Eastern Hungary's 'puszta' is home to nature and tradition

By Jan Dube Aug 7, 2007, 13:44 GMT

Hortobagy/Debrecen, Hungary - It was quiet in the steppe. The covered wagon swayed gently on the plain. The air was clear, and not a house nor a shrub was in sight.

And then: the crack of whips and clop of hooves. Three horse herdsmen called csikos galloped up and put on quite a show. They rode standing up on the backs of two horses, shouting 'ho' and 'ha' with their hands on their hips.

This scene in eastern Hungary's Hortobagy National Park seemed from a bygone era. And that was the object. 'We show how people lived here 100 years ago,' remarked Janos Vilagosi, the park's deputy director.

Covering 82,000 hectares, Hortobagy National Park is Hungary's largest and the biggest grass steppe in Europe. It has been a UNESCO World Heritage site since 1999. The park is an ideal destination for people seeking nature and quiet. For culture and bustle, there is the nearby city of Debrecen.

The blue-black garbed herdsmen on horseback are not simply performers for the some 150,000 people yearly who visit the puszta, as the steppe in Hortobagy is known. They are actually livestock breeders. Much of the park is cultivated land. The approximately 200 families of herders there raise old breeds of pigs, cattle and sheep using organic farming methods.

Zoltan Gencsi is managing director of the Hortobagy Non-profit Company for Nature Conservation and Gene Preservation. He helped bring about a revival of the old cattle breeds and converted 15,000 hectares of park into organically farmed land.

'Our grey cattle breeding has been a big success,' he said.

As if on cue, a herd of about 200 of the long-horned, one-ton beasts appeared on the puszta. 'These animals were a chief Hungarian export in the Middle Ages,' Gencsi related. Up to 100,000 of them were driven as far as southern Germany and northern Italy. In the 1970s, there were only about 400 head of grey cattle in Hungary. Today there are 9,000.

Gencsi is also proud of his water buffalo, which are used to make paprika salami.

'Half of Hungary used to be steppe and meadowlands where only pasture farming was possible, but no agriculture,' Vilagosi noted. At the end of the 19th century, the Tisza River, which flows through eastern Hungary, was dammed and the meadowlands drained. Not much of the old landscape remains.

'But the national park includes everything once typical of the Hungarian lowland: grassland, heath, fish ponds, meadows and marshland,' he said.

This landscape is attracting more and more nature lovers. Most visitors to the park are day tourists, though. They take a carriage ride in the puszta to the horse and cattle herdsmen, eat grey-cattle goulash and pancakes, and then get back on the tour bus, which takes them to Budapest, 200 kilometres away, or to Debrecen.

Debrecen, whose population is about 200,000, is the main city in eastern Hungary. In recent years it has experienced a construction boom.

'Many old buildings in the city centre have been restored, and prestigious structures like Fonix Hall (a multi-purpose arena) and the new courthouse have been built,' said Erzsebet Berta, an architecture critic.

A fountain gurgled in front of the Hotel Aranybika and played Mozart's 'Eine Kleine Nachtmusik' (A Little Night Music). Every few minutes a streetcar rattled by. Hortobagy was quieter. But on the dining hall buffet lay a piece of the puszta: water-buffalo salami.