The Great Plain

The plain was home to steppe peoples long before the Magyars: Sarmatians, Huns, Avars and Gepids all left graves here, and the Magyars themselves settled its grasslands in the 890s. In the 13th century King Béla IV invited Cuman and Jász (Alan) nomads to settle, and their names survive in the districts of Kunság and Jászság, where the relic known as Lehel's horn is kept at Jászberény.

The Ottoman conquest devastated the plain. Villages were burned and emptied, and people crowded into a few large market towns such as Debrecen and Kecskemét, which paid tribute to several masters and grew rich on cattle driven west to Vienna and beyond. Around 1605 the prince Stephen Bocskai settled his hajdú soldiers, former herdsmen, in free towns around Debrecen, giving Hajdú-Bihar its name. Debrecen became the centre of Hungarian Calvinism, and in 1849 Kossuth declared the Habsburgs dethroned in its Great Reformed Church.

In the 19th century the Tisza and its tributaries were regulated and marshes drained, turning pasture into farmland, and scattered farmsteads called tanya spread across the plain. Szeged was destroyed by a Tisza flood in 1879 and rebuilt with ring boulevards and new public buildings. The 1920 Trianon border cut the region's eastern cities off from their hinterlands now in Romania. Collectivisation after 1945 reshaped village life again, and Debrecen briefly hosted a provisional national government in 1944–45.

The plain holds a special place in the national imagination as the landscape of the puszta, the herdsman and the mirage, celebrated by the poet Sándor Petőfi. Its herdsmen, the csikós horsemen, gulyás cattle herders and juhász shepherds, had their own dress, dogs and crafts, and horse shows at Hortobágy and Bugac keep their riding skills alive for visitors. Hortobágy is listed as a UNESCO World Heritage cultural landscape for this pastoral tradition.

Religion divides the region. Debrecen, the "Calvinist Rome", and much of the north-east are Reformed Protestant, while Szeged, Kalocsa and the southern plain are strongly Catholic; Greek Catholic communities live around Nyíregyháza, and Slovak, Romanian and Serb minorities live in Békés and Csongrád-Csanád. Kalocsa is known for brightly coloured floral embroidery and painted house interiors, and Hódmezővásárhely for folk pottery.

The calendar includes Debrecen's Flower Carnival on 20 August, the Szeged Open-Air Festival each summer, harvest and sausage festivals in Békés, and pálinka and fish-soup contests along the rivers. The plain's towns have produced many notable figures, among them Kodály, born in Kecskemét, and the composer Ferenc Erkel, born in Gyula.

Debrecen, with about 200,000 people, is Hungary's second city, followed on the plain by Szeged, the third largest, Nyíregyháza with about 118,000, and Kecskemét, Szolnok and Békéscsaba. Much of the rest is small towns, villages and scattered tanya farmsteads, many of which have been abandoned or turned into weekend homes.

Farming is the backbone: wheat, maize, sunflowers, paprika around Szeged and Kalocsa, onions at Makó, fruit and vegetables on the sandy lands, and pigs and poultry. Manufacturing has grown fast in the cities, with Mercedes-Benz's car plant at Kecskemét, BMW's newer plant at Debrecen and a large battery factory near the same city. The universities of Debrecen and Szeged draw many international students, especially in medicine.

The countryside is ageing and many young people have left, while drought and falling groundwater on the sandy ridge are serious concerns. Life follows the farming year, and the spas are social places for locals.

This is the heartland of the dishes the world thinks of as Hungarian. Szeged and Kalocsa grow and grind the country's paprika, and Szeged's halászlé, a fiery soup of carp and other river fish, competes with Baja's version, made with thick pasta. Gulyás has its roots in the herdsmen's kettle cooking of the plain, and hortobágyi palacsinta, pancakes filled with minced meat and baked in a paprika and sour-cream sauce, is named after the puszta. Grey cattle and mangalica pigs, a curly-coated local breed, supply prized meat.

The region's sausages are famous: debreceni kolbász, a lightly smoked paprika sausage, and the spicy csabai and gyulai sausages from Békéscsaba and Gyula; Szeged is also the home of Pick winter salami. Makó grows onions, and lecsó, a stew of peppers, tomatoes and onions, is summer fare.

Fruit brandy is the drink of the plain: Kecskemét's apricot pálinka and plum pálinka from Szatmár in the north-east both carry protected designations. The sandy vineyards of the Kunság, between the Danube and the Tisza, form Hungary's largest wine region, producing mostly simple everyday wines.

The Hortobágy National Park, established in 1973 as Hungary's first, is the great sight of the plain: open grassland, fishponds and marshes around the village of Hortobágy, with the Nine-Arch Bridge, the old Hortobágy csárda inn, the herdsmen's museum, horse shows at Máta, and grey cattle, racka sheep and water buffalo in the fields. East of it, Debrecen has the Great Reformed Church, the Reformed College, the Déri Museum and the Nagyerdő park with its baths, and Hajdúszoboszló has one of Hungary's biggest spa complexes. Lake Tisza, a reservoir on the river near Tiszafüred, is a centre for birdwatching and water sports.

In the north-east, Nyíregyháza has its Sóstó spa and zoo, with the churches of Nyírbátor and villages of the Szatmár region beyond. In the south-east, Gyula's brick castle and castle bath stand close to the Romanian border.

Between the rivers, Kecskemét has the Cifrapalota and the Art Nouveau town hall, with the Kiskunság National Park and Bugac's puszta to the south, and Kalocsa its paprika museum. Szeged, where the Maros meets the Tisza, has the Votive Church and Dóm Square, the New Synagogue, the Reök Palace and the Móra Ferenc Museum; nearby Ópusztaszer's heritage park displays Árpád Feszty's panorama painting of the Magyar arrival.