The Carpathian Mountains Where I Grew Up — Richard Golian

The Carpathians are not the Alps. They are older, quieter, wilder. A mountain arc stretching from Austria to Romania — one of Europe's largest ecosystems, home to bears, wolves and lynx, and still remarkably unknown to most Western Europeans. I grew up in the Western Carpathians, in Banská Bystrica. The mountains were not something I visited on weekends. They were the backdrop of everyday life — the horizon I saw from my window, the forests I walked through as a child, the landscape that made silence feel natural. The Great Fatra and the Low Tatras form the largest continuous mountain area in Slovakia. You can walk for dozens of kilometres along the ridge without contact with civilisation. The brown bear density here is the highest in the European Union. We humans are only visitors there. These essays are not hiking guides. They are reflections on what it means to grow up close to wild nature in a continent that has largely domesticated its landscapes — and on what we lose when we stop paying attention to the places that exist beyond cities and screens.