thumb|upright=1.3|The Eastern Carpathians as 'Alpes [[Bastarnae|Bastarnice' on Tabula Peutingeriana]]

The Carpathian Mountains, Carpathians or Carpathian Alps () are a range of mountains forming an arc across Central Europe and Southeast Europe. Roughly long, it is the third-longest European mountain range after the Urals at and the Scandinavian Mountains at . The highest peaks in the Carpathians are in the Tatra Mountains, exceeding , closely followed by those in the Southern Carpathians in Romania, exceeding .

The range stretches from the Western Carpathians in Austria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Poland, clockwise through the Eastern Carpathians in Ukraine and Romania, to the Southern Carpathians in Romania and Serbia. The term Outer Carpathians is frequently used to describe the northern rim of the Western and Eastern Carpathians.

The Carpathians provide habitat for the largest European populations of brown bears, wolves, chamois, and lynxes, with the highest concentration in Romania, as well as over one-third of all European plant species. The mountains and their foothills also have many thermal and mineral waters, with Romania having one-third of the European total.

Romania is likewise home to the second-largest area of virgin forests in Europe after Russia, totaling 250,000 hectares (65%), most of them in the Carpathians, with the Southern Carpathians constituting Europe's largest unfragmented forest area. Rates of forest loss due to clearcutting, and deforestation due to illegal logging in the Carpathians are high.

Name

In modern times, the range is called in Czech, Polish and Slovak and in Ukrainian, / in Serbo-Croatian, in Romanian, in Rusyn, in German and in Hungarian. Although the toponym was recorded by Ptolemy in the second century AD, the modern form of the name is a neologism in most languages.

Historical names

In late Roman documents, the Eastern Carpathian Mountains were referred to as Montes Sarmatici (meaning Sarmatian Mountains). The Western Carpathians were called Carpates, a name that is first recorded in Ptolemy's Geographia (second century AD).

In the Scandinavian Hervarar saga, which relates ancient Germanic legends about battles between Goths and Huns, the name Karpates appears in the predictable Germanic form as Harvaða fjöllum (see Grimm's law). "Inter Alpes Huniae et Oceanum est Polonia" ("Between the Hunic Alps and the ocean lies Poland") by Gervase of Tilbury, was described in his Otia Imperialia ("Recreation for an Emperor") in 1211.

Havasok ("Snowy Mountains") was its medieval Hungarian name. Rus' chronicles referred to it as "Hungarian Mountains". Later sources, such as Dimitrie Cantemir and the Italian chronicler Giovanandrea Gromo, referred to the range as "Transylvania's Mountains", while the 17th-century historian Constantin Cantacuzino translated the name of the mountains in an Italian-Romanian glossary to "Rumanian Mountains".

Etymology

The etymology of the Carpathians is not clearly established, but the name "Carpates" is highly associated with the old Dacian tribes called "Carpes" or "Carpi" who lived in an area to the east of the Carpathians, from the east, northeast of the Black Sea to the Transylvanian Plain in the present day Romania and Moldova.

Potential root words

thumb|[[Hutsuls|Hutsul people, living in the Carpathian mountains, ]]

Karpates is considered a Paleo-Balkan name, with evidence provided by the Albanian kárpë / kárpa, pl. kárpa / kárpat ('rock, stiff'), and the Messapic karpa 'tuff (rock), limestone' (preserved as càrpë 'tuff' in Bitonto dialect and càrparu 'limestone' in Salentino).

The name Carpates may ultimately be from the Proto Indo-European root *sker-/*ker-, which meant mountain, rock, or rugged (cf. Albanian kárpë, Germanic root *skerp-, Old Norse "harrow", Gothic skarpo, Middle Low German scharf "potsherd", and Modern High German Scherbe "shard", Lithuanian kar~pas "cut, hack, notch", Latvian cìrpt "to shear, clip"). The archaic Polish word karpa meant 'rugged irregularities, underwater obstacles/rocks, rugged roots, or trunks'. The more common word skarpa means a sharp cliff or other vertical terrain, cf. Old English and English sharp.

