Doomsayer on the Hunger Stone

 

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.

IN HUNGARIAN

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)

Early Holocene Island below Budapest's III. District

MAGYARUL

Thanks to the joint research of prehistoric archaeologists and geographers, more and more details are becoming known about an ancient Danubian island and its first inhabitants, located under the 3rd district of Budapest. This big island once stretched from Csillaghegy (north) to Hajógyári Island (south), but its side arm was blocked off from the main Danube some 6000 years ago for climatic and tectonic reasons. In the Early Holocene, this Western Danube arm was gradually occupied by the surrounding watercourses, but traces of the riverbed can still be seen in the street network of the Mocsárosdűlő and Csillaghegy. 

Early Holocene hidrography of the Óbuda plains.  (I. Viczián) [2]

The proceedings of the XI. MΩMOΣ Research of Prehistory Conference, 10-12 April 2019, focused on the relationship between the environment and humans. The Óbuda area has been a priority area of research in landscape and environmental reconstruction, especially in relation to the Roman past of Aquincum. In the publication published in 2023 as Volume III of the Prehistoric Studies, a total of three papers discuss the environmental reconstruction of the prehistoric Danubian floodplain of Óbuda in three different excavation areas. At the site of Királyok útja 291-295, the researchers found the Danube mouth of the Csillaghegy Ditch, i.e. the northern tip of the prehistoric island [1]. Shallow drilling was carried out at the swampy area of Mocsárosdűlő in connection with the prehistoric sites along Pusztakúti street [2], and the Neolithic settlement of the island was studied at the site of Nánási street 75-77 [3]. Sediment samples from the excavations in the Csillaghegy Ditch and the Mocsárosdűlő site yielded almost identical results regarding the date of the Danube branch's bedding, despite the fact that the subsequent filling of the former Danube bed created different hydrographic characters at different sections. 

A summary of the end-of-quaternary climate history, with the river meandering activity.

In the Early Holocene period, the Óbuda floodplain between Békásmegyer and Újlak was a very different landscape compared to today. The Danube riverbed was not nearly as well canalised, with its tributaries freely flowing through the floodplain on both sides. During the Early Holocene, the dominant main branch of the Danube had already developed in the Óbuda area, but at that time, even larger side branches were still surrounding the relatively numerous and large islands (e.g. the Óceán Ditch on the east). The Early Holocene Óbuda-Danube branch can be relatively easily identified on a map, as the street network largely preserves the contours of the old riverbeds. The street network of Csillaghegy still shows the Csillaghegy Ditch parallel to the Árpád Street, which turned southwards near the Árpád Bath of Csillaghegy. Here it could form additional islands in the widening channel in the Mocsárosdűlő area. The Early Holocene Óbuda Island was over 5 kilometres long and covered an area of about 600 hectares.

Previously, two ideas competed over where the Óbuda Danube could return to the main branch. According to Ferenc Schweitzer [4], the estuary was originally located at the northern tip of Margaret Island, north of Újlak. This supposed Danube branch has been identified by archaeologists in the form of a drainage ditch at the foot of the Kiscell hilltop, but the archaeological fact that the legionary camp of Aquincum, i.e. the built-up area, extended from the Danube to the foot of the hilltop, rules out a Roman Danube bed in this area. If there were smaller creeks below the Kiscelli Hill in prehistoric times, they were displaced from the area by the Roman period at the latest and diverted north of the legionary camp into a new, shorter and straightened channel. 

The other possibility is that Óbuda was last an island in the Pleistocene. The Óbuda Danube originally flowed along the lower reaches of the old channel of the Aranyhegyi creek in the Early Holocene, and its estuary was north of Hajógyári Island. This idea is supported by the age of the Danubian terraces excavated in the Óbuda area and their height relative to the Danube level. 

