The Collection "From the City to the Mountains: Imagining the Carpathians in Culture and Art"

On September 8, 2024, the collection "From the City to the Mountains: Imagining the Carpathians in Culture and Art" was published, based on a series of lectures and a thematic conference of the same name. 

In this special issue of Euxeinos, the authors explore how citizens – Poles, Germans, Austrians, Ukrainians, and the Soviet authorities – imagined and constructed the image of the Carpathian Mountains from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day.

The mountains and the countryside were transformed from a natural phenomenon into an imagined place that helped to express anxieties about urban conditions, community ties, crises and environmental degradation, and relationships between people and power structures. The landscape became a part of visual practices and even imposed ideas about belonging, authenticity, roots, communities, states, hierarchies, and borders.

The collection is the result of an international project implemented by the Center for Urban History in 2021 with the support of the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland. Together, researchers from Ukraine, Austria, Poland, Germany, and the United States aimed to explore how cities and their inhabitants influenced the imagination of those who lived in non-urban areas, and how creative interaction between these two spaces contributed to the emergence of new cultural phenomena.

To read the publication in English, please follow the link: "From the City to the Mountains: Imagining the Carpathians in Culture and Art".

Editors

• Bohdan Shumylovych
• Joshua First

Authors

• Joshua First
• Herbert Justnik
• Ksenya Kiebuzinski
• Roman Lozynskyi
• Vladyslava Moskalets
• Martin Rohde