The Wall Street Journal
July 14, 2004
PAGE ONE
Journey to the Center Of Europe Involves Many a Wrong Turn
Mr. Xoma Marks the Spot In Ukraine, but Lithuania May Have a Better Claim
By MARC CHAMPION
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
July*14,*2004;*Page*A1
RAKHIV, Ukraine -- At the side of a road occasionally washed out by a river
in this remote corner of Ukraine's Carpathian Mountains stands a head-high
white and blue obelisk. It's a few hundred feet from the border with
Romania, and a three-hour drive on potholed roads to
Hungary, the nearest European Union country.
"This," says Vasil Xoma, Rakhiv's deputy mayor, "is the center of Europe."
Picture:
http://tinyurl.com/3vrzh
Caption: Vasil Xoma
Mr. Xoma and the people of Rakhiv are sure of their place in the world
because of the Latin inscription on the base of the obelisk. It was
placed a few miles outside Rakhiv by a team from the Austro-Hungarian
Military Geographical Institute back when this region belonged to the
Hapsburg empire.
According to the translation in Rakhiv's official guidebook, the
inscription, chiseled into the stone and carefully detailed in gold
paint on a blue background, reads: "Constant, precise, eternal place. The
center of Europe was determined very precisely, with a special
apparatus produced in Austria and Hungary, with the dial of meridians and
parallels. 1887."
Rakhiv, a poor logging region that has lost most of its tourist trade since
the collapse of the Soviet Union, hopes the obelisk will help
turn its fortunes.
A log building near completion a few meters away is to house a
center-of-Europe information kiosk. Mr. Xoma has opened a small hotel.
A South African minister says the town's position is a sign from God and is
building a psychological healing center. "Rub here and your
wish will come true," says Mr. Xoma, pointing to a well-worn brass button
at the base of the obelisk.
The trouble is, the translation -- made decades ago by "Academician N.
Tarasov" -- is wrong.
The marker is actually one of seven that Austrian geographers scattered
around the former empire as fixed points from which to
measure altitude, according to the current Austrian Geographical Society.
The geographers effectively transferred sea level from the
only piece of coast that the empire had access to, at Trieste on the
Adriatic Sea, inland. "It isn't saying anything about the center of
Europe," says Ingrid Kretschmer, chief cartographer with the society.
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RESHAPING EUROPE
See an interactive map with profiles of the countries that joined the
European Union
http://online.wsj.com/documents/info-eu_enlarge02-frameset.html
See a map of Rakhiv, Ukraine, one of a number of towns claiming to be the
Continent's geographical center.
http://tinyurl.com/6kc6k
----------
As the European Union expands eastward, redrawing the political map of the
Continent, towns claiming to be at Europe's geographical heart are
scattered far and wide. Some treat the distinction as a tourist draw. For
others, there are political undertones. Markers are dotted across the land
-- often with as little basis in reality as the Rakhiv obelisk.
A stone outside the medieval gold-mining town of Kremnica in Slovakia has a
rock marked "Center of Europe." It was placed there in the early 1990s and
has no known scientific basis, says Anton Brezak, deputy director of the
Institute of Geography at the Slovak Academy of
Sciences. It "was probably inspired by the political movement of Slovaks
for state independence," Mr. Brezak added, noting that also etched into the
stone are three key dates leading up to Slovakia's Jan. 1, 1993, breakaway
from the former Czechoslovakia.
Poland has two claimants. Szymon Antoni Sobiekrajski, cartographer and
astronomer to Poland's last king, calculated in 1775 that the center of
Europe was in Suchowola, Eastern Poland. That was where two lines spanning
the Continent crossed, says Jerzy Ostrowski at Poland's Institute of
Geography and Spatial Organization. One line ran from Cape Porsanger, in
Norway, to Cape Matapan, in Greece. The other ran from Cape St. Vincent in
Portugal to the easternmost point of Russia's Ural Mountains. Meanwhile,
residents in the town of Kiernozia, near Warsaw, believe the center of
Europe is located directly under the ceiling lamp of the dining room of the
local priest's rectory.