The highest elevations of the Early Holocene Óbuda Island are marked by the level of terrace II/a, which was raised during the whole Holocene by sand layers blown out of the barren western mountains, the Transdanubian terrace surface and the riverbed [4]. The terrace no. I alias the higher floodplain level had already been formed (at the Pleistocene-Holocene boundary - see the Gábris-Nádor Figure 2007), but the lower floodplain levels were only carved out by the Danube later, during the Subboreal. This means that each terrace level was 'one step lower' in the numbering: the present Terrace I (high floodplain) existed then at a low floodplain level, while the now flood-free Terrace II/a may have been a Terrace I (high floodplain) in the Early Holocene. 

Archaeology and earth sciences study the same layers in excavations, but their methods, approaches and basic objectives are different. Sometimes, however, the common sets create fruitful collaborations between representatives of each discipline, giving a more complex and comprehensive picture of the interaction between past people and their former environment. Archaeologists categorise buried layers of soil primarily on the basis of human factors such as artefacts, while geoscientists draw conclusions from the geochemistry, grain size, colour and mineral composition of the layer. The working procedures, the methods of dating and the instruments used deserve a separate entry, but fortunately the studies in this volume discuss this in a paragraph or two. In short, each archaeogeographical environment is characterised by different sedimentation. If a poorly sorted, organic matter-poor, gravelly, gravelly sandy layer is found, it may be inferred that the sediment was deposited in the bed of an active river. The total thickness of this late Quaternary river sediment in the Óbuda catchment is 10-15 m. The Danube beds were cut into this terrace gravel. The sediments are rich in organic matter, typically fine-grained and dark in colour, and typically settle in a marshy environment. Thus, based on the type, succession and thickness of sediments, it is possible to basically define a sedimentary environment, including the life cycles of a buried riverbed.  

The following sequence of layers was reconstructed at the northern section of the Csillaghegy Ditch (Királyok útja 291-295) on the basis of the Optically Stimulated Luminescence (OSL) dating:

6500 BC: Danube sediments, gravel, pebbles (active riverbed)

6000-5500 BC: shallow water, floodplain sediments of the Danube (sedimentation, decreasing water discharge)

5000-3000 BC: sediment deficit. Presumably, the reverse flow of a small creek in the Danube valley in the Danube lowlands carried sediments away. 

AD 1-1000: deposition of marshy sediments due to decreasing water flow, possibly caused by Roman drainage, which drained the waters of the Mocsáros marsh and Rómaifürdő springs mainly to the south.

1500 AD: accelerating sedimentation, marshy sediments.

Riverbed reconstruction based on sediment samples taken at the former mouth of the Csillaghegy Ditch  (Gy. Sipos) [1]

On the basis of the discovered Neolithic settlements, the researchers assume that in the Csillaghegy area the Western Óbudai Danube has already been blocked off from the main Danube by the Middle Neolithic. The water network was radically altered by the deglaciation, as the former Danube arm flowing in a southerly direction was replaced by the Csillaghegy Ditch, which transported waters of the mountainous area and springs into the Danube, but in the opposite direction, northwards. The Óbuda-Danube branch was influenced by the precipitation of the Atlantic climate phase. The sediments suggest that the Danube bed migrated slightly eastwards in parallel with the drift and incision, while the mouth of the stream in the Csillaghegy Ditch was dragged southwards. The latter is a phenomenon commonly observed in lowland streams flowing into the Danube. 

The cross sections of two different floodplain levels excavated during the excavation, "Section B is the higher floodplain, Section A the lower floodplain. (Viczián I.)

At the same time, the excavation at 295 Királyok útja revealed different processes at different levels of the floodplain in prehistory. At the higher levels, suitable for human settlement, only 30-60 cm of sediment including artefacts was deposited from the Middle Neolithic to the Late Iron Age, while the lower floodplain sediment deposited during the same period was 250 cm thick. This means that sediment accumulation on the higher ground was already taking place in a typically terrestrial environment at this time. This includes the human cultural layer, airborne dust, organic matter from vegetation and silt deposited by the major Danube floods. Meanwhile, flooding was much more frequent at the lower level, i.e. the differences between the two floodplain levels were gradually eroded by the Danube-derived sediment, making the initially lower floodplain level increasingly suitable for human settlement. In this respect, it is no coincidence that the ruins of the town of Aquincum, lying on a nearly flood-free surface, are covered in places by less than 25 cm of sediment.

