In the fading daylight, the dumpy haystacks on the hillsides take on the look of an army of babushkas, brooding over the highway that rises from Uzhhorod into the Carpathians. As it winds up and over the gentle peaks, the air sharpens, and the grapevines and the lushness of the plains give way to the forests of birch that will run uninterrupted from there almost to the other side of the planet. It feels an appropriate place for Europe to end. This has always been borderland. Trans-Carpathia has shifted between the clutches of half a dozen states. For a millennium, travellers from farther east have descended into Europe by this route. For a good part of the 2oth century, when the Iron Curtain lay far to the west, the peoples of the region moved and mixed; in the towns near Ukraine's border, it is not unusual for a secretary in a local company to be fluent in Ukrainian, Russian, Hungarian and Slovak, as well as in English.
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