Mapping stateless peoples: The east Slavs of the Carpahtians

Canadian Slavonic Papers, Sep-Dec 1997 by Paul Robert Magocsi

Such theoretical constructs were reflected in practice. Throughout the interwar years, Carpatho-Rusyn political and civic activists living in the Presov Region argued they were only "temporarily" under a Slovak administration, and they repeatedly demanded to be united with their brethren in neighboring autonomous Subcarpathian Rus'. Those demands were reiterated as late as 1945, a time when Subcarpathia was about to be annexed to the Soviet Union.36 At the far southeastern corner of the Carpatho-Rusyn areal, recent documents have come to light to show that there, too, in early 1945, representatives of the dozen or so villages in Maramures Region of Romania requested that they be united with their brethren in Transcarpathia.37 And as for settlements father south that were separated from compact Carpatho-Rusyn territory, older residents in several villages of present-day northeastern Hungary retain an active historical memory that their ancestors are Rusyns (rutenok) from the Carpathians, while farther south the Vojvodinian Rusyns have a well developed literature that makes it clear that their ancestral home is in the Carpathian Highland (Hornitsa).38

If an argument can be made that Rusyns south of the Carpathians have a common political culture and a sense of historic tradition that is distinct from other East Slavs, how does one justify the inclusion of the so-called Lemko Region north of the mountains within the framework of a Carpatho-Rusyn areal? At first glance it might seem that the ethnographic principle is being invoked after it has been rejected in the case of Carpatho-Rusyn lands farther east. In fact, it is historical tradition as well as in part geography that has helped to create a sense of communality across the crests of the mountains.

With regard to geography, it has always been relatively easy for the inhabitants of the Lemko Region to maintain commercial, cultural, and familial relations with East Slavs immediately to the south, because the Beskyd rangesroughly between the Poprad River in the west and the Oslawa River in the east (the present-day boundary between Poland and Slovakia) - have the lowest elevations throughout the Carpathians and are penetrated by several routes that cut through accessible passes (Tylyc/Tylycz, Dukl'a/Dukla, Lupkiv/Lupkow).39

Not surprisingly, then, when at the close of World War I the East Slavs of the Lemko Region organized for the first time to decide their political future, the strongest orientation among them called for unity with their Rusyn brethren living south of the mountains.40 It was, in fact, the political demands of the Lemko Rusyns that resulted in the first maps which conceptualized in visual terms the idea of an entity called Carpathian Rus', whose territory basically coincided with the villages from the 1900-1921 period shown on the C-R Settlement Map. The Lemko-inspired concept of a Carpatho-Rusyn homeland was submitted to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919,(41) and it was only after the Czechoslovak government refused to accept their request for unification that the Lemkos formed on the northern slopes of the Carpathian Mountains an independent Lemko Rusyn Republic that was to last sixteen months (December 1919 to March 1920). Despite the failure to unite politically after World War I, Lemko writers and historians have kept alive a tradition that the Lemko Region and its East Slavic inhabitants are culturally part of a Carpathian Rus' homeland on both sides of the Carpathian Mountains.42