Multiethnicity and multilingualism are the foundation of Transcarpathia’s greatest myth, which is nice to brag about every chance one gets – the myth that so many nations live here, such a multitude of ethnicities and traditions, that we are multicultural! However, the close proximity of many cultures doesn’t necessarily equal multiculturalism.

It’s said that one Transcarpathian is a smuggler, two are are a construction team, and three are impossible to find – one of them has to be Hungarian or Romanian. The anecdote accurately describes the idiosyncrasy of the region, which could also be likened to a cooking pot: surrounded on one side by the peaks of the Carpathians, and on the other – the borders of four European Union states (Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania). Just imagine what kind of dish could be stewing in there.

The land that capitals forgot

Today’s Transcarpathia has always been a rim, an edge, a borderland. All the countries that it’s ended up in over the last few centuries have treated it this way, as a zone infinitely marginal and forgettable. It’s been characterised as a region that’s useless, barely worth noticing and certainly not worth investing in, but it’d just be a shame to get rid of it. Paradoxically, the yesterday’s lack of interest from capitals has turned into today’s advantage: civilisation came to Transcarpathia late and with reluctance, allowing the region to preserve its old tradition and separate identity.

In the Kingdom of Hungary, Transcarpathia was the north-east edge. An idiosyncratic region, as it had a predominantly Slavic population. In the times of Austria-Hungary, it remained marginal. The thing is, Austria-Hungary was part Austria and part Hungary, which is why Lviv in Galicia and Chernivtsi in Bukovina – both formerly under Austrian jurisdiction – are grand, well-developed cities with theatres and broad boulevards, while Uzhhorod, the capital of Transcarpathia, remains a neat and cosy, but also unimpressive and provincial town.

Hungary didn’t invest in Transcarpathia, didn’t build advanced infrastructure or care for the development of local education. Austria-Hungary’s last censuses show that the level of illiteracy was higher in Transcarpathia than almost anywhere else in the empire. I needn’t mention the region didn’t have even one university at the time and the only way to gain education was to undergo full Magyarisation and end up in Budapest. The scale of Magyarisation is illustrated by Transcarpathia’s best artist – Adalbert Erdeli, who was descended from the Ukrainian Hritz family, but around the year 1900, out of Hungarian patriotism, his father changed their surname to Erdélyi (“of/from Transylvania”). This opened many doors and the young man was now able to build a career.

Transcarpathia was also the far-eastern edge under Czechoslovakian rule. Whereas the neighbouring regions are nostalgic for kindly Austria, the people of Transcarpathia see the times of Masaryk as their golden age. They say the Czechs built more in twenty years than the Hungarians in a thousand. To be precise, it was only then, barely a hundred years ago, that the concept of Transcarpathia as a separate region emerged; earlier the land had just been considered as individual counties. In interwar Czechoslovakia, the Carpathian Mountains were the country’s east border, hence the region was named Subcarpathian Ruthenia. Only after the Second World War, when the land became part of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, was it renamed to Transcarpathia to match the new geographical reality.

In today’s independent Ukraine, Transcarpathia is still the distant borderland, especially since Uzhhorod is further from Kiev than from eleven other European capitals, and just as far away from Donbas as from Amsterdam. It’s doubtless that both the region’s geographical situation and historical experiences, different from the rest of Ukraine’s, have formed the local people’s peculiar mentality. “Peculiar” being a word with not entirely positive connotations, I must add. This is well demonstrated during elections, when television programmes show maps with colours that represent voting preferences. Transcarpathians often vote strangely, unlike the rest of Western Ukraine, which is seen as patriotic and pro-European. Transcarpathia, meanwhile, will often vote for regional political projects, populists or even pro-Kremlin parties. And all that from a place that’s even further west than Ukraine’s western symbol – Lviv!

The dream of “great” Transcarpathia

The Transcarpathian Oblast in Ukraine is the largest part of historical Transcarpathia, but not the only one. After the Second World War, a large chunk ended up in Czechoslovakia (and later Slovakia, after the country’s breakup), and it stretches all the way to Spiš and Prešov in the north. That’s where Transcarpathian “awakeners” came from – cultural and educational activists who at one point started the region’s national revival. In modern-day Slovakia, quite a number of citizens consider themselves to be of a separate Rusyn nationality, although signs of close ties with Ukraine also exist, such as the Museum of Ukrainian Culture in Svidník.

The Ukrainian ties are most visibly expressed in religious affiliation. Eastern Slovakia has a great many practitioners of Greek Catholicism, because it used to be part of the Greek Catholic Eparchy of Mukachevo. One member of this Church used to be Andy Warhol, the world’s most famous Transcarpathian expat. This is frequently mentioned by the media, and Uzhhorod even opened a hotel in Warhol’s honour, the Emigrand, decorated in the artist’s signature pop-art style.

Religion is another aspect of Transcarpathian uniqueness. Not even every Ukrainian knows that Ukraine has not one but two Greek Catholic Churches. Apart from the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, there is the Greek Catholic Eparchy of Mukachevo, which answers directly to the Vatican. While Ukrainian Greek Catholicism was born from the Union of Brest in 1596, the Mukachevo Church came out of a separate Union of Uzhhorod in 1646. It’s not easier with the Eastern Orthodox Church either. Let’s remember that in the interwar period, when Transcarpathia was part of Czechoslovakia, the local faithful were considered subordinate to the Serbian (!) Orthodox Church. These days, following the consistent policy of Soviet authorities, the vast majority of local Orthodox Christians are part of the Moscow Patriarchate. It’s the regions dominated by the Orthodox Church and peppered with the Moscow Patriarchate’s monasteries that most eagerly cast pro-Russian votes.

