Today’s pair of pin badges from the still-expanding European football collection feature the same club under subtly changed, modernized identities: Karpaty Lvov, as they were Russian Soviet-style (& remain in the Ostalgic heart of TOoT), & Lviv as they are now known in their native, harsher-looking Ukrainian.
Other than a solitary Soviet Cup victory, in 1969, tangible success has eluded the club, yet, for whatever reason, a sticker bearing a team photograph of Karpaty Lvov featured in the ‘SSSR’ pages of the 76-77 Panini Euro Football album that I owned, a free gift courtesy of Shoot! magazine (an entirely random reason, it would seem, but very fortuitously, for Karpaty were only one of three teams whose sticker was included but who weren’t present in any of the three continental club competitions that particular season: fellow Russians Torpedo Moscow & Young Boys Berne of Switzerland being the other two), attempted to fill back in its day & have subsequently acquired a completed copy of, for nostalgia’s sake, &, somehow, stuck – again, the exotic difference of the name (& I’d have surely consulted the atlas to locate Lvov, nerdy as I was & remain, noticed the proximity of the Carpathian Mountains & made the connection) must have sparked an enthusiasm that became devotion, especially as it became apparent the club’s colours were green & white as featured on the sticker image, one of the very favourite aesthetic combinations.
Given this latter fact, the newer club crest as represented on the badge is a fine thing, the badge thus an object of desire, more so with its Cyrillic lettering, acquired from the good people of eurofussball.net in Germany.
The vintage Soviet-era Karpaty Lvov badge is, of course, a magnificent historical artefact, devoid of the frippery of colour, its weathered patina appearing, however fancifully or romantically, as though the object might conceivably have been disinterred from burial deep within a Carpathian forest - the pines of which feature in relief upon its form - since the fall of the Soviet Empire, although it actually came via an ebay seller in Shrewsbury.
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