Home > Travel Writing > Hungary/Hortobágy National Park

The six giant grey cattle thundered along the embankment, their nostrils jetting steam in the cold air of a Hungarian autumn morning. The early sun winked off the brass balls they carried on the tips of their long, upswept horns. Behind them rattled the green wooden farm cart they were pulling, its driver standing upright in flowing blue pantaloons and black flat-crowned felt hat as he yelled for a passage through the bicyclists and ancient cars on the causeway.
‘Going to the bull market,’ remarked my guide Péter Koltai as we moved respectfully off the road. ‘Nobody better get in their way.’

Beyond the market causeway the level grasslands of the puszta, the Great Plain of eastern Hungary, stretched away to the horizon. A big blood-red sun hung above the mists. Silhouetted against it stood one of the impassive puszta shepherds, cloaked against the morning chill, his hands crossed on the brass top of his crook, contemplating his flock of 400 sheep. If he noticed the formations of cranes that were passing in the sky, gently creaking to each other, he gave no sign of it. ‘Come on,’ said Péter, ‘we’ll go talk to him.’

The shepherd apologised for the rubber Wellingtons and shop-bought drill trousers he was wearing. His usual high leather boots and baggy pleated trews had got soaked and muddy yesterday, he explained, and now they were drying off by the stove at home. But if we’d like to come back and see him next day he would be sure to be dressed in all his finery. To my eyes this man of the Hortobágy, the region that Péter and I were out to explore, looked magnificent with his chin-length moustache and upright bearing. A dark crane feather was stuck in the band of his green felt hat. He allowed his photograph to be taken with great dignity before he raised his hand in a regal gesture of dismissal.

To Péter, and to our cheerful driver Zsolt, the Hortobágy National Park was almost as much an unknown region as it was to me. Lifelong citizens of Budapest, they had only set foot in the Hortobágy a couple of times in their lives. To these west Hungarian city boys, the sight of the galloping grey cattle and the timeless figure of the shepherd on the plain were rare and strange. Hortobágy strikes newcomers like that: a ‘seascape country’ as the poet Sandor Petõfi called it, an enormous flatland seemingly open for inspection under vast skies, but secret and mysterious as soon as one leaves the straight roads that crisscross the Great Plain.

Out in the pale green and grey grasslands the soil looks crusty and alkaline. You marvel that it can grow such lush grass, such brilliantly green and orange fields of pumpkins and tall stands of trees. It looks too flaky, too dry with salt minerals. It is rich river silt, spread through millennia of seasonal floods from the River Tisza which snakes its way through the Great Plain on the western borders of the Hortobágy.

Beds of reeds wave in every breath of wind. They have grown up on the wetlands that have formed in former pools and ponds since the Tisza was canalised and its floods brought under control in the 19th century. A quarter of the Hortobágy is wetland of such importance for bird life that it carries RAMSAR status, a badge of international significance. One of the magnets that had drawn me to the Hortobágy was what I had read about the great crane migrations of October, when up to 70,000 of these striking-looking sailors of the sky pass through the region on their way south to winter quarters in Africa. But it’s not just the birds that make the Hortobágy so rare and precious a place.

The lumbering grey cattle are only one of the agricultural breeds peculiar to the puszta that have maintained their ancient bloodlines in the Hortobágy. There are racka sheep with spiral horns, and comical-looking mangalica pigs that sport long curly wool coats in red, blond and dark ‘swallow’ hues. These beasts have thriven on the Great Plain since the early Middle Ages.

The plain itself, depopulated when 15th-century Turkish invaders swept it clean of settlements, remained a puszta or deserted wilderness from then on. Horse and cow herds, shepherds and swineherds formed the strictly hierarchical, highly traditional human society of the Hortobágy. Their outmoded animals, too, remained unchanged. Already an anachronism by the mid-20th century, the whole region would have been ploughed for intensive agriculture if the Hungarian government hadn’t been persuaded to declare some 200,000 acres a National Park in 1973.

