Fun with Maps - Carpathian Mountains and Rusyns

 In this episode of Fun with Maps, host Dan Hanson looks at the Carpathian Mountains. The Carpathian Mountains are in Eastern Europe and form an arc through several countries including Poland, Slovakia, Ukraine, Romania, Czech Republic, Austria, and Serbia. Important cities such as Kraków (Poland), Bratislava (Slovakia) and Cluj-Napoca (Romania) are in or near the Carpathians.

What is most interesting about the Carpathians are the people who come from there. You may hear them called Rusyns, Rutheni, Ruthenes, Carpatho-Rusyns or another variation but basically they are an East Slavic ethnic group from the Eastern Carpathians in Central Europe. They speak Rusyn, an East Slavic language variety, treated variously as either a distinct language or a dialect of the Ukrainian language.

The Rusyns are inexorably linked to the Carpathian Mountains and vice versa. The Rusyns do not have a specific country to call home. The traditional homeland of the Rusyn people, Carpathian Rus', lies in the heart of the Carpathian Mountains, on the borders of modern-day Ukraine, Poland, and Slovakia. Today, approximately three-quarters of Rusyns reside within Ukraine, specifically the geographic region known as Transcarpathia (historic Subcarpathian Rus') The United States holds the largest population of Rusyns outside of Carpathian Rus', mostly within the former industrial centers of the Northeastern and Midwestern United States like Ohio and Pennsylvania. At the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries, approximately 225,000 Rusyns immigrated to the US. This video also covers Aleksander Dukhnovich who is a sort of 'George Washington' of the Rusyns. He is famous for saying "I was, am, and always will be a Rusyn."

This part of Europe has had tremendous geopolitical changes over the years even through the 20th century with the world wars and the forming of Czechoslovakia and dissolution of Yugoslavia and other factors. You will see why Carpatho-Ukraine has been called The One Day Republic. The Republic of Carpatho-Ukraine existed for just one day on March 15, 1939, before it was occupied and annexed by Hungary. The most famous Carpatho-Ukrainian might be Andy Warhol, the pop artist who pioneered the concept of 'fifteen minutes of fame'.

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