“They have no history,” an anonymous 19th-century British author wrote of the Carpathians, because he was too lazy to go there to find out. The Carpathians actually groan under the weight of their history. The old tribes of Europe—Celts, Romans, Germans, Franks, Slavs, Huns, Dacians, Avars and Magyars—set up camps in their foot-hills and strongholds on their vantage points. Many valued them for their salt. The medieval kings and queens of Europe treasured them for their copper, silver and gold.
Why have we heard so little about the Carpathians? Largely because they are so varied, each massif different to the next. On the map they look more like a single range. Up close they reminded me often of a pack of cards, constantly reshuffled, as I found my way between them. For Poles, they are a southern border; for Ukrainians, a western borderland; for Slovaks, the three stylised mountain ranges on their coat of arms. Rather than the Carpathians, Hungarians speak of the Carpathian basin, their homeland, and still mourn the loss of the ring of mountains that once protected them from the outside world.
During the writing of my new book, Walking Europe’s Last Wilderness: A Journey through the Carpathian Mountains, I became a Hungarian citizen and somehow inherited their pain. But I cross the spine of the mountains at every opportunity, like the roof of a house, to experience what it looks like from the other side. For Romanians, the mountains are central to their image of themselves, as descendants of the forced marriage between the brave Dacians and their Roman conquerors. The mountains also hide less well-known identities: Ruthenians and Transylvanians, Liptos, Lemkos, Boykos and Hutsuls, Bukovinians and Szeklers.
The book was researched and written over seven years, starting in January 2018, and comprises many shorter or longer journeys through different mountain ranges from my home in Budapest. The Hungarians think and speak in terms of ‘the Carpathian basin,’ the region they settled in the 9th century, and which depended for its defense on control over the Carpathian mountains which ring the flatlands at the center. So when they lost control of the mountains, in the aftermath of the First World War, confirmed in writing at the Treaty of Trianon in 1920, this was (and still is) seen as a national disaster.
I cross the spine of the mountains at every opportunity, like the roof of a house, to experience what it looks like from the other side.The Poles, though, see the Carpathians very differently. The word ‘Poland’ is from the Slavic root polje meaning ‘plain’ or flat lands. So historically, Polish people saw the Carpathians as their southern border. But there was also a romantic attachment to the Gorale, the brave, handsome, independent-minded mountain people, who came to be seen as embodying the best of the Polish nation, preserving Polish culture through the decades when Poland ceased to exist, partitioned between Russia, Prussia and Austria.
The relationship between Poles and Ukrainians is another complication. The region of Galicia, administered by either Poland or Austria over the centuries, curls round the north-eastern edge of the Carpathians. The majority Ruthenian or Ukrainian population at different points in their history, sometimes resented Polish rule. In the aftermath of the Second World War, that took the form of armed resistance, and mass deportations. Then there were the Lemko, Boyko and Hutsul peoples, alongside all the minorities, including Jews and Romany Gypsies, included in the population of this multicultural corner of the old Austro-Hungarian empire. An anonymous British author of the late 19th century wrote of the Carpathians that “they have no history.” In fact, they groan under the weight of their history.
But it is a complex history, with many tensions, and ambiguities. Like the weather in the mountains in February. During the years I travelled and wrote the book, the Covid pandemic was followed by the full scale Russian invasion of Ukraine. The chapters of my book following this excerpt explore how the war impacted Transcarpathian Ukraine. While some young men volunteered to defend their Ukrainian homeland, and fought on a front 1,400km to the east, others decided this was not their war, and fled across the border, to avoid the draft.
–Nick Thorpe, February, 2025
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If you study a relief map of the western Carpathians long enough, faces start to appear. One is of a Neanderthal man, with the High Tatras for his flared nose, the Low Tatras as the upper lip, the lakes either side of Nowy Targ in Poland as his eyes, and the gentle curves of the Beskid mountains framing his face. The rivers of Poland are his long hair, flow down his neck and away, all the way to the Baltic Sea.
The Vistula is the queen of these rivers, more than 1,000 km long, rising on the slopes of Barania Góra in Silesia, close to the triple border of Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Kraków is the first major city on her path, but she also claims Warsaw, Płock, Toruń and Bydgoszcz on her way, before disgorging into the sea near Gdańsk.