Cross-section of the Mocsárosdűlő explored by shallow geological drilling
and the stratigraphic boundaries identified on the basis of macroscopic features (Sipos Gy.) [2]

In the Mocsárosdűlő area, the OSL dating reconstructed the following sequence of strata:

5930-4910 BC Sand and gravel sediment, active fluvial formation, island-structured, multi-branched river network. This layer was overlain by a fine-grained clayey silt layer, which was already a precursor of sedimentation. 

5410-4610 BC Another layer of gravel was deposited on top of the silty layer, indicating renewed river activity. This was the last active period of the Western Óbudai Danube. 

4610-2800 BC After this period, the presence of river sediment in the marshland area ceases. The decrease in the sedimentation rate indicates that, over time, floods reached the area less and less frequently. The Mocsáros, which at that time still had an open, lake-like water surface, was supplied by groundwater and streams from the surrounding valleys, but at the same time the alluvial cone of the Aranyhegyi stream was building up and expanding at the expense of the open water surface.

2800 BC - AD 14th c. Shallow, eutrophic, marshy environment, increasingly dark, organic-rich sediments. The carving out of the low floodplain, followed by Roman drainage, further depleted the groundwater in the area, and thus the open waters of the Mocsáros marsh. From the Middle Ages to the present day, sedimentation has continued, with the marshy surface becoming increasingly smaller. 

Results of OSL and C14 dating on sediments from Drill No. 4. (Gy. Sipos) [2]

After the Óbudai Danube became an oxbow, complex processes took place in the former riverbed, but in general, the surface-forming influence of the surrounding watercourses increased significantly, while the Danubian influence gradually decreased. Floods entered the old tributary less and less frequently, and the sediment deposited there could only be partially transported by the smaller watercourses flowing into the Danube. These watercourses also transported a considerable amount of (slope) sediment from the valleys running down from the west. As a result, the riverbed, estimated at a maximum width of 200 meters, has been steadily narrowing. One of the interesting features of this Early Holocene basin is that the upper and lower estuaries of the basin were not closed, as streams on both sides continued to 'use' the riverbed. Finally, it was only anthropogenic interventions in the 19th and 20th centuries (sluices, stream bed relocations) that eliminated the former upper and lower estuaries.

Hydrography of the III. district between the Middle Neolithic and the Middle Ages.
(I. Viczián) [2]

Danube influence continued to be exerted through the groundwater, which during floods was moving between the oxbow and the Danube through the loose, gravelly alluvium. During floods, the deepest areas, such as the Mocsárosdűlő, were saturated with water, while during low water periods the river sucked this stagnant water away. Later, human intervention, canalisation and drainage further increased this suction effect. In addition, the surface waters of the Mocsáros were fed by springs, surface water courses and direct precipitation. The combined flow of these probably did not exceed 2 cubic metres per second. In the volume Ókori táj, ókori város [4], the water yield of all springs in the area was estimated at 42000 cubic metres per day. This is equivalent to about half a cubic metre per second, to which must be added the average flow of the Aranyhegyi creek of 0.3 cubic metres per second, and the flow of other smaller streams. Over the past millennia, some of these watercourses have been buried by the city and climatic influences may have modified the water yield, so that an exact value for these can no longer be determined. By comparison, this is at most a third of the water yield of the Zala river entering the lake Balaton. In addition, it should be noted that the waters of the oxbow flowed in two directions due to the effect of the emerging watershed in the Óbuda-Danube basin. From the late Neolithic onwards, the waters of the Mocsáros surplus, the sources of the Roman baths, the Árpád spring and the waters coming from the Kert street in Békásmegyer reached the Danube in a northerly direction via the Csillaghegy Ditch, while the combined waters of the Aranyhegyi stream and the Rádl Ditch flowed in a southerly direction. It is possible, however, that the Aranyhegyi stream may have changed its course in the early period from its newly formed alluvial cone in the channel. From Roman times onwards, human influence has profoundly redrawn the hydrology of the landscape. 

