Tatra Mountains

Landscape

Polish Tatras ( the highest place RYSY 2499 m.n.p.m) -- the highest mountain in the Carpathians,with a distinatie high mountain relief.Divided into the Hight Tatras,consisting of crystaline rocks (mainly granite,with aretes,crags,numerous lake,kettle-holes and moraines,all of which are remants of glacial perials ) and the Western Tatras, consisting of cristaline (schists and greiss) and sedimentay limestone rocks with wide valleys and mumerous karstic (water - in cised formations).

Ask Poles to define their their country’s natural atractions and they often came up with the following simple definition :The Lakes, The Sea and The Mountains.” The mountains “ consist of an almost unbroken chain of ridges extending the whale lenght of the southern border, of which the highest most spectacular and most revered are the Tatras - or Tatry as they’re know in Polish.Eighty kilometers long, with peaks rising to over 2500 m, the Polish Tatras are actually a relatively small part of the range, most of which rises across the bardar in Slovakie.As the estimeted three million anual tourist show, however, the Polish section as enouth to keep

most people happy:hight peaks for the dedicated mounaineers, evcellent trails for hiters,cable cars and creature canforts for day - trippers and ski slopes in winter.What used to be a prime eastern bloc holiday region is now being transfored into something of Western tourist enchave,the legions of easternEuropeans that used to desced on Zacopane rapidly being replaced by new harder of Italians, Freach - and increasingly Brists - taking advantageof the low cast of holidays in the Polish mountains.

They are as beautiful as any mountain landscape in northern Europe, the ascents taling you boulder strewn paths alongsite woods and the streams up to the ridges, where grand, winds peaks rise in the brilliantalpine sunshine.

PODHALE and GÓRALE

Podhale -- the Tatra foot hills, beging to the south of Nowy Targ - is a sparsely populated region villages. The inhabitans of Podhale, the

górale,are fiercely independent mountain farmers, know trough-out Poland for their folk traditions. The region was “discovered” by the Polish intelligentsia in the late nineteenth century and the górale rapidly emerged as symbols of the struggle for independence, the links forged between intellectuals and local peasants preaging the anticipated national unity of the past- independence era. As in other reguleced areas of the country, the poverty of rural life led thousards of górale the imigrate to the United States in the 1920s and 1930s.