The San is the Vistula’s younger sister, rising in the eastern Beskids right on the border with Ukraine, and meandering northwest to reach the Vistula at Sandomierz. The Ukrainian national anthem, adopted in 1991, celebrates Ukrainian territory “from the San to the Don” rivers:
Brethren, stand together in a bloody fight, from the Sian [San]
to the Don,
We will not allow others to rule our native land.
The Black Sea will smile and grandfather Dnipro [Dnieper]
will rejoice,
For in our own Ukraine good fortune shall flourish once again.
“Some memory of a liturgy, of an all-night vigil, lies submerged in this anthem. It seems as if the wind is blowing through this simple chant, as if the branches of a tree are singing,” wrote the modern Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov. Silvestrov participated in the Euromaidan protests against Russian influence in 2013, where the anthem was constantly sung.
The Polish national anthem also draws on its own river, but in a slightly different context:
We’ll cross the Vistula, we’ll cross the Warta,
We shall be Polish.
Bonaparte has shown us the way
In which we shall prevail.
Napoleon means different things to different peoples in eastern Europe. In Poland, he’s a rather positive figure. He established the Duchy of Warsaw in 1807—the first attempt to recreate a Polish state after the disastrous partition of 1795 (though it was partitioned again between Austria and Prussia in 1815). In Slovakia, he is disliked for his failed siege of Pressburg (Bratislava) in 1809 and the scorched-earth policy which followed—the destruction of the castles of the Little Carpathians.
On our first morning in Leśne Berdo, a guesthouse near the village of Przysłup, we climb through the wooded hills towards the ridge that forms the border. The snow has been falling since we crossed into Poland from Slovakia, and now lies half a metre deep, covering the railway track we walk beside as far as Przysłup station. It’s a forest railway, not in everyday use, and the points stick out of the deep snow like tiny human figures. The sun is shining, a perfect day for the mountains, the temperature hovering around zero, just cold enough to keep the snow intact.
From Przysłup we follow a track up into the forest towards Jasło. Fir trees cast their shadows like giants in the winter sunlight. The snow puts polka dots on the silvery trunks of the beeches. It takes us three hours to Jasło, instead of two, slowed by the snow and the sheer beauty. The sun is still shining, but the wind is blowing white clouds out of Slovakia, while the clouds over Ukraine are darker. Geese fly in formation high above us. On the open mountainside, the wind makes delicate curves in the snow, like the marks on a sandy beach left by the sea. The first peak we reach is Okrąglik, at 1,101 metres. The cubeshaped stone marking the border with Slovakia is painted white, with a coat of red round the top. Light seems to burrow out of the snow into the sky. We rarely meet another person, though there are footprints and animal tracks in the snow, mostly of deer and dogs.
Along a wooded ridge we walk, with Slovakia to the right of us, Poland to the left and Ukraine straight ahead. Our original plan was to cut down to Wetlina, then hitchhike back along the road to Przysłup. But we set out later than we had planned, and the winter’s day is too short; so we come down to the valley at Smerek, and feast on trout and dumplings and excellent Polish beer.
The next day is much warmer, and the melting snow swells the San river at Lutowiska, only 2–3km from the Ukrainian border. The hills have no nationality, softly coated with beech trees, and everywhere the roar of the rivers. The wooden Greek Catholic church in Lutowiska was burnt down and the population expelled to the Soviet Union after the Second World War:
The Second World War in Lutowiska effectively lasts 12 years: the local population is annihilated. The Jews are shot, Poles and Ruthenians deported. Lutowiska becomes Szewczenko. After the devastation and theft, the church has a new role—as a stable.
The Greek Catholic church of St Michael the Archangel in Smolnik survived, the oldest and most beautiful church in the Bieszczady region, built in 1791 of seasoned timber.
In 1951, this corner of Poland was swapped by the Soviet Union for a similar-sized plot, rich in coal seams. There was hardly anyone left alive. The landscape still seems strangely empty, with villages few and far between. This is a world deeply scarred by war and deportations.