The name may instead come from Indo-European * 'to turn', akin to Old English 'to turn, change' (English warp) and Greek 'wrist' (Karpathos island has the same root word), perhaps referring to the way the Carpathian mountain range bends or veers in an L-shape.

Comparison with the Alps

thumb|upright=1.2|[[Bucura Lake|Lake Bucura, Southern Carpathians, Romania]]

The Carpathians, which attain an altitude over in only a few places, lack the bold peaks, extensive snowfields, large glaciers, high waterfalls, and numerous large lakes that are common in the Alps. The Carpathians at their highest altitude are only as high as the middle region of the Alps, with which they share a common appearance, climate, and flora.

The Carpathians are separated from the Alps by the Danube, only meeting at the Leitha Mountains at Bratislava. The river also separates the Carpathians from the Balkan Mountains at Orșova in Romania. The valley of the March and Oder separates the Carpathians from the Silesian and Moravian chains, which belong to the middle wing of the great Central Mountain System of Europe.

thumb|upright=1.2|View of [[Spiš Castle in Slovakia, from the Branisko Pass]]

Unlike the other wings of the system, the Carpathians, which form the watershed between the northern seas and the Black Sea, are surrounded on all sides by plains. The Pannonian plain is to the southwest, the Lower Danubian Plain to the south, with the southern part being in Bulgaria, and the northern – in (Romania), and the Galician plain to the northeast.

Mountain passes

In the Romanian part of the main chain of the Carpathians, mountain passes include Prislop Pass, Tihuța Pass, Bicaz Canyon, Ghimeș Pass, Buzău Pass, Predeal Pass (crossed by the railway from Brașov to Bucharest), Turnu Roșu Pass (1,115 ft., running through the narrow gorge of the Olt River and crossed by the railway from Sibiu to Bucharest), Vulcan Pass, and the Iron Gate (both crossed by the railway from Timișoara to Craiova).

Geology

thumb|upright=1.3|Bicaz Canyon

The area now occupied by the Carpathians was once occupied by smaller ocean basins. The Carpathian mountains were formed during the Alpine orogeny in the Mesozoic and Cenozoic by moving the ALCAPA (Alpine-Carpathian-Pannonian), Tisza and Dacia plates over subducting oceanic crust.

The mountains take the form of a fold and thrust belt with generally north vergence in the western segment, northeast to east vergence in the eastern portion and southeast vergence in the southern portion. Currently, the area is the most seismically active in Central Europe.

The external, generally northern, portion of the orogenic belt is a Tertiary accretionary wedge of a so-called Flysch belt (the Carpathian Flysch Belt) created by rocks scraped off the sea bottom and thrust over the North-European plate. The Carpathian accretionary wedge is made of several thin skinned nappes composed of Cretaceous to Paleogene turbidites. Thrusting of the Flysch nappes over the Carpathian foreland caused the formation of the Carpathian foreland basin. The boundary between the Flysch belt and internal zones of the orogenic belt in the western segment of the mountain range is marked by the Pieniny Klippen Belt, a narrow complicated zone of polyphase compressional deformation, later involved in a supposed strike-slip zone.

thumb|upright=1.3|[[Bucegi Mountains in Romania]]

Internal zones in western and eastern segments contain older Variscan igneous massifs reworked in Mesozoic thick and thin-skinned nappes. During the Middle Miocene this zone was affected by intensive calc-alkaline arc volcanism that developed over the subduction zone of the flysch basins. At the same time, the internal zones of the orogenic belt were affected by large extensional structure of the back-arc Pannonian Basin. The last volcanic activity occurred at Ciomadul about 30,000 years ago. At some locations solifluction deposits have formed on the slopes of the Carpathians.

Ecology

thumb|A horse atop the Krasna mountain range in Ukraine's [[Zakarpattia Oblast]]

The ecology of the Carpathians varies with altitude, ranging from lowland forests to alpine meadows. Foothill forests are primarily of broadleaf deciduous trees, including oak, hornbeam, and linden. European beech is characteristic of the montane forest zone. Higher-elevation subalpine forests are characterized by Norway spruce (Picea abies). Krummholz and alpine meadows occur above the treeline.