Connections between archaeological cultures and sediments of the Mocsárosdűlő. (Gy. Sipos) [2]

As archaeological research uncovers more and more of the Early Holocene Óbuda Island, our ideas about the prehistoric landscape and environment are expanding and refining regarding the area of Budapest's III. district. The research even sheds light on when humans settled on this piece of land. 

The relationship between prehistoric man and the river is illustrated by the sites along the river banks, which in some periods were closer to the river and in others moved further away from it. This periodicity has long been known to climatologists because it can be linked to changes in climate. In wetter periods, when flood risk increased, human settlements moved away from the river, while in drier periods they may have even occupied the lower floodplains intermittently. 

The cutting off of the Óbudai Danube by the Middle Neolithic, facilitated access to the area, and the deepening of the main branch of the river created the opportunity for the settlement of communities of the Linear Pottery culture (c. 5500–4500 BC). The occupation of the former Danubian areas of the island of Óbuda may have begun during the period of the pottery of the Notehead ceramics style (c. 5300-5200 BC). Then, gradually, several new settlements were established, when there was only an oxbow at the site of the Mocsáros. The site of the village excavated by Zsuzsanna M. Virág at 75-77 Nánási Street was inhabited until the end of the Želiezovce group period (c. 4900 BC). During the Želiezovce period, previously uninhabited islands were also populated, such as the northern tip of the present-day Óbuda Island. This means that the present-day Óbuda Island and Margaret Island with its similar floodplain levels may have existed at the end of the Holocene. The settlement excavated on Nánási street was formed on a land surface sloping down to the east, i.e. towards the Danube, and consisted of two parts. The higher (103.6 m.B.f.) and the deeper (102 m.B.f.) parts were separated by a two-metre deep ditch. Settlement on the lower surface could only have been intermittent, interrupted by the rising water level of the Danube in the late Neolithic (4950-4400 BC) [3].  

Recent hydrological features of the III. district. I. Viczián [2]

Human settlement has ultimately accelerated the natural processes of sedimentation of the Óbuda oxbow lake. Settlements had to be provided with access through the former Óbudai Danube riverbed. Farmers were also interested in filling in deeper areas and in the canalization of creeks towards the Danube. The ponds turned into sloughs, the sloughs into marshes, the marshes into bogs, while the wetlands continued to shrink. The climatically and tectonically incised main branch of the Danube have disappeared for good after the last layer of gravel in the marsh. Danubian floods continued to inundate the area for a long time and accumulated considerable amounts of silt. Thus, one of Budapest's largest islands ceased to exist some 6,000 years ago, and the fact that record floods can sometimes still form open water in the deepest parts of the Mocsáros, does not change this.

Translated with DeepL.com (free version)

MΩMOΣ XI. Research of Prehistory Conference 

Proceedings of the conference held at the BTM (Budapest History Museum) Aquincum Museum on 10-12 April 2019. Link: https://edit.elte.hu/xmlui/handle/10831/85856?key=%C5%91sr%C3%A9g%C3%A9szeti%20tanulm%C3%A1nyok

[1] Gábor Szilas – István Viczián – György Sipos – Dávid Gergely Páll – Zsuzsanna M. Virág – Kinga Rekeczki: The Impact of Fluvial Landscape Evolution on Prehistoric Settlement Patterns along the Danube: An Interdisciplinary Environmental Reconstruction in Óbuda, NW Budapest

[2] Farkas Márton Tóth – István Viczián – György Sipos – Dávid Gergely Páll – Zsuzsanna M. Virág – Gábor Szilas – Dávid Kraus: Environmental Changes along a Former Tributary of the Danube. Interdisciplinary Research in Mocsárosdűlő (Budapest, District III) 

[3] Zsuzsanna M. Virág: Neolithic Humans and the River Danube. The Possibilities of Environmental Reconstruction in an Urban Area. A Case Study (75–77 Nánási Road, Budapest, District III.