In the First World War, this part of Galicia was a constant battleground between the armies of the Austro-Hungarian empire, to which Galicia then belonged, and Russia. Developments in Galicia had a profound impact on the outcome of the war. In August 1914, the chief of staff of the German army, Helmuth von Moltke, withdrew five divisions from his western front, advancing across Belgium, and sent them to Galicia. In the early stages of the war, this made tactical sense. The Germans destroyed two Russian armies, overcoming the overwhelming numerical superiority of the Russians with better strategy, weapons and supply chains. Their offensive on the Eastern Front in the summer of 1915 failed to deliver a decisive victory, however.
In 1916, the Brusilov offensive was the last real effort of the war by Russian forces. Commanded by General Aleksei Brusilov, the Russians achieved initial success, then foundered on the combined defences of Germany and Austria-Hungary. By tying down German troops who could otherwise have fought the Allies at Verdun, events in Galicia played a crucial role in the eventual Allied victory. Some 750,000 German soldiers, a million from the Austro-Hungarian armies and 2 million Russians died in the eastern Carpathians, and the plains stretching down from them to north, south and east.
According to military historian Timothy C. Dowling:
Brusilov’s armies regained all of the territory lost in 1915 and advanced once again to the Carpathian mountains, where they threatened Hungary. Only rapid action by Germany’s military leaders held the front together and prevented the collapse of the Habsburg Empire in 1916.
Behind the big strategies and the numbers lay the vast misery of soldiers and civilians.
“From Szvidnik to the Dukla pass the road curved up rapidly,” wrote the American correspondent Alden Brooks in the New York Times in 1915.
The forests were torn and burnt with shot and shell. Here were more scenes of violent struggle, trees fallen across the road, and now roughly shoved aside, rudimentary trenches, abandoned artillery caissons, two or three cannon with broken wheels, and soon, bloated, mangled horses, legs in the air, and finally the dead. They lay there to right and left, Russians for the most part, some dead in a last agony, their fingers clutching the air; others in the gutter where they had crawled to die, blackened face buried on an arm…
The American novelist Daniel Mason drums up no less bleak a scene in The Winter Soldier, but on the other side of the lines, among the Austro-Hungarian armies. Much of the action takes place in a makeshift field hospital in a ruined church in the (invented) hamlet of Lemnowicze. Margarete, a nun-turned-nurse, and Lucius, a trainee doctor from Vienna, extract bullets and shell fragments, perform amputations, and tend the sick and dying with insufficient medicines, equipment or food. The army, meanwhile, just wants to get the men back into battle:
And then there were others, men who could have fought again but now refused. Their war was over, they told him with finality. They had once been patriots, but all reasons for their patriotism had long been lost.
“Why should I shed blood for Austria?” The Czech and Polish and Romanian and Hungarian and Ruthenian soldiers asked him. “When Austria sends us into battle in front of her own? With shoes made of cardboard! And two men for every gun!”
“They will hang you for desertion,” Lucius told them. “Ha! Let them come.”
In a bar on our last evening in Przysłup, I order a bottle of “Śnieg na Beniowej”—”Snow on Beniowa”—because of the beauty of the label. “This was one of our first brews,” reads the entry on the brewery web page.
Originally planned as a Christmas beer, it quickly gained an empire of ardent fans and is one of the most frequently brewed nowadays…Thanks to a special composition of different varieties of hops, it has a beautiful vanilla-orange aroma with a delicate note of ripe peaches, kiwi fruits and summer flowers. The taste is citrus fruits, cinnamon and nutmeg. The whole is crowned by a short, savoury bitterness.
In a place scarred forever by the bitterness of loss, the sweet bitterness of good beer is welcome.
Snow on Beniowa, just like rain in Cisna is strongly associated with the region where we live, work, make our beers and pay taxes. Beniowa is an extremely charming, displaced village on the border with Ukraine, on the southernmost tip of Poland. Famous for its beautiful, old linden tree growing in the middle of an old village. Richard Kaja, a famous poster artist, graphic designer and traveler, masterfully depicted it on the label…
Ursa Major is a small craft brewery in the village of Uherce Mineralne. The pub also serves beer from Ukraine—Lvivske—with the year 1715 on the label, which I also taste. But the beer from the small Polish brewery is undoubtedly better.
The brewery’s first Facebook entry for 2024 applauds the decision of the new Polish government, elected in October 2023, to end the cutting of trees in the national parks and do more to protect the Carpathians—the opposite of what the new Slovak government is doing.
