A nation is in essence a land and its people. Geologically, the land is relatively stable—at least from the human perspective of time. The birth of a mountain range or the erosion of a coastline may have happened eons ago. Epochs and cycles in the development of human culture comparatively run much more frequently, but the cycles of humanity necessarily depend on the utility of the environment which formed before them. Every modern person is some ultimate collection of these dynamics, and the burgeoning fields of landscape archaeology and archaeogenetics are giving fresh insights into who was using the ancient land over time and how. For a modern Rusyn, these approaches are providing exciting insights into a past largely lost to written history.    

Old culture histories were based on archaeology that made sweeping conclusions based on very little evidence. The focus was on elite burials, and eventually, investigations included evidence of dwellings, but the reality of nature is that most things can’t be adequately preserved for a holistic image of the past.  In other words, there is limited insight into a culture based on something like a predominant pattern on a pottery fragment.

Landscape archaeology is greatly improving on this kind of research that used to center solely on the manmade structures of an archaeological excavation. One must not only consider how a population modified the land for development, but it is important to consider how the natural landscape itself was utilized by the inhabitants without the need for noticeable modification. Insights from this approach have greatly increased our appreciation of pre-contact New World societies, but one can see it is also of immense importance for a society as closely tied to their land as the Rusyns.

There was no need to construct megalithic or grandiose structures since the magnificent peaks of the Carpathian mountains themselves stood as natural analogues to manmade monuments like the Great Pyramids of Giza. Indeed, just hiking in the hinterlands of the homeland can even be realistically seen as a pilgrimage to the ancient temples of Old, since the groves and forests were the sites of early ritual and spiritualism.

Population centers in the mountain passes would likely see a mixing of groups similar to our conception of port cities. Instead of access to the sea and trade bringing people together, Subcarpathia was a hub of internal land networks. With the many paths of travel between regions funneled through the land, closer contact with neighbors brought political opportunities as well as the burden of military footpaths. The points on a map are so intrinsically strategic that even in modern warfare, particularly during World War I, it became a devastating front between empires such as Austria and Russia. It is no mistake that there are still numerous nearby borders, but it should be remembered that Rusyns didn’t exist merely bubbled between bordering powers, but rather the Rusyns themselves were the enduring population that served as a determining force and legitimate center of civilization in their own right.

A key aspect of examining the Rusyn culture is to fully consider how their habitation zone has throughout time brought very different people together—sometimes amicably, many times hostilely, but always ultimately to a shared purpose and identity of the people who stay. So it is by connecting the land to the people we can genuinely begin speaking in terms of a nation—that is, not as an abstract or bureaucratic political concept, but the reality of a shared experience for a community generated by the common cultural processes over a distinctive geographic environment.

The Rusyn zone we are speaking of is a kind of glue between adjacent landscapes. From the Polish plains and open spaces of the Ukrainian countryside, the mountains emerge with passes like connecting joints to the Hungarian plain and Danubian river basin. Baltic tribes by the sea in the north are known to have traded with the ancient cultures of the Black Sea, and it is also presumable that things like Baltic amber found their way to the civilizations of the Mediterranean through these passes into the Balkan peninsula. The vast East also saw intense interaction with peoples of Central Asia who provided vital links beyond the Middle and the Far East.

There were quite a number of centuries with an influx of invaders from different directions. The cast of barbarian warbands is astounding not only for the sheer magnitude of numbers, but also for its own collective diversity. Scythians, Sarmatians, Huns, Avars, and even Mongols would all encounter the area in their western progress in their own times. Some archaeological finds and a legacy of place names bear the mark of Celtic culture which dominated Europe for a long while. The period of Germanic migrations brought first Goths and later Vikings—and the initial Scandinavian elite of the Kievan Rus even established their authority in a settled manner. 

It is meditative to reflect that all of these groups had a huge impact on our ancestors—and the real key insight is they contributed to the Rusyn genetic ancestry as well in a very direct and measurable way. It also helps to look ahead to the future. As the world becomes increasingly global and multi-ethnic, it is important to never forget the land we came from. However we grow our families, and wherever we move, if we retain a memory of the Rus land then by that we remain a nation. This way the Rusyn identity will not be diluted or lost because new cultural interactions are all part of the ongoing narrative. We continue to lay the brickwork of expanding that identity–with our foundation built firmly on the peaks and valleys of our homeland.