TO THE KYSAK STATION.

PEOPLE IN PRAGUE told us the canteen ladies of Kysak were one the great sights of Eastern Europe. Kysak is a small Slovakian railway junction town near the Ukrainian border. Night and day, trains pull in from the major cities of Central Europe. On the platform is an immense barn-like building noisy with the hubbub of travellers twenty-four hours a day. The crowds and movement are continuous, the hall is full of beery, urinous fumes, smoke haze dims the bare-bulb light glare as people read papers, chat, take a nap, drink, smoke, snore, loll in corners, or wander outside for a leak. It could be a scene in Les Halles, the Parisian provision market of Zola's Le Ventre de Paris.

Large women of indeterminate age in shapeless blue uniforms and plastic shower hats, with huge arms, wide cheeks and cheery countenances, serve customers in canteen-style queues. Jovial, they slop beer, take change, fry eggs and bacon, pour tea, wipe the counters, swap banter, all seemingly in the same motion. The queues never end. The 1950s-style food is fried US diner fare, fat globules swim in the white coffee, concern over cholesterol is unknown here--there are greater worries, like getting through the day. Truck drivers, locals, passengers, railway crew, vagabonds, refugees from the east, gypsies, shift workers, the well dressed and the shabby, mingle together. The noise, energy, anxiety, and good-hearted confusion never stop. This is one side of East European life--an unreconstructed, natural existence in which people have learnt how to survive at a very basic level. At least, that's how it looks to out-siders like ourselves. For the indigenes life is tough and unromantic.

Kysak lies between the provincial cities of Presov and Kosice at the eastern end of Slovakia. Nearby are borders with Poland, Ukraine, Romania and Hungary. This is a region seemingly at the edge of everything, hard to locate in relation to other landmarks. But Nicholas Crane in Clear Waters Rising introduces another perspective: the nearby city of Uzhgorod in Ukraine is "Europe's Pole of Continentality. It is the town in Europe most distant from the sea. As the crow flies, Uzhgorod is 670 kilometres from the Baltic, the Adriatic and the Black Sea." So this unknown region where five countries meet it is actually the geographic heart of Europe, the centre as well as the borderlands.

Paul Magocsi in his Historical Atlas of East Central Europe divides Europe into three east-west zones. To the north is the broad sweep of lowland stretching from Russia to Holland, much of it along the Baltic Sea. In the middle is the mountainous region stretching from the Carpathians of Romania to the Pyrenees. To the south is the Mediterranean coastal region from Greece to Spain. Far eastern Slovakia, the region in which Kysak is located, lies halfway between north and south in the mountainous zone, and halfway also between east and west. The Carpathian mountains have historically acted as a barrier protecting Europe from being overrun by nomads from the steppes.

In medieval times Kysak lay on major trade routes connecting Vienna with Krakow, and Breslau with Lvov. Today it is in an area defined not by connection but by division. Many of what Norman Davies in Europe: A History calls the fault lines of Europe go through this region. The people to the west are Catholic, to the east Orthodox, with Uniates in between. Nineteenth-century industrialisation reached as far as the Czech lands, but not as far east as here. Europe's vineyard line is a little to the south, as were the Roman limes, the northern frontiers of the Roman empire's provinces.

Similarly the Ottomans never quite reached here, but they came close. At a small wooden Ruthenian Uniate church nearby, we were surprised to find that the local saint is St John of Suceava, a town in north-eastern Romania. His sacred relics had been brought here for safe keeping when the Turks pushed to their furthest limits of expansion in the 1530s. The bones were returned after the Ottoman retreat, but the local cult still flourishes.

Though at the heart of Europe, this region is the opposite of an imperial centre from which lines of force radiate. It is a black hole, an implosion remote from real centres of political and cultural influence. Up till a decade ago the inhabitants have almost never ruled their own lives. Eastern Europe has been a battleground for the imperial ambitions of outsiders--Germans from the north-west, the Habsburgs from the south-west, Russians from The north-east and the Ottomans from the south-east, all dominated these areas. The word borderlands, which today features in the titles of many books, is the area stretching from Belarus in the north, through western Ukraine and the provinces known as Galicia, Bukovina and Bessarabia, down through Romania, Moldova and Bulgaria to the Black Sea. These realms have a shadowy existence even to most Europeans. In them few peoples were able to establish a permanent identity as nation-states with clear and recognised boundaries, since they were unable to control their own destiny. Belarus was never until now a state.