Since its creation in 1787 as Łyczakowski Cemetery, it has been the main necropolis of the city's (at the time named Lemberg[1]) intelligentsia, middle and upper classes.

The original project was prepared by Karol Bauer [pl], the head of the Lviv University botanical garden.

The majority of the surviving pre-war inhabitants of the city were expelled to the former German areas awarded to Poland after the Yalta Conference.

On the wall of the memorial was written a verse: At the middle of the planetin the storm clouds thunderdeads are watching the skybelieving in the wisdom of livings Poetic writing in honor of the Soviet soldiers was eliminated at the direction of urban authorities in 1990s.

The Lviv Oblast Council announced on May 20, 2022 that it would hold an architectural contest in order to select the design for a war memorial at the site, which has been described as part of the decommunization process in Ukraine.

[7] The exhumation proceedings uncovered remains dating back to the First World War and belonging to soldiers of the German, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman and Russian armies, which are set to be moved into a dedicated section within the planned memorial,[8] as well as World War II and post-War Soviet burials, which will be transferred to the Holoskiv Cemetery in Lviv.

Though in the late 1980s, workers of a Polish company which were working in Khmelnytskyi started to redecorate and rebuild the necropolis from its ruins (which was not always legal according to Ukrainian law).

Although the Ukrainian authorities tried to stop the works several times, the Poles managed to renovate this important memorial of great Lvovians.

Buried here are members Polish January Uprising of 1863, of which a member of the Polish Central National Committee Bronisław Szwarce, the famous zoologist Benedykt Dybowski, cornet Vitebsk land, resting under the central monument rebels Shimon Vizunas Shidlovsky [pl], etc.