It is a strange, but familiar argument, often repeated by nationalist governments across eastern Europe. They’re our trees, and we’ll cut down as many as we like.“It’s time to move chainsaws out of parts of Polish forests,” said Environment Minister Paulina Hennig-Kloska. “We have decided to issue the first decision to limit and suspend logging of the most valuable forest areas in Poland.”
The new government coalition also pledged to expand Poland’s national parks. The outgoing government did not have a good environmental record. “Foreign organisations have been demanding influence over Polish forests at the European Commission—and the [Court of Justice of the European Union] has just granted them this right,” Tweeted former Prime Minister Beata Szydło. “It is worth emphasising—this is not about ‘defending nature.’ This is about giving foreign organisations the right to block Polish decisions.”
It is a strange, but familiar argument, often repeated by nationalist governments across eastern Europe. They’re our trees, and we’ll cut down as many as we like. The same wind blows through Brussels that ruffles the leaves in the high Carpathians.
*
The Black Dunajec rises on the northern slopes of Wołowiec mountain, then flows eastwards, collecting all the streams along the Polish–Slovak border. At Červený Kláštor (Red Monastery), by now just the plain Dunajec, it forges through a spectacular gorge, much loved by rafters and cyclists, to reach the Vistula.
The red monastery is a rather gloomy place, enlivened by an excellent legend. The monks had a reputation for the healing power of their herbs, under the guidance of a monk called Cyprian, who studied alchemy, cosmology and botany, and who wrote his Herbarium between 1756 and 1775. The original copy is in the Slovak National Museum in Bratislava. According to legend, Cyprian was also determined to fly. He constructed a flying machine, and launched himself from the “Three Crowns Hill.” At first he flew like a bird, and soared so high that an angel saw his reflection on the Morskie Oko—the “eye of the sea” mountain lake in the Polish Tatras. She struck him with lightning and he crashed to the ground. A rock, in the shape of a monk, marks the place.
*
Like the Dunajec, the Poprad rises south of the High Tatras, then flows round them to the Vistula. On the shore of the Poprad, in Strážky, there is an exhibition of the work of the artist László Mednyánszky (1852–1919) in the manor house where he lived. Mednyánszky came from a noble Hungarian family, with Slovak, Polish and French ancestry. His most striking landscapes are of the Tatra mountains and the Great Plain of Hungary near the River Tisza. He worked as a war correspondent on the Austro-Hungarian front lines in Galicia, was injured, barely survived the war, and died in Vienna in 1919.
The castle is white as a wedding cake, with square towers on each corner, topped by battlements. The walls are vanilla-white, thick enough to be defended, but their color evokes peacetime and ice cream, rather than conflict. There’s a sense of waiting—for the artist to return, or Russian tanks to arrive.
In 1968, the French director Alain Robbe-Grillet shot his film The Man Who Lies here. After the Second World War, a man with a split personality arrives in a small town where no one remembers him, claiming sometimes to be Jean, a hero of the resistance, sometimes Boris, a traitor. Three lonely women are drawn to his odd and contradictory stories. He sleeps with two, but Jean kills Boris, his alter ego, before he can sleep with the third.
Mednyánszky was a chess player, a game he could find wherever his travels took him. He got on well with peasants and aristocrats alike. The great love of his life, Bálint Kurdi, was a boatman from Vác on the Danube. Another close friend was Blažej Ladeczky, a young shepherd from Potvorice on the Váh river.
Mednyánszky’s paintings from the Eastern Front are the bleakest. A figure in white—his arms folded behind his back, military style, his clothes almost the luminous white of the Strážky castle—inspects a huddle of hooded prisoners of war. Another, “Before a Captured Russian Trench” (1915), shows two black crows perched on twisted fence-posts, and others flying above. The barbed wire, in grey oil paint, looks as soft as cobwebs.
Before leaving the castle, we walk down to the Poprad. The surface is so still, reflecting white and grey cumulus clouds on a dark-blue sky. It is hard to believe the river is even flowing. Oaks and willows lean out over the water, like Adonis, to admire their own reflections.
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From Walking Europe’s Last Wilderness: A Journey through the Carpathian Mountains by Nick Thorpe. Copyright © 2025. Available from Yale University Press.