[4] Katalin H. Kérdő, Ferenc Schweitzer, (2010) Aquincum : ókori táj, ókori város. http://real-eod.mtak.hu/4508/

First image of the newborn Kis-Háros Island

IN HUNGARIAN

There are still a lot of people in Hungary who are older than the Kis-Háros Island near Nagytétény, Budapest. 

The Kis-Háros Island emerges from the Danube in 1940 (source: Hadtörténeti Múzeum, section: 5062_1)

Recently, an educational video about the island of Kis-Háros was uploaded to BudapestVideo.hu, showing the hidden natural values of the island. The nearly three-hectare area was protected in 1999, six years after the declaration of the neighboring "big brother" Háros Island. The video takes us back to a story we wrote 8 years ago, which raised a seemingly intractable question that has remained unanswered ever since: when exactly did the Kis-Háros Island form?

"The Kis-Háros Island was born as a gravel bar as a result of river regulation sometime in the 20th century. It is impossible to pinpoint the exact date of its birth, as the gravel bar gradually rose from the Danube." 

Before the above aerial photograph was found, the only answer to the question would have been sometime before 1967, as this is the earliest aerial photograph of the island on the fentrol.hu website. Earlier maps usually omitted the Kis-Háros Island. It is not on the 1941 military map and is also missing from the 1958 town planning base map of the Nagytétényi section. However, it could have been on the 1941 map, next to the last houses of the Baross Gábor district, which stretches down to the Danube, as far as the aerial photo was taken in 1940 is concerned. Unless it is a flyspeck on the map, the black spot is the Kis-Háros Island and its first reflection in the history of the islands in the Danube, which are constantly being created and destroyed. 

The Kis Háros Island during the autumn of 1968 (fentrol.hu)

That black spot cannot be a flyspeck for several reasons. If you compare it with the 1968 aerial photo, you can see that its location is correct. In the 1940 photo, the river color and the flooded bank make it look very much like they were flying over Nagytétény during high water level. Only the canopy of freshly sprouted trees on the gravel reef is sticking out of the water. This gravel reef is where it is because the sister island of Háros was annexed to the right bank of the Danube in 1911 (interestingly, Háros and Hunyadi Islands were probably administratively part of Szigetszentmiklós until 1950 and only became part of the capital through the Greater Budapest concept.

The Kis-Háros Island was therefore already an island in 1940, and the few meters of trees that settled on it suggest that the island's origins are not far off the mark if we put its origins in the second half of the 1930s. In this case, the age of the island would be around 80-85 years. 

To conclude, here is the educational film about the island that inspired this post:

Thanks to the crew for their thought-provoking work! 

Sources:

• https://budapestvideo.hu/video/a-kis-haros-sziget?fbclid=IwAR1kWxrr1mxnWbeqa842zmt2qLR_XAEF9XyIfwMIsrZGfIsxw9RXfRICD2I
• http://www.termeszetvedelem.hu/index.php?pg=pl_20-54-TT-99

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

Perspective sight of the St. Margaret Island

MAGYARUL

This is how the Margaret Island looked like from above, in 1963. 

This image was originally entitled as "Budapest Távlati Térképe" (Perspective sight of Budapest) and published in 1963. A friend of mine asked for this map, when I noticed the Margaret Island. It was hand drawn by István Mácsai and János Kiss. If we look at it closer we may not find the Danubius Health Spa Hotel next to the Grand Hotel in the left tip of the island, it hasn't built yet. Many old buildings and other architecture vanished during the fierce fighting in January, 1945 when the Soviet forces bombed the island. We can see the remaining monuments, like the Musical Well, the Grand Hotel, the famous water tower and open-air theatre, the Rose garden, the Palatinus baths, the Hajós Alfréd swimming pool. It is worth to compare this image with the below one, drawn 24 years after the first one.