Wildlife in the Carpathians includes Eurasian brown bear (Ursus arctos arctos), Eurasian wolf (Canis lupus lupus), Eurasian lynx (Lynx lynx), European wildcat (Felis silvestris), Tatra chamois (Rupicapra rupicapra tatrica), European bison (Bison bonasus), and golden eagle (Aquila chrysaetos).

|50°00′45″N

|20°59′19″E

|-

|Râmnicu Vâlcea

|Romania

|93,151

|250

|45°6′17″N

|24°22′32″E

|-

|Prešov

|Slovakia

|82,927

|296

|49°00′06″N

|21°14′22″E

|-

|Mukachevo

|Ukraine

|85,569

|125

|48°27′00″N

|22°45′00″E

|-

|Drohobych

|Ukraine

|73,682

|371

|49°21′00″N

|23°30′00″E

|}

Smaller cities and towns:

  • Piatra Neamț (Romania)
  • Nowy Sącz (Poland)
  • Suceava (Romania)
  • Vršac (Serbia)
  • Târgu Jiu (Romania)
  • Drobeta-Turnu Severin (Romania)
  • Reșița (Romania)
  • Žilina (Slovakia)
  • Bistrița (Romania)
  • Zvolen (Slovakia)
  • Deva (Romania)
  • Zlín (Czech Republic)
  • Hunedoara (Romania)
  • Martin (Slovakia)
  • Zalău (Romania)
  • Przemyśl (Poland)
  • Krosno (Poland)
  • Sanok (Poland)
  • Alba Iulia (Romania)
  • Sfântu Gheorghe (Romania)
  • Turda (Romania)
  • Mediaș (Romania)
  • Poprad (Slovakia)
  • Spišská Nová Ves (Slovakia)
  • Petroșani (Romania)
  • Miercurea Ciuc (Romania)
  • Făgăraș (Romania)
  • Odorheiu Secuiesc (Romania)
  • Boryslav (Ukraine)
  • Jasło (Poland)
  • Cieszyn (Poland)
  • Nowy Targ (Poland)
  • Żywiec (Poland)
  • Zakopane (Poland)
  • Petrila (Romania)
  • Cugir (Romania)
  • Târgu Neamț (Romania)
  • Câmpulung Moldovenesc (Romania)
  • Gheorgheni (Romania)
  • Rakhiv (Ukraine)
  • Vatra Dornei (Romania)
  • Rabka-Zdrój (Poland)
  • Bor (Serbia)

See also

  • Karpatka—A Polish dessert named after the Carpathians
  • RMS Carpathia a British ocean liner named after the Carpathians that rescued survivors of the RMS Titanic
  • The Living Fire—A Ukrainian documentary film about the life of Carpathian shepherds
  • Sudetes—A neighbouring mountain system whose uplift is related to that of the Carpathians
  • Tourism in Poland
  • Tourism in Romania
  • Tourism in Serbia
  • Tourism in Slovakia
  • Tourism in Ukraine

References

Sources

Further reading

  • Tóth, Kata (August 2025). "Invisible Mountains? The Eastern and Southern Carpathians and Their Environmental History (Fourteenth–Seventeenth Centuries)" . Environment and History, 31#3: 327–349.
  • Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 1 "Carpathian Mountains", by Volodymyr Kubijovyč (1984).
  • Carpathianconvention.org: The Framework Convention for the Protection and Sustainable Development of the Carpathians
  • Orographic map highlighting Carpathian mountains
  • Alpinet.org: Romanian mountain guide
  • Carpati.org: Romanian mountain guide
  • Pgi.gov.pl: Oil and Gas Fields in the Carpathians
  • Video: Beautiful mountains Carpathians, Ukraine
  • Ukrainian Carpathian Mountains: Protecting some of Europe's last intact forests – Frankfurt Zoological Society
  • Video: Zacharovanyi Krai National Park | Ukrainian Carpathians – Frankfurt Zoological Society
  • Video: Looking for Lynx | Ukrainian Carpathians