The Carpathians as Protectors: Mountains as Active Protectors and Agents

Mountains are spaces of safety. This idea has been with us for a long time. Yet, we seem to have forgotten this idea and have replaced it with a contradictory one that asserts that before the early modern era, humans feared and avoided mountains. This misunderstanding is so pervasive that I’ve called it a modern myth, a folktale for the modern generation. A cursory reading of the Old Testament does a pretty good job of dispelling the myth.¹ Yet the idea is a bit older than the Old Testament and appears in humanity’s oldest literary texts, the Epic of Gilgamesh and other cuneiform tablets of Mesopotamia. While I usually roll my eyes when I read phrases like “since the dawn of time” in student papers, I can confidently say here that humans have equated mountains with safety since the dawn of human culture.

The mountains = safety idea was recently and briefly discussed in the inaugural episode of the Mountain Stories, Mountain Futures podcast. The episode features Alexandra Cotofana discussing her 2022 book Xenophobic Mountains. The book explores how the Carpathian Mountains in Romania have been perceived as active political and moral agents that protect the nation by punishing ethno-religious “others.”

The Carpathian Mountains, according to Cotofana, serve as active protectors in Romanian popular memory. They sheltered local peoples from waves of imperial conquest. In one of Romania’s popular stories, one that resembles the Roman myth of Apollo and Daphne, the Dacian princess Dochia asked the gods to turn her to stone rather than submit to Emperor Trajan’s territorial and sexual advances. Later, the same mountains became a kind of barrier or protector against Ottoman expansion, with the landscape itself perceived as working alongside local defenders. In reality, the mountains didn’t stop the Ottomans, but they were imagined to have done so.²

During times of conflict, knowledge of a landscape is a strategic asset. Knowing the mountains, for example, helps them become a kind of safe haven. We saw this during the American invasion of Afghanistan, when Osama bin Laden and his band hid in the country’s Tora Bora mountains and used them to escape into neighboring Pakistan. Anyone who studies history will recognize a similar pattern.

The Cotofana interview left me thinking about how widespread this “head for the hills” impulse is across cultures and throughout history, especially during times of war, and how regularly the language of “mountain as safe space” or “mountain as protector” appears. Mountains can be passive sites of shelter and, as the podcast interview points out, can also be seen or understood as active agents in human survival. We can therefore frame the mountains = safety idea through the lens of strategic geography or sentient landscapes.