Carpathians’ peoples
It’s probably the last mountain culture of Europe where people are still going around making hay by hand and casually walking uphill for two hours to get to that other plot of land where haystacks are built and potatoes wait to be taken care of.
Also probably one of the few where, besides machines, people keep horses for field work and also oxen, for the really hard winter jobs in the forest or on the hay meadows.
It’s the place where you will see shepherds bringing supplies on donkeys’ backs to their huts at 2000m, where their flocks spend the summer. And where entire villages are being temporarily deserted because locals take to the mountains in summer in what is possibly the last transhumance on our continent.
This culture handcrafted and nourished the beautiful landscapes of the Carpathians, and the same culture is living its last days now, struck by the complete anachronism of its existence.
It leaves behind wooden churches, gradually rewilded alpine meadows and a heritage of spiritual freedom and openness towards people and nature that allow us to walk everywhere on their lands in unhindered freedom and contemplate the ubiquitous presence of large carnivores in the closest proximity to the human communities.
