Harmony reigns in an unexpected place

In the borderlands between empires and religions – places like Israel, the Balkans, Kashmir or Northern Ireland – conflict often erupts. But there are exceptions. In a pocket of land below the Carpathian Mountains, where five countries and four religions meet, peace has reigned for a thousand years.

The many and varied peoples of Subcarpathia – Hungarians, Germans, Gypsies, Poles, Romanians, Russians, Ruthenians, Slovaks, Tatars, and Ukrainians – have never turned against one another. Instead, they have developed an oasis of pluralism hidden deep in Eastern Europe.

"This is a hundred miles of forested no man's land, claimed by every empire and controlled by none," says Valeriy Padyak, a quiet scholar and publisher in the province's capital, Uzhgorod. "Wars have passed over us and around us, but we are like a rock in a stream. Of all the riches in these mountains, the real gold is peace."

Both UNESCO and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe have dubbed Subcarpathia a model for "the peaceful coexistence of various national groups" and suggested that it might offer a positive example for Europe's conflict zones. Despite dozens of brutal foreign occupations, the local inhabitants have never been provoked to interethnic violence.

No nation claims the majority of the population, but the Ruthenians, a native Slavic tribe, comprise the largest group.

There are schools and university departments teaching in Hungarian, Slovak, Polish, Romanian, and Hebrew, as well as Ukrainian and Russian. Newspapers and television stations cover the same wide spectrum, and Romanies (Gypsies), persecuted in many other parts of Europe, attend mainstream schools and have preserved their language to a high degree.

"What is our secret?" Mr. Padyak asks, bouncing his small son on his knee. "People here simply don't go in for racial insults and we let each community make its own choices. When the Hungarians wanted street signs in Hungarian, the Slavic groups simply agreed. The Hungarians should be able to use their language in their settlements. It makes sense and it avoids conflicts."

It seems so simple in Subcarpathia, but a similar debate over language rights touched off the war in Macedonia just last year.

But while Subcarpathia has been blessed with harmony among its various groups, it has been afflicted with economic woes. "The mountain villages are cold and bleak," says Oksana Stankyevich, a young Hungarian-Ruthenian woman. "The soil is poor, and all it grows is potatoes. Every new ruler strips our natural resources. Even now, the Ukrainian government is clear-cutting the timber, leaving big gashes in the landscape. There is no hope for young people here, so we are leaving."

The isolated province is the poorest region in the Ukraine. Most of the population of 1.3 million people lives in what the UN considers absolute poverty, subsisting on less than $1 per day. As a result, hundreds of thousands of young people have emigrated over the past 10 years, mostly Slovaks, Hungarians, Poles, and Germans who are sometimes able to gain residency in their ethnic states.

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