Editorial

Abstract

This special issue of Euxeinos explores the ways that urban Poles, German-Austrians, Ukrainians and Soviets have imagined and constructed an image of the Carpathian mountains from the mid-19th century to the current day. The city is often seen as the epitome and engine of modernization and progress, whether through trade, technological advancements, or industrial development. It is in the city that cultural institutions, commerce, and political power predominantly reside. Urban centers, whether large or small, have been the epicenters of massive mediatization, shaping our imagination of places beyond the cities. Urban dwellers have actively imagined, reinvented, and transformed rural life, often through a process of destruction and reconstruction. Folk arts and rural lifestyles were invented and reinvented, imagined, and reimagined, resulting in new forms of culture. Natural phenomena, like mountains and rural areas, were transformed into imaginary spaces that expressed anxieties about urban conditions, community bonds, environmental crises, human relations and power structures. The landscape became integral to depicting practices and imposing ideas about belonging, authenticity, roots, communities, states, hierarchies, and borders.