According to legend, the ancestors of the Hungarians migrated and eventually settled in the heart of the Great Hungarian Plain, driven partly by the promise of a dream and partly by climatic pressures — recurring droughts and food shortages — that forced them to abandon their nomadic way of life. In those times, the fertile lands, rich in water and wildlife and crossed by two great rivers, offered favorable conditions for life and growth and for the emergence of agricultural and pastoral ways of life. Yet, because of its geographical position, the region and its people have been struck many times by the storms of history. The homesteads and farmlands were plundered by nomadic tribes or seized by political powers serving their own interests. The world of the farmsteads came to an end after World War II, when Stalinist state socialism and nearly fifty years of Soviet occupation forced radical change. Peasants were driven — often by force — into collective farms; their lands were nationalized, exhausted under industrial agriculture, and later fragmented and dispersed during the political transition of the late 1980s. The Great Plain, which covers more than two-thirds of the country, has been continuously reshaped to suit human needs. Rivers were straightened and confined between dikes and sluices; marshes were drained; waters were diverted through canal networks. The combined effect of these interventions has made the Great Plain the area most exposed to climate change in Hungary today. As life on the farmsteads becomes increasingly difficult and offers little perspective, most young people now seek their future in the cities. Among the rural population, rates of suicide and alcoholism in middle and old age are among the highest in Europe.

The lands and homesteads that once held value across generations are losing their worth, while the region — responsible for nearly 80 percent of the country’s total agricultural output — is moving steadily toward desertification and ecological collapse. Climate forecasts predict that between 2050 and 2100, the area will become entirely unsuitable for farming. With deteriorating economic prospects, collapsing infrastructure, depopulating villages, and worsening climatic conditions, the Great Plain is turning into a place of dreamers and solitaries — a metaphor for a slowly vanishing Eden. Adaptability, struggle, willpower, endurance, and humanity — even under harsh and rapidly changing circumstances. It is a remembrance of water and of the most intimate relationship between water and humankind. The people who still live here are bound by this connection: to nature, to the desire for self-reliance, and to the search for freedom. Solitude, unfulfilled dreams, lost and reborn hopes, the will to live, and the constant cycle of struggle, birth, and death shape them just as the Desolate Plain does — a land that has never been gentle with its inhabitants. Narrowing, yet still offering both refuge from the technocratic world and a space for freedom, it endures. The pride forged in independence and perseverance, and the defiance of time and the elements, have sunk deep roots. Those born here often remain, even as the land dries out completely. For the people of the Great Plain, the center of the world is their small patch of earth —  their homestead. To them, the idea of living elsewhere, otherwise, or differently  is almost unimaginable.