One relic of the Union of Uzhhorod is the presence of nearly three hundred thousand Greek Catholics in eastern Hungary. They’ve long stopped speaking the language of their ancestors and they consider themselves Hungarian, but Greek Catholic village churches suggest old Transcarpathian roots. Even Romania has territories that the people of Transcarpathia consider historically “theirs” – for instance, parts of the Maramureș region: the town of Sighetu Marmației and the surrounding villages, where one can still hear Transcarpathian dialects and place names are written in both Latin and Cyrillic script.

Multiculturalism or a multitude of cultures?

Transcarpathia boasts so many dialects foreign to outsider ears that some attempt to classify them as a separate Slavic language. It’s no surprise that locals are so hard to understand, since the proximity of other countries and nations has created a special linguistic flavour in this cooking pot, one in which Ukrainian is enriched – or littered, some would say – with borrowings from neighbouring languages, namely, Hungarian, Romanian, Slovak and Polish. Let’s add to that the German colonisers, the Czech administration, the local Jews and Roma, and we get a concoction that makes Transcarpathians hard to understand for one another, let alone for outsiders.

Multiethnicity and multilingualism are the foundation of Transcarpathia’s greatest myth, which is nice to brag about every chance one gets – the myth that so many nations live here, such a multitude of ethnicities and traditions, that we are multicultural! However, the close proximity of many cultures doesn’t necessarily equal multiculturalism. The Hungarians – the country’s largest minority (one hundred and fifty thousand, which is twelve per cent of the population) – live their own lives. They have their own community, their own political parties, their own Church, newspapers, radio and television. Sometimes, they even don’t speak Ukrainian and they’re not interested in what goes on in Kiev, because they’re fixated on Budapest. In their defence, the Transcarpathian Ukrainian’s knowledge of Hungarian culture, despite the closeness and common history, is very slim and stereotypical – nothing beyond Budapest, Sándor Petőfi, csárdás and Tokaj wine.

It’s even worse with Romania and the Romanians. Under Ceaușescu’s rule, the country had been completely isolated, and after the fall of Communism it turned out to be so dirt poor that it was no use doing even shady business there. People from Transcarpathia travelled to Hungary, Poland or Yugoslavia, but never Romania – you couldn’t make money there. You’d only hear belittling jokes about the mountains, horse-drawn carts and the Roma – and that was that when it came to information about Romanians. But even the jokes were scarce. And even now, after Romania joined the European Union and began its dynamic development, there are no trains or buses linking Transcarpathian and Romanian towns. It’s as if the two places were separated not by a border, but a rift.

And so it turns out that, while we brag about our multiculturalism given half a chance, we don’t actually have it. One needn’t look far: just stop anyone on the streets of Uzhhorod, Vynohradiv, or Rakhiv and ask them about Hungary or Romania’s most famous modern writers, best bands, famous directors or artists. What’s the most popular music group in Romania? Who’s the best female writer from Slovakia? What is your favourite Hungarian film? You will hear nothing but pregnant silence.

Smuggling as a mode of communication

Transcarpathia mostly makes it into the Ukrainian media because of smuggling. There’s a long-standing stereotype that every fourth person in the region is a smuggler. That is, of course, a myth and an outright lie. In truth, smuggling is done by every second person.

Jokes aside, this tiny oblast bordering as many as four European Union states is just naturally bound to be a smuggling centre. Wherever there are borders and price differences, there has always been and there will always be smuggling. Transcarpathia did not invent it, it’s a feature of virtually all borderlands in the world. When borders, customs and price differences vanish, smuggling loses its purpose. Such has been the case of Italy and Austria, and more recently – Germany and Poland. Smuggling is not as bad as they, despite its terrible, criminal reputation. I’ll let you in on a secret: Transcarpathians don’t think badly of smugglers. Most of them, anyway. The thing is, smugglers can generally be divided into two groups. The first, accounting for ninety-nine per cent of all goods transported in or out, are the big fish, the local princes, who’ve spun a web of local politicians, Kiev authorities, customs officers and border guards – in a word, they’re the people who are the most vocal about fighting smugglers. They don’t need to hide, hack through forests or swim across the Tisa. Their cars just casually drive through official border crossings and make hard cash for their owners.

The second group are simple people with no “protection” or contacts, people who bring cigarettes and vodka across on a daily basis, hiding them in their own cars and clothes, to simply make a living. The group, while numerous, account for merely one per cent of all Transcarpathian smuggling. It’s just hard to think badly of those people, because in times of economic crisis and unemployment they’ve created their own jobs (albeit illegally) to feed their families. It’s them that most often get caught and make it into the news, whereas no one even bats an eye at the big fish.

One shouldn’t think smuggling is a uniquely Ukrainian, in this case Transcarpathian, sin, because they have no respect for the law and look for easy money. Just like sex needs at least two people, so does smuggling: one brings the goods from here, the other (the Pole, Slovak, Romanian, Hungarian) buys them there. Thus, people on both sides of the border form horizontal bonds and communities actually become bridged. Because smuggling is perhaps the most successful mode of natural cross-border cooperation. The people on both sides make acquaintances, learn languages to understand each other, build relationships that are not merely economic, but also friendly. Smuggling is therefore the thread that sews together Transcarpathia, once whole and now torn apart by borders.

Translated from the Polish by Łukasz Buchalski