Carpathian Mountains

• 1. Introduction

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  The Carpathian Mountains, a great arc of rock across Central and Southeast Europe, were rich in iron, gold and silver, especially in their western part. When the Roman emperor Trajan conquered Dacia, he brought back to Rome over 165 tons of gold and 330 tons of silver. Yet the range holds far more than metal. Why does it bend so sharply? What forces raised it from the floor of ancient seas? Which animals and forests still shelter inside it? And why can nobody say for certain where its name comes from?

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• 2. An Arc Across Europe

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  Over 1500 km long, the Carpathians rank as the third-longest mountain range in Europe. Only the Urals at 2500 km and the Scandinavian Mountains at 1700 km run longer. Although people call it a chain, it is not one unbroken ridge. It is made of several groups that differ in their landforms and their geology. The northwestern Carpathians begin in Slovakia and southern Poland. From there the range sweeps in a large semicircle around Transcarpathia and Transylvania, heads southeast, and ends on the Danube near Orșova in Romania.

  Three labels divide the arc: Western, Eastern and Southern Carpathians. The Western Carpathians lie in Austria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Poland. The Eastern Carpathians run through Ukraine and Romania. The Southern Carpathians cross Romania and Serbia. The northern rim of the Western and Eastern sections is often called the Outer Carpathians.

  Romania holds half of the range, or 50 percent. Slovakia takes 21 percent, Poland and Ukraine 10 percent each, Serbia 5 percent, the Czech Republic 3 percent, and Austria only 1 percent. Together they cover 190000 km2. After the Alps, that makes the Carpathians the most extensive mountain system in Europe.

  The width of the range swings from 12 km in some places to 500 km in others. The highest ground sits where the range is widest, in the Transylvanian plateau and in the southern Tatra Mountains group. Gerlachovský štít in Slovakia's High Tatras is the tallest summit at 2655 m. Tatra peaks exceed 2600 m, and the Southern Carpathians in Romania follow closely behind. Romania's own highest point is Moldoveanu in the Făgăraș Mountains, at 2544 m.

  Farther from the core, the summits sink. Hoverla in Ukraine reaches 2061 m, and Rtanj in Serbia reaches 1565 m. Lysá hora in the Czech Republic stands at 1323 m, and Kékes in Hungary at 1014 m. The Austrian end of the range tops out at the Hundsheimer Berg, just 481 m high.

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• 3. Shadow of the Alps

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  Only in a few places do the Carpathians climb above 2500 m. At their very highest, they match just the middle region of the Alps, and they share that neighbor's general look, climate and plant life. What they lack is drama. The bold peaks, wide snowfields, large glaciers, high waterfalls and numerous big lakes of the Alps are missing here.

  The Danube cuts the two systems apart. They touch only at the Leitha Mountains near Bratislava. The same river separates the Carpathians from the Balkan Mountains at Orșova in Romania. To the north, the valley of the March and Oder divides them from the Silesian and Moravian chains, which belong to the middle wing of the great Central Mountain System of Europe.

  Unlike the other wings of that system, the Carpathians are ringed by plains on every side. The Pannonian plain lies to the southwest, and the Lower Danubian Plain to the south. Part of that southern lowland is in Bulgaria and part in Romania. The Galician plain stretches to the northeast. The range also serves as the watershed between the northern seas and the Black Sea.

  For a long time, scientists believed that no corner of the Carpathians stayed snow-covered all year and that no glaciers existed there. Then Polish researchers found one area of permafrost and glacial ice in the Tatra Mountains.

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• 4. Built by Colliding Plates

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  Where the Carpathians now stand, smaller ocean basins once lay. The mountains rose during the Alpine orogeny, the great mountain-building episode of the Mesozoic and Cenozoic eras. Three blocks of crust did the work: the ALCAPA plate, whose name joins Alpine, Carpathian and Pannonian, along with the Tisza and Dacia plates. They moved over oceanic crust that was sinking beneath them.

  The result is a fold and thrust belt, where rock layers were crumpled and shoved over one another. The push points north in the western segment, northeast to east in the eastern portion, and southeast in the southern portion. Along the outer northern edge lies the Carpathian Flysch Belt. It formed from rocks scraped off the sea bottom and thrust over the North-European plate, in thin sheets of Cretaceous to Paleogene sediment. That shoving also created the Carpathian foreland basin. In the western segment, the Pieniny Klippen Belt marks the boundary between this flysch belt and the inner zones.

  Those inner zones contain older igneous massifs of Variscan age, reworked during the Mesozoic. During the Middle Miocene, intense volcanism affected them, fed by the subduction of the flysch basins. At the same time, the Pannonian Basin opened behind the arc through large-scale stretching of the crust. The last volcanic activity happened at Ciomadul about 30,000 years ago.

  The mountains began to take their present shape from the latest Miocene onward. On some slopes, soil that crept downhill left solifluction deposits. The area remains the most seismically active in Central Europe.

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• 5. Forests and Wildlife

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  Romania holds 250,000 hectares of virgin forest, the second-largest area in Europe after Russia. Most of it grows in the Carpathians. The Southern Carpathians form the largest unfragmented forest area on the continent.

