Primeval Beech Forests of the Carpathians and the Ancient Beech Forests of Germany*

When I saw a small article recently in an advertising supplement promoting new biospheres to visit, I made the mistake of associating the word with some kind of space travel. I’ve since learned that biospheres, in fact, are very terrestrial wonders and that any discerning traveler should visit at least a couple of them during his or her life time. (Note: To be clear, we’re talking natural biospheres, not the man-made human biosphere in Arizona).

Thirteen new “biospheres” will be added next July to UNESCO’s official list and although you may be too late to consider any of them for this summer’s vacation, the already large list of 580 in 114 countries is enough to give any traveler a sense of infinite possibilities. “You could spend a lifetime hopping from one to the next and never quite reach them all,” according to the advertisement of the World Heritage Center.

On the list: the pleasures and pains of UNESCO inscription

By Howard Swain; Slovak Spectator; March 20 2012

Perched on the altar of the wooden articled church in Leštiny, in the Žilina Region of northern Slovakia, are two figures unique in Christian iconography. In the early 1990s, after the fall of the communist regime, a spate of looting in some of Slovakia’s historical monuments accounted for the original, priceless versions of two statues of the brothers Aaron and Moses, which had stood in the church for hundreds of years. Wounded by their loss, the villagers of Leštiny commissioned a local carver to replace the artefacts, and he went to work to produce something vaguely akin to the prized and delicate whittlings of his artisan predecessors.

When the figures were completed, it mattered little to most parishioners that the carver had taken as models two slightly less than traditional forms. The result was that when Leštiny was added to the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2008, the statues of Aaron and Moses became the only UNESCO-protected garden gnomes in world. These multi-coloured, long-nosed chaps duly took their place alongside the Statue of Liberty, Stonehenge, the Great Pyramid of Giza and the historic sanctuary of Machu Picchu as officially some of the 936 most significant cultural monuments on earth.

It was, of course, not exclusively the gnomic figures that attracted UNESCO to Leštiny. Rather the magnificent hilltop church in which they stand, which dates from the 17th century, is one of eight “Wooden Churches of the Slovak part of the Carpathian Mountain Area” that three years ago earned inscription on UNESCO’s prestigious list of cultural sites. Since its inception in 1972, the UNESCO World Heritage List has offered conservation and preservation to sites both natural and manmade, from the modern and ancient worlds, in 153 countries in all corners of the globe, including seven locations in Slovakia.

Jun 27 2011 - Asia Pacific gets four new World Heritage sites; Travel Daily Media