Poloniny

Poloniny takes its name from what lies on top: poloniny are the ridge-crest meadows of the Eastern Carpathians, long waves of grass above an unbroken sea of beech, strung along the frontier ridge of the Bukovské vrchy from Pľaša to Ďurkovec to Kamenná lúka. The park — 29,805 hectares, declared on 1 October 1997 — occupies Slovakia's remotest corner, where the country narrows to a wedge between Poland and Ukraine; its highest point, Kremenec at 1,221 metres, is exactly the point where the three states meet. Across those borders sit Poland's Bieszczady and Ukraine's Uzhanskyi national parks, and since 1998 all three have formed the East Carpathians biosphere reserve, the first trilateral one in the world.

The beech is the park's claim on the planet. Stužica, Havešová and Rožok — primeval forest tracts never systematically logged, where beeches stand over fifty metres tall and five hundred years old, among the tallest of the species anywhere — were inscribed in 2007 as founding components of UNESCO's serial World Heritage listing of Europe's ancient beech forests. Under them lives the full Carpathian guild: wolves, bears, lynx, and since a 2004 reintroduction the European bison, whose free-ranging herd here is Slovakia's only one. The wolf, fittingly, is on the park's emblem.

The emptiness that protects all this has a human cost written into it. This is Rusyn country, and its villages — with their small log-and-shingle Greek Catholic churches, still standing at Topoľa, Ruský Potok and Uličské Krivé — have been emptying for a century. In the 1980s the construction of the Starina reservoir, today the largest drinking-water reservoir in Slovakia, removed seven villages outright; their orchards still bloom in the closed water-protection zone. Depopulation left one unplanned gift: in 2010 the area became the Poloniny Dark-Sky Park, the first in Slovakia, because the night here is simply darker than anywhere else in the country.

What's worth knowing before you go

There is no quick way in, which is the point. Snina is the railhead and market town; buses continue up the Ulička valley to Ulič and Nová Sedlica, the easternmost village in Slovakia and the trailhead for the essential walk — up through the Stužica primeval forest to Kremenec, touching three countries on one summit (the Polish border may be crossed on marked trails; the Ukrainian may not). Accommodation is village-scale — Nová Sedlica, Runina, Zboj — and shops are few, so provision in Snina. Autumn is the season: the beech turns in early October and the rut fills the valleys with red-deer roaring. The connoisseur's pairing is a clear night at the astronomical observatory on Kolonické sedlo, on the park's edge, where the dark-sky park runs public observing — the Milky Way here casts shadows, and the same darkness is why the park's owls and edible dormice do so well.