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The Great Hungarian Plain: a European Frontier Area (I)*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

A. N. J. Den Hollander
A. N. J. Den Hollander
Affiliation:
University of Amsterdam
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Extract

The Nagy-Magyar Alföld, the Great Hungarian Plain, lies within the Carpathian crescent, between the last foothills of the Alps and the South Slavic and Transylvanian mountain ranges. The Danube and the Tisza meander slowly through it, carrying their muddy waters to the narrow passage of the Iron Gates. The landscape here—the wide horizons shimmering in the heat of summer with unreal outlines, the crossed well-poles like slanting T's, the endless fields alternately of wheat and maize, the alkali-rimmed lakes, the lack of trees, the occasional stretches of empty steppe with not a single human being in sight—is to anyone from the tree-clad mountain slopes across the Danube a startling contrast. The visitor will soon discover that the character of the region and the traditions of its people have combined in the course of history to create here unique social forms.

Type
Research Article
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 3 , Issue 1 , October 1960 , pp. 74 - 88
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1960

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References

1 The Plain comprises 41,901 sq. km., almost half of what remained as Hungary after World War I. For further documentation of the subject see my book, Nederzettingsvormen en Problemen in de Grote Hongaarse Laagvlakte: een Europees “Frontier” Gebied (Amsterdam, 1947)Google Scholar.

2 Of the 732 counties in the Alföld, 644 had a tanya territory before World War II, containing in 1930 a population of almost 1,500,000. In the county of Csongrád in that year 69,822 of the 140,529 inhabitants lived in tanyas. In the territory of the town of Szeged the tanya population numbered over 40,000.

3 The municipalities with 5,000 to 50,000 inhabitants included 42.8% of the plains population in 1930; those with over 50,000 had 33.9%. The counties of the autonomous towns of Szeged, Debrecen and Kecskemét covered 764, 957, and 939 sq. km. respectively, before World War II. Subotica (after the treaty of Trianon transferred to Jugoslavia) had the largest territory of all, 974 sq. km. Villages could also have extensive territories, e.g., Törökszentmiklós with 330 sq. km. and Sövenyháza with 320.

4 See Kniesza, István, Ungarns Völkerschaften im XI Jahrhundert. Archivum Europae Centro-Orientalis, IV (1938)Google Scholar for disproof of the view that formerly prevailed, that the Magyars were so few in number as to form only a thinly spread ruling class over the Slav population.

5 von Szepeshazy, Carl, von Thiele, J. C. and Ellrich, Angus, in Hongarije zoals het is en de Hongaren zoals ze zijn (Franeker, 1833), pp. 113–14, describe the houses as built of a mixture of clay and straw: “ in five minutes a house will burn down, in twenty minutes an entire village … but in a few hours a new house is built”Google Scholar.

6 Kecskemét augmented its territory with the lands of abandoned villages as early as the 13th century, after the Mongol invasion. J. Ecsedi, cited by Mayer, R., “Die Alföldstädte”, Abhandlungen der Geographischen Gesellschaft in Wien, XIV, Heft 1 (1940), pp. 9–10Google Scholar, investigated the fate of 50 “lost” villages once existing in the territory of Debrecen: 7 or 8 of these were destroyed by Crimean Tatars in the Turkish army in 1593–94 and were never rebuilt; 5 more destroyed in 1594 were rebuilt only to be burnt by Seidi Pascha in 1660; 3 were partly destroyed in 1594 and dragged on miserably to final extinction; 6 were destroyed in the middle ages and 15 others probably so; 4 were destroyed probably a little later; in 8 other cases the date of disappearance is altogether unknown.

7 Takacs, Imre, “Die wirtschaftlichen und sozialen Folgen der Wiederbesiedelung der ungarischen Tiefebene im 18 Jahrhundert”, Ungarische Jahrbücher, XIII, Heft 1–2 (07 1933), p. 106Google Scholar.

8 Puszta originally meant “bare” or “waste”, indicating the fact that something formerly present had disappeared, as in the Wüstungen of Germany, where villages had disappeared. See Bendixen, J. A., Verlagerung and Strukturwandel ländlicher Siedlungen, (Kiel, 1937)Google Scholar, on abandonment of villages in Brandenburg.

9 Gunda, Béla, “The Anthropogeography of Pasturing on the Great Hungarian Plain”, A Földrajzi Közlemények, LXIII, no. 1 (1940), p. 27Google Scholar.

10 O. Herman, L. Madarassy, St. Ecsedi and I. Györffy were able to study herders’ customs while they still survived. See the latter's “Die extensive ungarische Vierhaltung”, Ungarische Jahrbücher, XVIII (1938)Google Scholar. The ethnographic department of the Hungarian Museum in Budapest has a fine collection of material in this field.

11 On the continued indifference of the Hungarians to manuring the soil see von Matlekovits, A., Das Königreich Ungarn volkswirtschaftlich und statistisch dargestellt, 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1900), I, p. 207Google Scholar. The ól-stable manure was used as fuel and for building garden partitions, but part of it went to waste.

12 Slovaks from the north in 1718 built Kiskörös, which appears on a Joseph II map as kertes város, but generally speaking Slovak immigrants were not absorbed into the plains traditions, holding to their own traditions.

13 “A Magyar Tanya”, Földrajzi Közlemények (1937), p. 86Google Scholar.

14 Ibid., p. 89.