The road between the two bridges, across the island marks the old riverbank. In the beginning of the 20th century the Buda side and the southern tip of the island has been enlarged. In 1945 the park island of Budapest has been devastated, many of the buildings has been destroyed and later demolished instead of rebuilding. For example the summer cottage of Palatine Joseph together with the 1838 icy flood mark, the pavilion of the main entrance, the Island Café, the MAC clubhouse, the Saint Margaret Chapel, the Dairy Shop and many more buildings. At least we have the old maps and pictures of the island which has never regained its former beauty.   

Here you can see those buildings disappeared after World War II.

Here you can see how would it looked like nowadays

Lost islands of Budapest

Once a friend of mine, who is a history-geography teacher just like me, told me there was a competition in their school. One of the questions was: How many Danubian islands are there in Budapest? He told me what he tought the correct answer would be, which was an irrationally big number, and asked me if it is true. I told him: it depends. What do you call an island? 

In my opinion, island is a peace of land, which is completely surrounded by a body of water all the time. Not just a few months of the year, but the whole year. I told my friend, there are a very few islands in Budapest meeting this criteria. 

We have to wind back the clock till the dawn of written history. By the Budapest section it means the time when the first Roman legionaries settled down next to the Danuvios river. Until this time there was no human impact on the Danube valley. No dredging, no locks, no stone embankments and no bridges.

Disappearing high-water marks in Budapest

MAGYARUL

"And shall your children ask ye tomorrow  
what this stone is in your temple,  
thus shall ye say unto them:  
Let the last generation hear  

that the waters of the Danube reached this high.."  

   

The last comprehensive study on the high-water marks of Budapest was completed in 1977. György Rajna’s “Flood tables in Budapest” was published only two years later, in 1979, in the 21st volume of Tanulmányok Budapest Múltjából (Studies from the Past of Budapest). This short span of time was enough to force the author to add a short addendum, that during these two years two flood tables of 1838 disappeared from two buildings in Ferencváros, and two other were demolished together with the house in Újpest. 35 years have passed since the publication of this study. What has been the fate of the carefully collected and documented tables? This is what I tried to survey. 

A nice example of the rescue of a flood table: Ferencváros, Bokréta utca 32.

Community gardening by the Danube

MAGYARUL 

Urban guerilla gardening? New kind of street art? Community gardening which uses every free square inch? Or maybe a civil movement to draw attention to the decaying Budapest embankments? Who planted vegetables under the Elizabeth bridge?

Most beautiful bridge in the world

There are times, when words mean nothing. In this post, there will be no data, date, paragraphs of law, engineering plans and documents. Only plenty of old photographs selected from fortepan.hu of the Erzsébet bridge in Budapest, most beautiful bridge in the world. 

Erected for the rolling Danuvius...

...by Tiberius Haterius Callinicus. I read this weather-beaten inscription on a stone altar at the lapidary of the Aquincum Museum in Budapest (image on the left). People from the antiquity worshipped the Danube river as a God - I first read about this in a József Révay book (Walks in the roman Hungary, 1965) Besides carving altars for the river-god, they proudly named their children after it. Danuvius, son of Diassumarus is known from a stele, erected next to the Danube, and there was a Caius Retonius Danuvius, a pontifex of the emperors cult in Aquincum.

The Danube, as a deity existed earlier, in the Hellenic era too. Its name was Istros (Ιστριη), which meant strong and swift mediated from Thracian language. Istros was the river-god of the north and Scythia according to the Greek mithology. His parents were Oceanos and Tethys, his brothers were the Nile, Eridannus (Po) and Alpheus (Alfíos on the Peloponnesos)

Istros used to be the name of the lower section of the Danube, from the Iron Gates to the Delta. There was also a greek colony with the same name Istros south from the Delta, founded by Miletian merchants and settlers. Some say, thet Istros has a common root with Isar (German), Isére (French), Isarco (Italian) and the slav Bistrica. I’m not sure if it is true, but Greeks do not use this form for the Danube anymore.

