed of playing there," said the Coach of the Millennium.

Later, in 2009, a step forward was made. The Polonia in Lviv, remembering the successes of the past, reactivated the club. And it is still active today.