In purely geographic terminology the name Bieszczady simply denotes a 60 km long part of the long Carpathian Arc between the Lupkowska and Uzhok passes, about 2000 sq. km in all or an area not much bigger than Greater London County. It is here that the great European watershed between the Mediterraean, Black and Baltic seas begins turning from its previously east- west axis into a north- south one. As such this range constitutes the westermost part of the East Carpathian range which has a diffrent flora and fauna from the far more developed and spoiled West Carpathians. It is also the only part of this long assembly of ranges, humps and hillocks that eluded Stalin's grasp after 1945 and managed to stay within Poland. Before the last war Poland stretched right until the gates of Transylvania, some 250 km further southeast along these melancholy fells. This is all that remains of Poland's once extensive eastern marchlands that for a time in the seventeenth century stretched almost to the gates of Moscow and left an indelible mark upon the national psyche. 

This rather pitiful remnant evokes feelings of powerful nostalgia that no other part of today's Poland can match. It is the Polish equivalent of Oberlausitz or Vorpommern for the Germans, which remind them respectively about Silesia or Pomerania, both lost as consequence of Hilerian warmongering. Just like the Germans who were ruthlessly expelled from their former East Prussian homelands, so too were the Poles who replaced them- most came from present Belarus or Ukraine. For almost 50 years the artifical border along the San and Bug rivers seperated the ostensibly friendly Slavic peoples from one another, a line arbitrarly drawn by one  Lord Curzon in the privacy of his London ministry, a man that never visited Poland nor even attempted to understand its prewar ethnic mosaic. 

Even the part of the range west of the infant San river, which  remains in Poland once had a very strong Ukrainian majority. These highlanders are long gone, victim of the vicious ethnic cleansing perpetrated on so many peoples right after the war, where instead of the Wilsonian ideal of fitting the borders to satisfy various nationalities, these peoples were moved about like sacks of coal to fit the new political demarcations dreamed up in Teheran, Yalta or Potsdam. The people might be gone, but the wooden churches were they worshipped, the cementeries were they laid their forefathers to well deserved rest after lives of backbraking labor, their old farmsteads which saw so much grief but also happiness stemming from daily life, they all remain to a great extent. It is this peculiar image of diversity, the eastern, almost oriental appearance of a region so diffrent from the communist ideal of a mononational Poland, together with the wild beech forests that replaced prewar fields and pastures, that draw visitors from all over Poland. They search here for that foretaste of the " wild East" that they sampled when their grandmothers tucked them to bed and told tales of endless forests peopled by proud and fearless people who feared no one. 

Needless to say the area, just like most of what used to be eastern Poland presented hardly a rosy picture back then, and still is more than rough, to say the least. The nostalgia the old treasure in their hearts tends to have the unfortunate quality that the longer removed in time we are from our childhoods, the wrinkles, blemishes and downright horrific details that could spoil the picture tend to dissapear in the fog of wishful thinking.  We want to concentrate on what made us happy, our past, no matter how awful, always appears better and more secure than the unknown realities of what the future holds, or does not hold in store for us. This is why so many older Poles, my grandparents included, can talk for hours about the happy folk dances, wedding partys where vodka flowed like a river, courtly manners of aristocracy and kissing the priest in the hand as he gave his blessings to the hopefully sobered up parishoners. They forget, or perhaps do not want to remember how awfully hard life in those God- forsaken provinces really was.

During years with bad harvests, many peasants practically starved to death, infant mortality resembled medieval levels even though the twentieth century was already well underway, electricity and plumbing were as abstract as the moon. There were almost no hardened roads, few rail lines, most people could not read or write, although happily they knew how to party and spread their love all around, together with syphilis and gonorrhea. The Hutsuls, who lived in those quiet valleys around Carnohora and Ukraine's highest peak, the Howerla, were renowned for their easy going attitude toward life and love. Although nominally Greek- Catholic their faith involved a lot of pagan leftovers such as beliefs in demons, vampires, ghosts of unbaptized children haunting their parents and other assorted floatsam of premodern naivete. They were sexually liberated before anybody ever heard of Mairlyn Monroe and the Rolling Stones, and as such object of insincere derision and hidden jealousy of their more orthodox neigbors from the lowlands. The Hutsul way of life symbolized freedom in its pure, unadulterated form, a Rousselian noble savage riding atop their tiny horses over the windswept Poloniny, as the huge mountaintop meadows are called here,  having nothing to worry about precisely because they got so little to lose. Oskar Kolberg, a renowned Polish ethnographer canvassing the region in the late nineteenth century, believed that of all "polish races, this one preserved the spirit of the deceased country better than the  rest." 

The cataclysmic events that began in the fall of 1939 clearly refuted any illusions that the Hutsuls considered themselves members of Polish society. They really always were, and are Ukrainians, as far as their dialect and religion indicates. That October, over the corpse of Poland Stalin and Hitler divided the erstwhile " bastard of Versailles" along the San and Bug rivers. The Hutsuls and Bojkis, the other ethnic group that inhabited the Bieszczady proper, did not welcome the Muscovite invaders with open arms. Forced collectivization and rooting out of the kulaks went directly against their freedom- loving way of life, and they had no practical use for Marxist dystopias.

When the Germans conquered the region in the summer of 1941 many greeted them as liberators, only to be rewarded with summary executions of the " slavic subhumans." But by the spring of 1944, with the Germans in full retreat and the prospect of Marxist rule looming again on the horizon, most have had enough- they wanted neither Soviets, or Germans, and certainly not the aristocratic Poles who treated them so condescendingly before the war- they wanted a free Ukraine- whatever it meant, at whatever cost. 

Thousands died during the next five years attempting to carve out their country, heedless of the hopelessness of their cause. Hundreds of Hutsul and Bojki villages were depopulated, their inhabitants shot in nearby woods as " enemies of the people, kulaks and other fascist scum," others deported to Siberia or eastern Ukraine where there could be russified more efficiently. 

Those who found themselves in Poland fared no better- instead of Siberia they suddenly found themselves in cattle cars heading for Wroclaw, Szczecin or Olsztyn where the Germans have just been chased out in the name of correcting past injustices with new ones. In Poland more Greek Orthodox believers live on the Baltic coast than near the Ukrainian border, their former language all but gone, only the rites of their church showing any diffrence from the surrounding sea of polishness. To the extent that they are assimilated they are regarded as fellow Poles, their unusual faith nonwithstanding. Old hatreds, but also the memory of what might have been, are dying out with the old generation. 

In the Carnohora, the Gorgany, the Svidoviec and the Polish section of the Bieszczady time flows as slowly as ever. Decades of communist mismanagement and inertia have paradoxically ensured that the backwardness of the region is here to stay for the time being, thus providing the few westerners who venture here a unique view into an almost pre- industrial corner of Europe. 

Together with the vast stretches of Transylvania and Bukovina that lie in Romania, these truly are the hidden gems of Europe- better discovered now than in the future when they too will vanish under the watchful gaze of countless Brussels and Strasbourg bureaucrats that seek to improve our world and make it duller.