More plausibly, in 1989, the National Geographical Institute of France
calculated that Europe's geographical center was in Lithuania, close
to its capital, Vilnius. It got there by calculating the Continent's
"center of gravity" -- as if you carved out a cardboard map of Europe and
balanced it on a pin.
Whether it's the center of Europe or the center of the European Union also
makes a difference. The Belgian village of Oignies-en-Thierache
has a glass monument that used to mark the EU's center. Now, with the EU's
expansion May 1 to include 10 more countries, that honor has shifted to
Kleinmaischeid, a small village near Koblenz in western Germany, according
to the French institute, using its center-of-gravity method.
The Ukrainian obelisk had Soviet authorities persuaded of its authenticity:
They put a big steel spike next to the obelisk to double-mark the spot,
which seemed to place the heart of Europe firmly within the Soviet orbit.
The site is still called Europe's center on official Ukrainian Web sites.
The inscription isn't simple to translate because parts have been worn off
and painted over incorrectly. The Wall Street Journal asked an
Oxford University classics professor to translate it. She consulted with
another scholar who found an earlier transcript of the Rakhiv
inscription that was easier to read, and came up with this:
"Main fixed point of exact height-leveling carried out in Austria-Hungary
in connection with the European measurement of meridional and parallel
degrees. 1887" The professor, reluctant to pour cold water on Rahkiv's
ambitions, asked not to be identified.
Professor Kretschmer said the reference to meridians and parallels may have
been connected with a project at the time to measure the
curvature of the Earth in Europe, although she was uncertain.
In fairness to Mr. Tarasov, it took a classics professor from Oxford
University two days of consulting with colleagues to figure out what
the inscription said, largely because parts had been worn off or painted
incorrectly, making the Latin gibberish.
But the revelation that Rakhiv is probably not the center of Europe seems
unlikely to deter anyone here, where there is a strong desire to
join the EU along with neighbors from Slovakia and Hungary, which entered
in May, and in a few years' time, Romania, too.
Rakhiv's claim, however tenuous, has already helped win it some admirers.
Benna Cloete, a former minister in the Reformed Church of
South Africa, says he has fallen for what he describes as Rakhiv's
mysterious energy and hopes to move here next year. The group he runs,
Mature Personhood, has bought two pieces of land here on which to build
training centers for "wounded healing" seminars.
The group works in South Africa, Egypt, Britain and Ukraine taking lost
souls through a weeklong personal journey that attempts to repair
the spirit by reconnecting them with themselves, God, other people and
nature, Mr. Cloete says in an interview at one of his retreats in
Kent, England.
He says he first visited Rakhiv in 1996, as he searched for a place to
conduct healing seminars. He was impressed not just by the location
but by the resilience of the local "Hutsul" mountain people, who had
retained their spirit after decades of Communist rule.
"When we discovered this was the center of Europe, we thought: Perhaps God
wants us to do something here, calling people back to the roots of
humanhood in Europe," Mr. Cloete says.
Informed about the mistake in translation, Mr. Cloete says: "It's been
called the center of Europe and accepted very widely. I don't think it
will be easy to erase that perception."
Rakhiv's officials still hope tourists will make the pilgrimage to see
their obelisk and the nature reserves in the mountains above their
town. Surrounded by ruggedly beautiful mountains that rise just above 2,000
meters (6,500 feet), Rakhiv used to attract about 100,000
tourists a year from around the former Soviet Union to visit nearby
national parks and drink the mineral waters. Nowadays, that number has
fallen to fewer than 20,000, says Mr. Xoma.
"I wouldn't even talk about these other places as the center," says Deputy
Mayor Vasil Buzash, sitting at a table with Mr. Xoma, two more
deputy mayors and Mayor Yuri Kabal. "This is the center of Europe."
URL for this article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB108976264032863020,00.html
MAP: "Centers of Europe"
http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/images/P1-AB726_Center07132004212630.gif