Survivor of the 1838 flood - The horse-apple tree on the Margaret Island

Between March 6th and 18th, 1838, the Margaret island between Buda and Pest ceased to exist. For two weeks the whole island, a property of Archduke Joseph, the Palatine of Hungary was under water, while the moving ice-shield completely devastated it, on the 13th march. After the flood went down, replenishing works took place, clearing away almost all of the memories of the devastation. After the II. World War, the small, yellow palatine summer house was torn down, with the marble slab marking the high water mark of 1838. In the 1920s Gyula Krúdy, a known Hungarian writer described the “Seven chieftain sycamore tree”, which was broken in the icy flood, then grew 7 new branches. This tree has also disappeared since. Only one tree remained on the Margaret island, which still bear the marks of the flood, an old Horse-apple tree. 
 

Lighthouses of the Danube

 

Heartly I admit that until last week I had no knowledge of the Danubian lighthouses. At least I had a suspicion that maybe I have seen one in Vienna. I was quite sure that there must be some in the Danube-delta, one for every branch, but those are belonging to the Black Sea – I thought. Then I came upon Béla Vályi’s monumental map on the Danube valley in the known Hungarian geographer, Jenő Cholnoky’s heritage. As I was browsing these sections I saw something strange in the mouth of the Tisza river: a lighthouse! Wow, does it still exists?

 

Spiritual landscape of the Danube in 1941

In year 1941, Hungary regained most of its old parts, like southern Slovakia, Subcarpathia, northern Transylvania and Vojvodina. The Hungarian High Commands took efforts to revise the old maps of these territories. This country-wide mapping project started with aerial photography of Hungary. These images were assembled into orthophotos and also received labels and geographic coordinate system. You can see the result here, although many prints have been destroyed during the second world war. The surviving prints can be found at the Institute and Museum of Military History, Budapest. Recently these maps were digitised, as a member of this project I found many traces of long lost danubian branches in these black and white images.

section 4859_2 A new lake will be born.

 

The swollen Margaret Island

  

If we go through the admirable photo collaction of Fortepan.hu with an eye got used to geomorphology, we can find a lot of interesting changes in the Hungarian landscape. So it is with Budapest's favourite island, the Margaret Island. Its name comes from Saint Margaret, daughter of the Hungarian King Béla IV. In the 30s, an unknown tourist captured this view from the Buda Castle. This photo has preserved the memory of the Víziváros, Margaret Island, further the Népsziget and the northernmost Palotai Island covered with dense forest.

But there is something strange with the Margaret Island. Its western side is quite barren, as if a real estate investor has just chopped the forest to build more hotels. But that is not the case. To understand, why the island looked like this, we have to go back in time.
 

Danubian archipelago on fire - archive pictures of the bombing of Hungary, 1944

Busy death is seeking this era... Fortepan.hu, a famous collection of old photographs has just published several pictures, taken from american bombers over Hungary, late summer and autumn in 1944. Dichotomy hides in these pictures. On one hand the Danube is rolling along in bright sunshine. We almost see the bathers on the sandy banks, as they cover their eyes from the sun, watching the approaching bombers in the sky. On the other hand, young american soldiers look down on the countryside, patterns of cities, roads, fields and meadows, like an outstreched map, on which red crosses are indicating the facilities, industries, bridges, railroad junctions to be destroyed. They let loose their deadly load as easy as pushing a button. And when completed their mission, they fly back to Italy, happy to survive the fires of the anti-aircraft batteries. And on one plane, a frightened photographer documents how much they managed to complete from the day's work.

I only selected these pictures, that have something to do with the Danube. Our trip begins in the Hungarian west, and we will go along the Danube, first eastbound, then we turn south in the Danube Bend.