‘Walking Europe’s Last Wilderness’ Review: A Carpathian Ramble

The Carpathian Mountains are a horseshoe-shaped range that arcs from central to southeastern Europe. From their western edge in Austria and the Czech Republic, the Carpathians rise clockwise through Slovakia and southern Poland, curve around the Hungarian plains and through western Ukraine, run south into Romania, then turn back westward and finally protrude into northern Serbia. There are wild patches in Europe’s other major ranges, but the Carpathians have forests where the Alps have ski resorts and brown bears where the Pyrenees have the microstate of Andorra. The Carpathians are the last wild place in a crowded continent.

The Carpathians, Nick Thorpe writes in “Walking Europe’s Last Wilderness,” are the “geographical center of Europe.” Their peaks and ridges form the watershed between the Baltic Sea to the north and the Black Sea to the southeast. As geography shapes history and history shapes peoples, the mountains are a political “fault line between East and West.” Once contained within the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Carpathians now curve through six European Union states, one candidate state (Serbia) and Ukraine, whose future is uncertain.

The cover art of “Walking Europe’s Last Wilderness” evokes John Craxton’s designs for Patrick Leigh Fermor’s travelogues “A Time of Gifts” (1977) and “Between the Woods and the Water” (1986). Though Mr. Thorpe describes the enduring exoticism of hospitable huts, historical grudges, handmade goat cheese and homebrewed pálinka fruit spirits, this is not a romanticizing epic from a lost era. Mr. Thorpe is a hiker and camper, and always ready to go barefoot in the meadows, but he lives in Budapest, one of the cities of the plains that surround the Carpathians. A BBC reporter, he launched a series of episodic explorations between 2018 and 2024. He has compiled a richly textured report on an ancient terrain that is being remade into a new political and economic landscape.

The nation-states of the region were created in the 19th and early 20th centuries by “unraveling the complex web of religious, cultural and linguistic threads that characterized Europe.” The nation-builders suppressed “local dialects, vernaculars and identities” and then the Soviets suppressed the nations. The mountains still hide the remnants of the peoples who neither attained statehood nor succumbed: Liptos, Lemkos, Boykos, Hutsuls, Bukovinians, Szeklers, Ruthenians. The revival of the nation-states and their economies after the Cold War threatens to erase the last traces of local identity.

Samo Hríbik, a shepherd in Slovakia, finds his flock by starlight without the help of a dog and fashions traditional fujara flutes, whose “long, shuddering notes,” Mr. Thorpe writes, suggest “the wind buffeting a thatched roof.” In western Ukraine, the 86-year-old Vasyl Kischuk puts on his traditional white smock and brown hat and demonstrates the trembita , the traditional Hutsul wooden trumpet, and a “deep, mournful sound fills the meadow.”

As memories and traditional crafts are fading, incomers are reviving them. Mr. Thorpe meets brewers, cheesemakers, environmentalists and animal lovers mapping migration corridors for brown bears amid the refugee crisis caused by the Ukraine war. Oreste Del Sol, a Paris-born anarchist who shows Mr. Thorpe around his farm and the local slow-food cheese factory in the Ukrainian village of Nyzhnje Selyshche, tells him that being a shepherd in Ukraine is “illegal, or a-legal.” The production and sale of cheese is unregulated. The cheese, Mr. Thorpe finds, is “magnificent.”

For Slovaks, it is the mountains that matter; their national coat of arms carries three stylized ranges. Hungarians, however, speak of the “Carpathian basin” as their homeland and its ring of mountains as a lost shield against invaders. Romanians, whose country is bisected north-south by the Carpathians’ eastern flank, trace their origins to the Dacians, one of whose ancient tribes, the Carpi, gives the name of the mountains. For all their governments, forestry is big business. There are still “primeval forests” in the Carpathians, untouched by humans. There are many “old-growth” forests that were too remote or located on terrain too steep to be exploited in the past. There are also “buffer zones” such as national parks. But the forestry companies now have modern cutting technology and transport, and satellite imagery.

The bouncy IKEA Pöang chair in Mr. Thorpe’s Budapest home is made from beechwood. Romania has two-thirds of Europe’s old-growth forests and IKEA is “the largest private forest owner in Romania.” On paper, IKEA is a “champion of sustainable forestry.” Environmentalists claim, however, that some of its beechwood is “illegally logged—or, at best, over-logged.” IKEA insists it practices “responsible forest management.” Mr. Thorpe goes to a hilltop near Romania’s border with Ukraine. Google Maps shows it “thickly forested.” Mr. Thorpe finds only stumps and scattered branches.

Romsilva, the state forestry company, manages about two-thirds of Romania’s forests. It is charged with both protecting national parks and exploiting a national asset. According to the Romanian Forestry Inventory, 18 million cubic meters (about 635 million cubic feet) of timber were legally felled annually between 2014 and 2017, but “a further 18 million cubic meters were cut illegally each year.” Between 2010 and 2020, 600 members of the Forestry Guard were assaulted after intervening to stop illegal logging. Six were killed.

When Mr. Thorpe leaves the Slovakian capital of Bratislava, he notices that a “gulf of sheer incomprehension has opened up between the village and the city.” The gulf never narrows. “The mountain people, those born and bred here, don’t do much walking in the mountains,” says Sergiu Frusinoiu, a Romanian working with a mountain rescue group. Romania’s “bear problem” is worsening as humans expand into the mountainous territory of its large carnivores: bears, wolves, lynx and jackals. New roads cut across bear migration routes. New towns increase human-carnivore contact. The bears are learning to see humans as a source of food. The Romanian government will allow “the hunting of nearly 500 bears by the end of 2025.” Foreigners, Germans especially, will pay up to 20,000 euros to kill a big male. But no one can agree how many bears there are in Romania, or whether there are really “too many.”