Péter, Zsolt and I were on our way from Hortobágy village towards the town of Tiszafüred on the western edge of the Park, where the River Tisza curls through the grasslands. Signs of eastern Hungary’s slow emergence from the old Communist cocoon were plentiful along the road in the shape of rattletrap old Ladas and Trabants, the latter farting clouds of blue exhaust smoke as they drove at snail’s pace, jammed to the roof with peasant families. Zsolt swept our BMW past with the panache of a city lad among country cousins. Within the hour he was sprawled alongside Péter and me on the seat of an old wooden punt, grinning with delight as the tangled trees, the side creeks and lakelets of the River Tisza nature reserve inched by more slowly than the tardiest Trabant.

“The Tisza can get mad,” observed Tibor the boatman. “Two years ago the floods were so bad that only the tops of the trees were out of the water. But today” – he waved at the green reedbeds, the boatloads of carp fisherman and the cormorants digesting their fish dinners on tree branches – “all is beautiful, eh?”

Further downriver a whole artificial lake – appropriately entitled ‘Noisy Lake’ - has been given over to jet-skiiers, motor-boaters and other hell-raisers. But here in the soothing silence of the reserve all was indeed beautiful. As a siphon of city stresses, a punt on the Tisza takes some beating. We nosed and drifted until it was time to hightail back to Hortobágy village for the bull market.

Big sleek black Nonius horses – another speciality of the Hortobágy – were stamping and whickering to each other as we wandered around the open-air market on the puszta near the village. The Hortobágy csikos or horsemen had dolled up to the nines for their appearance at the market, as much an opportunity to meet and drink with old friends as to buy and sell horses and long-horned cattle. Dressed in flowing blue pantaloons and black hats with upturned brims, the csikos joked, passed the bottle and tried to slip their brass-tipped crooks between the legs of unwary acquaintances. Their big shaggy komondor sheepdogs with matted dreadlock pelts stayed close at heel. This was a scene straight out of a Hortobágy history book, only the cars and tractors of the market-goers pegging it to the modern age.

The csikos and their fellow herders of cattle, sheep and pigs on the Great Plain may still follow their own enclosed order of a lifestyle, but they are happy to put on a show for outsiders when the opportunity arises. On a cold, still afternoon of steely skies over the puszta I joined a horse-buggy full of National Park visitors, and found myself being treated to a display that would have earned the applause of Genghis Khan himself.

In their now familiar rig of voluminous royal blue pantaloons and tunic, the horsemen looked magnificent as they cantered across the plain. They rode bareback, commanded their horses to lie prone, and cracked their whips like fireworks. The supreme moment came when a young csikos circled our buggy with the reins of five magnificent Nonius mares in his hand, controlling them at full tilt in a mad jingle of brass bells as he balanced upright on the rump of one of the galloping quintet.

Next day we went bird-watching. Gabor Tihanyige, a young Hortobágy man with a great love of the puszta plants and birds woven all through him, came with us to the giant fish pools of the plain, sharing his telescope and his kaleidoscopic knowledge. The city boys trod gingerly in their trainers at first, but soon they were well into the mysteries of ferruginous duck, pigmy cormorants, marsh harriers and lesser white-fronted geese. These last we watched in a bitterly cold puszta wind from the top of a gaunt wooden tower. ‘There are only 250 of these geese in the whole of Europe,’ Gabor told us, ‘so they are very, very rare.’ Far out on the Great Plain, but pulled close to us by Gabor’s telescope, the pale-chested white-fronts waddled calmly about their business, oblivious to their ornithological star status.

And so, on the last evening, to the famous cranes. The three of us stood among other birdwatchers at the top of one of the puszta towers. We shivered in a red sunset, listening to the cranes gabbling in their maize-field feeding grounds.

When they finally came, it was in their tens of thousands, in vees and columns of up to two hundred birds at a time. Their handsome colour scheme – big grey bodies and long black necks, dagger-like bills, a bold white eye stripe and a brilliant scarlet blob on the crown of the head – could not be seen in the gathering dusk. Instead the cranes passed in stark black silhouette across the smoky crimson of the western skyline, line upon line of them, filling the cold air of the Hortobágy with creaky, fluttering calls as they went on to their fishpond roosts out in the darkness of the plain.

Read more travel writing by Christopher Somerville