There is no more perfect illustration of the spectacle than this headless soccer fan at the foot of Budapest's Szabadság Bridge. This sculpture is not mourning the rubbishy embankment, although it could, it is not exactly the elements of the decaying embankment that are being discussed, it has to be seen a little further away, but not much.
The location may be familiar to readers of this blog, the famous hunger stone of Budapest located in the Danube at the foot of Gellért Hill, standing like a familiar apple tree at the end of the garden. Between 5 and 6 p.m. on the first day of July 2025, this rock seems, from a climatological point of view, much like the mentioned apple tree in the garden in blossom on a beautiful New Year's Eve, with swallows circling above.
In fact, this long introduction is unnecessary. Climate hasn't been given much space on the Danube Islands blog so far, and probably won't be again. Yes, behind the mourning blue-white soccer fan you can see the Hunger Stone. Yes, on the first day of July. Not for the first time this year, but for the second. On 4 March, it seemed like alarmism to write that the Hunger Stone would emerge, after all, the hydrographic forecasts could be wrong, only to find that less than a week later, on 11 March, you could take a selfie of it with dry feet. As Hungarian news portals have correctly reported, March has never seen anything like it since the start of the regular water level measurements on the Danube. This was an extraordinary situation from a hydrological point of view, as March is usually and historically a flood month on the Danube, not a low-water month. Typically, it used to be an icy flood season. Wesselényi, high water marks and all the rest.
Here we are again. In July. Never before this month has the Hunger Stone emerged from the Danube, since water level measurements have been taken place on the Danube. Not at the end of July, near the end of the hydrological year, but on the first day. Two days from International Danube Day. At the time when the second Danubian flood season stemming from rainfall usually ends. 1965, The Great Danube Flood, and so on. This is a hydrologically exceptional situation. Second time this year. So that only half the year has passed. A bird of distress is perched on the Hunger Stone. Wait, there are already two of them.
Of course, you could say that we are half a metre away from the lowest water level ever recorded in history, we survived the autumn of 2018, which was already seven years ago. Except that the low water “came in time” when it was expected, after the Danube catchment area had drained, just before the autumn rains. Of course, we also survived the drought of 2022, when we had to write that on 10 August the Hunger Stone had never appeared so early in Budapest. On 10 August. Which is forty days from now. During the “historic” drought, which was just three years ago.
The meteorologists forecast rain in a few days, four days and the Hunger Stone will disappear again, and the birds of distress will fly away. We may have another summer, autumn and winter like in our “childhood”, soft rain, sunbathing without skin cancer, then a good sledging in the fluffy snow, but this doubly extraordinary year will not turn into normal year. Soon, the three remaining months of April, May and June will fall. (The latter has just barely escaped with this half day.) We'll document that properly. And then there will be nothing else to do.
Translated with DeepL.com (free version)
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