Transcarpathia: Peripheral Region at the 'Centre of Europe'

No one writing about Transcarpathia can resist retelling the region’s favourite anecdote: A visitor, encountering one of the oldest local inhabitants, asks about his life. The reply: ‘I was born in Austria-Hungary, I went to school in Czechoslovakia, I did my army service in Horthy’s Hungary, followed by a spell in prison in the USSR. Now I am ending my days in independent Ukraine.’ The visitor expresses surprise at how much of the world the old man has seen. ‘But no!’, he responds, ‘I’ve never left this village!’ In fact, this tale considerably understates the convolutions of Transcarpathia’s trajectory: in the course of the twentieth century it underwent no fewer than 17 changes of political status. These included not only annexation and re-annexation by the states mentioned above (with varying degrees of autonomy under each); occupation by Romania (in 1919–20) and Nazi Germany (in 1944); but also two brief periods of independent existence. Always an economic and political backwater, Transcarpathia nevertheless bore the full brunt of twentieth-century Europe’s travails. Transcarpathians insist on their ‘Central European’ identity, ‘officially’ confirmed by the Viennese Geographical Society, which in 1911 identified the ‘Centre of Europe’ in the Carpathian foothills just above Rahiv, a small town in the east of the region. A monument marks the precise spot. One of the more endearing inconveniences of everyday life in Transcarpathia today is the local insistence on using Central European time – one hour behind official Kiev time – quietly asserting where the province feels it belongs. Indeed, it conforms nicely to Milan Kundera’s celebrated characterization of ‘Central Europe’ as: a condensed version of Europe itself in all its cultural variety, a small arch-European Europe, a reduced model of Europe made made up of nations conceived according to one rule: the greatest variety within the smallest space (Kundera, 1984: 33). The ethnic composition of the region is indeed complex. The last (1989) Soviet census recorded a large majority of Ukrainians (78.4 per cent) alongside a significant minority of Hungarians (12.5 per cent), and small, but locally concentrated minorities of Russians, Romanians, Roma,