Traveling Hungary’s majestic grasslands
History, freedom converge in the bare beauty of the Puszta plain
In the early 1980s — when Hungary was still deeply cloaked within the Iron Curtain, when grocery lines wrapped around city blocks, infrastructure crumbled and travel outside the country was restricted — my uncle Gabor in Budapest saved what money he could and headed for the scenic grasslands in the east.
It was an escape, a yearning for beauty amid economic malaise and depressing city life. He had been enamored for years of the 19th-century poetry of Janos Arany and Sandor Petofi, who evoked the plain’s quiet, boundless, bare beauty and who wrote eloquently of lonely shepherds, withered peasant women and wild horses. Through Hapsburg and Ottoman rule, this vast, empty plain, called the Puszta, was for Hungarians their own Big Sky Country, and it remained an untamable, immutable terrain symbolic of liberty, even when the nation’s farms were collectivized under the Soviets.
In 1973, most of the great plain was designated Hungary’s first national park, and in 1999 it became a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
My uncle, who taught high school English in Budapest, recalled recently how when he walked across the fields during that visit, “you could see and feel each of the words of these great poets, one by one — words that as a schoolboy, I had to learn and know now by heart.”
When he told me this, I was preparing to visit Hungary, specifically Hortobagy National Park in the Puszta. It was September, and the refugee crisis at Hungary’s southern border with Serbia was an exodus of biblical proportions. Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban was vociferously defending his state police and the construction of a wall to keep out the refugees.
This all gave me pause: My father — Gabor’s brother, and a refugee of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution — had followed the same route toward
Austria (and then onward to the United States) that the Syrians and others were now traversing.
Perhaps I could balance, in a way, the distressing images of refugees with scenes from my country’s heritage by visiting the majestic Puszta. I was keen to see this landscape that my father, a mostly irascible man, admired as much as Gabor did — though my father never had the chance to travel there himself.
When he died, in 2012, I was all the more determined to see this mystical region that filled his imagination, and that he had, sight unseen, vividly described for me when I was a child. A print in our living room had depicted cowboys in billowy trousers galloping across the wheat fields and shepherds in floorlength sheepskin robes. I was especially eager to go horseback riding in the area.
Upon arriving in Budapest, I took the train to Hajduszoboszlo, where I was met by Reka, my guide. She drove me past stalks of sunflowers and cornfields baking in the early autumn sun, with bicyclists — teenagers as well as seniors — weaving in and out of traffic. I could see large nests atop chimneys. (More than 240 bird species, including herons, egrets, warblers, eagles and cranes are sighted in the Hortobagy National Park annually.)
After checking into the Sovirag Hotel just off of the main road in Hortobagy, we sat for lunch outside at a nearby roadside inn, the Hortobagyi Csarda. Built at the end of the 18th century, this inn, like others in the region, was a popular resting spot for cattlemen and shepherds, as well as traveling merchants selling salt from the mines of Maramures County in present-day Romania. As we sat outside, it was quiet, but I could imagine gypsy musicians meandering about as guests drank palinka, Hungary’s traditional and potent fruit brandy.
Reka encouraged me to order the goulash, telling me that the beef comes from the Puszta’s distinctive gray horned cattle. The meal was exceptional.
A nap afterward would have been welcome, but I had arranged to ride. A short walk took us to the bungalow of Albert and Judit Hajdu. The hosts, neither of whom spoke English, greeted us warmly. Albert soon vanished around the side of the house andreappeared leading two horses.
Before long, I was sitting atop Madar, or Birdy. Albert leaped onto his own horse and then led me outside the courtyard. While trying to follow Albert’s instructions in Hungarian, I discovered he could, thankfully, speak German, as do I.
On the road, Albert pointed out clusters of fall aster and blackthorn, wild pear trees and lustrous rosehip bushes, looking as though they were on fire in the setting autumn sun.
The next day, Reka and I met Albert for a wooden carriage ride. He dressed as a driver from an earlier time, with a black vest and riding boots, and a feather in his fedora. We passed several of the Puszta’s traditional sweep wells and happened upon a barn as a shepherd was letting out his flock of Racka sheep, kicking up a dramatic dust storm. Later, we reached a meadow with some neglected farmhouses as well as a simple memorial.
Between 1950 and 1953, at the height of Josef Stalin’s purges across the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc, several thousand Hungarian families were rounded up and imprisoned in the remote Puszta. These farmhouses, Albert said, had served as quarters for one of those labor camps. When Stalin died in 1953, the camps were dismantled, and almost no trace of them was left.
I had thought of my father during the previous day’s horseback ride, mostly of how he pined all his life for the beloved homeland he had left. He had had no choice, I thought — but no, he had, and he chose freedom. And so, as I stood before these pitiful farmhouses on the windswept plain — and later that evening, watching television images of refugees on Hungary’s southern border — I thought of Petofi’s musings on the dilemma of liberty: Liberty and love These two I must have. For my love I’ll sacrifice My life. For liberty I’ll sacrifice My love.