  The vegetation changes with altitude. The foothills carry broadleaf deciduous trees, including oak, hornbeam and linden. European beech marks the montane zone above them. Higher up, subalpine forests are dominated by Norway spruce, Picea abies. Above the treeline come krummholz, the stunted, wind-bent scrub, and alpine meadows. In all, the range shelters over one-third of all European plant species.

  The animals are as notable as the plants. The Carpathians support the largest European populations of brown bears, wolves, chamois and lynxes, and the highest concentration of them lives in Romania. The wildlife list also includes the European wildcat, the Tatra chamois, the European bison and the golden eagle.

  Beneath the forests, water rises warm from the ground. The mountains and their foothills hold many thermal and mineral springs, and Romania has one-third of the European total.

  The forests face pressure. Clearcutting and illegal logging drive high rates of forest loss across the Carpathians.

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• 6. Names Across Centuries

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  In the second century AD, the geographer Ptolemy recorded the name Carpates in his Geographia, and it referred to the Western Carpathians. Late Roman documents used a different label for the Eastern Carpathians, Montes Sarmatici, meaning Sarmatian Mountains. Despite this ancient record, the modern form of the name is a neologism in most languages.

  The Scandinavian Hervarar saga relates ancient Germanic legends about battles between Goths and Huns. There the mountains appear as Harvaða fjöllum, which is the predictable Germanic form of Karpates, following the sound changes known as Grimm's law. In 1211, Gervase of Tilbury wrote in his Otia Imperialia, or "Recreation for an Emperor": "Inter Alpes Huniae et Oceanum est Polonia". That means "Between the Hunic Alps and the ocean lies Poland".

  Hungarian documents from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century called the range Thorchal, Tarczal, or less often Montes Nivium, meaning Snowy Mountains. Havasok, which also means Snowy Mountains, was its medieval Hungarian name. Rus' chronicles spoke of the Hungarian Mountains instead.

  Later writers shifted the focus again. Dimitrie Cantemir and the Italian chronicler Giovanandrea Gromo called the range Transylvania's Mountains. In the 17th century, the historian Constantin Cantacuzino rendered the name as Rumanian Mountains in an Italian-Romanian glossary.

  Today the range is Karpaty in Czech, Polish and Slovak, Karpaten in German, Kárpátok in Hungarian, and Carpați in Romanian.

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• 7. Roots of a Word

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  The Dacian tribes known as the Carpes or Carpi lived east of the mountains, in an area stretching from the northeast of the Black Sea to the Transylvanian Plain. That lands in present-day Romania and Moldova. The name Carpates is closely linked to these people, but its etymology is not clearly established.

  One view treats Karpates as a Paleo-Balkan name. Evidence comes from the Albanian kárpë, meaning rock or stiff, and from the Messapic karpa, meaning tuff or limestone. Messapic karpa survives as càrpë, meaning tuff, in the dialect of Bitonto, and as càrparu, meaning limestone, in Salentino. The Beskydy, a series of ranges within the Carpathians, may support the link too. Their name resembles the Albanian bjeshkë, meaning high mountains or mountain pastures.

  A second view traces Carpates to the Proto-Indo-European root sker- or ker-, which meant mountain, rock or rugged. Relatives would include the Old Norse harfr, meaning harrow, the Gothic skarpo, and the Modern High German Scherbe, meaning shard. The Lithuanian karpas, meaning cut, hack or notch, would belong here too. In Polish, the old word karpa meant rugged irregularities, underwater obstacles or rugged roots. The more common skarpa means a sharp cliff, and it is a cousin of English sharp.

  A third idea starts from the Indo-European *kwerp, meaning to turn, which relates to Old English hweorfan and to English warp. The Greek karpós, meaning wrist, shares the root, as does the island of Karpathos. On this reading, the name could describe the way the range bends in an L-shape.

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• 8. Lines on the Map

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  The Predeal Pass, south of Brașov and the Prahova Valley, forms the border between the eastern and southern Carpathians. A railway from Brașov to Bucharest crosses it. Other Romanian crossings include Prislop Pass, Tihuța Pass, Bicaz Canyon, Ghimeș Pass and Buzău Pass. Turnu Roșu Pass runs through the narrow gorge of the Olt River, and a railway from Sibiu to Bucharest uses it. Vulcan Pass and the Iron Gate carry a railway from Timișoara to Craiova.

  Finding borders inside the range is harder than crossing it. Dividing the Carpathians by country, into Serbian, Romanian, Ukrainian, Polish, Slovakian, Czech and Austrian sections, proves relative, because national and regional borders have changed often. Each nation also developed its own classifications, reflecting local traditions. That makes comparison between them difficult.

  The geological border between the Western and Eastern Carpathians runs roughly along a line between the towns of Michalovce, Bardejov, Nowy Sącz and Tarnów. In older systems, the line lay farther east, following the rivers San and Osława in Poland, the town of Snina in Slovakia and the river Tur'ia in Ukraine. Biologists move the boundary even farther east.

  Romanians sometimes use the label Eastern Carpathians only for the part of the range inside their country, and they split it into three groups. These are the Maramureș-Bukovinian Carpathians, the Moldavian-Transylvanian Carpathians and the Curvature Carpathians.

  In Ukraine, the eastern sections are especially hard to classify, because several overlapping traditions shaped them. Wooded Carpathians, Poloniny Mountains and Eastern Beskids are used with differing scopes by authors from different traditions.

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