Transcarpathia is the new Transylvania
Earlier this month I visited Transcarpathia in the Carpathian mountains of south-western Ukraine. It is surely one of Europe’s wildest and most untouched regions - what Transylvania was 30 years ago.
Transcarpathia - a crescent of land shoe-horned into south-western Ukraine between the Carpathian mountains, Hungary's Great Plain and the hills of northern Romania - is what Transylvania was 30 years ago.
Back then Transylvania ('the land beyond the forest') was the proverbial land that time forgot: home to liquor distilled in the kitchen, laced-up leather shoes, quiet shabby courtyards, and restaurants that had one dominant ingredient.
One of my favourite such restaurants in the city of Cluj (Kolozsvar to the local ethnic Hungarians I cavorted with back then) was known as 'the cabbage' ('a kaposztas'). Another was 'the mushroom' ('a gombas').