The mayor of Băile Tușnad has educated his townspeople, spent €10,000 on bear-proof trash cans, and cut down the fruiting apple and plum trees in his town. The bears no longer come into Băile Tușnad but, he says, neither do other Romanian mayors in search of advice. Many politicians and businessmen are deep in corrupt forestry deals. The U.S. and EU’s plans for postwar Ukraine include building a “circular road through the Carpathians” to open the mountains for further development. The oligarchs will build ski resorts “where the playboys and playgirls of the new Ukraine will glide effortlessly at high speed, while their brothers, or uncles, sit bitterly at home in wheelchairs.” Old-growth forests make new money, and slow food comes second to a quick buck.

Must even steak be politicised? The American Heart Association recently recommended eating more “plant-based” protein in a move to counter the Health and Human Services Department’s new guidelines calling for more red meat.

Few would argue that eating a Big Mac a day is good for you.

On the other hand, growing evidence, including a study last month in the Journal of the American Medical Association, suggests that eating more meat—particularly unprocessed red meat—can reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s in the quarter or so of people with a particular genetic predisposition.

The APOE4 gene variant is one of the biggest risk factors for Alzheimer’s.

You inherit one copy of the APOE gene from each parent. The most common variant is APOE3; the least is APOE2.

The latter carries a lower risk of Alzheimer’s, while the former is neutral. A quarter of people carry one copy of the APOE4 variant, and about 2% carry two.

APOE4 is more common among people with Northern European and African ancestry. In Europe the variant increases with latitude, and is present in as many as 27% of people in northern countries versus 4% in southern ones. God smiled on the Italians and Greeks.

For unknown reasons, the APOE4 variant increases the risk of Alzheimer’s far more for women than men.

Women’s risk multiplies roughly fourfold if they have one copy and tenfold if they have two. Men with a single copy show little if any higher risk, while those with two face four times the risk.

What makes APOE4 so pernicious? Scientists don’t know exactly, but the variant is also associated with higher cholesterol levels—even among thin people who eat healthily.

Scientists have found that cholesterol builds up in brain cells of APOE4 carriers, which can disrupt communications between neurons and generate amyloid plaque, an Alzheimer’s hallmark.

The Heart Association’s recommendation to eat less red meat may be sound advice for people with high cholesterol caused by indulgent diets.

But a diet high in red meat may be better for the brains of APOE4 carriers.

In the JAMA study, researchers at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute examined how diet, particularly meat consumption, affects dementia risk among seniors with the different APOE variants.

Higher consumption of meat, especially unprocessed red meat, was associated with significantly lower dementia risk for APOE4 carriers.

APOE4 carriers who consumed the most meat—the equivalent of 4.5 ounces a day—were no more likely to develop dementia than noncarriers. (

The study controlled for other variables that are known to affect Alzheimer’s risk including sex, age, physical activity, smoking, alcohol consumption and education.)

APOE4 carriers who ate the most unprocessed meat were at significantly lower risk of dying over the study’s 15-year period and had lower cholesterol than carriers who ate less. Go figure. Noncarriers, however, didn’tenjoy similar benefits from eating more red meat.

The study’s findings are consistent with two large U.K. studies.

One found that each additional 50 grams of red meat (equivalent to half a hamburger patty) that an APOE4 carrier consumed each day was associated with a 36% reduced risk of dementia.

The other found that older women who carried the APOE4 variant and consumed at least one serving a day of unprocessed red meat had a cognitive advantage over carriers who ate less than half a serving, and that this advantage was of roughly equal magnitude to the cognitive disadvantage observed among APOE4 carriers in general.

In all three studies, eating more red meat appeared to negate the increased genetic risk of APOE4.

Perhaps one reason men with the variant are at lower Alzheimer’s risk than women is that men eat more red meat.

These findings might cause chagrin to women who rag their husbands about ordering the rib-eye instead of the heart-healthy salmon.

But remember, the cognitive benefits of eating more red meat appear isolated to APOE4 carriers.

Nutrition is complicated, and categorical recommendations—other than perhaps to avoid nutritionally devoid foods—would best be avoided by governments and health bodies.

Readers can order an at-home test from any number of companies to screen for the APOE4 variant.

The Swedish researchers hypothesize that APOE4 carriers may be evolutionarily adapted to carnivorous diets, since the variant is believed to have emerged between one million and six million years ago during a “hypercarnivorous” period in human history.

The other two APOE variants originated more recently, during eras when humans ate more plants.

APOE4 carriers may absorb more nutrients from meat than plants, the researchers surmise. Vitamin B12—low levels have been associated with cognitive decline—isn’t naturally present in plant-based foods but is abundant in red meat.

Foods high in phytates (such as grains and beans) can interfere with absorption of zinc and iron (also high in red meat), which naturally declines with age. So maybe don’t chuck your steak yet.

‘Walking Europe’s Last Wilderness’ Review: A Carpathian Ramble

Rising along the line where eastern and western Europe divide, a forested mountain range is home to shepherds, villages and plenty of bears.

At least for people who carry the APOE4 genetic variant, a juicy steak could keep the brain healthy.