Taming the Environment: Carpathian Landscapes and Nature in the Age of Tourism, 1860s-1910s

• In Event: Mountains in Transition: Tracing the Environmental History of the Southeastern Carpathians Mountains

Abstract

Travelling around Transylvania in 1863, Charles Boner — a trailblazers of southern Carpathian travel — lamented the deforestation in the region. It was as if the ‘old world’ that had vanished in Britain was now endangered in this region of Europe, so Boner claimed. Growing numbers of tourists and scientific experts in the Carpathians in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries shared similar fears of nature disappearing. But this older regime of alpine imagination was challenged by other ideas about environment. The vastness of the Carpathians was also something to be tamed. Nation-builders in Carpathian societies were particularly intent on making the space their own, garnering the natural resources, and harnessing the Carpathian environment. Calculating and classifying the environment were concerns they shared with geologists and others who, like David T. Ansted (1862), who moved to incorporate this underexplored region into a broader European picture of landscape.
But it was alpine organisations in particular that shaped the uplands of the Carpathians by encouraging tourism to the region from the 1870s. The Siebenbürgischer Alpenverein (Transylvanian Alpine Society, 1873), the Magyaroszági Kárpát Egyesület (Hungarian Carpathian Association, 1873) and the Siebenbürgischer Karpatenverein (Transylvanian Carpathian Association, 1880) marked out the southern and eastern Transylvanian region with alpine huts and markers while revering the landscape they helped to make accessible to a broader European public. Their mission statements and activism cast the landscape and environment of the Carpathians as a complex set of identity markers which ranged from reverence to exploitation, to conservation, and to bourgeois entertainment.

Author

• James Koranyi, U of Durham (UK)