Szeged
Szeged is the third largest city of Hungary, the largest city and regional centre of the Southern Great Plain and the county seat of Csongrád county. The University of Szeged is one of the most distinguished universities in Hungary; the famous Szeged Open Air Festival is one of the main attractions, held every summer and celebrated as the Day of the City on May 21. The name Szeged might come from an old Hungarian word for corner, pointing to the turn of the river Tisza that flows through the city. Others say it derives from the Hungarian word sziget which means'island'. Others still contend that szeg means'dark blond' – a reference to the color of the water where the rivers Tisza and Maros merge; the city has its own name in a number of foreign languages by adding a suffix -in to the Hungarian name: Croatian, Segedin. Szeged and its area have been inhabited since ancient times. Ptolemy mentions the oldest known name of the city: Partiscum, it is possible that king of the Huns had his seat somewhere in this area.
The name Szeged was first mentioned in 1183, in a document of King Béla III. In the second century AD there was a Roman trading post established on an island in the Tisza, the foundations of the Szeged castle suggest that the structure may have been built over an earlier fort. Today only one corner of the castle still remains standing. During the Mongol invasion the town was destroyed and its inhabitants fled to the nearby swamps, but they soon returned and rebuilt their town. In the 14th century, during the reign of Louis the Great, Szeged became the most important town of Southern Hungary, – as the Turkish armies got closer to Hungary – the strategic importance of Szeged grew. King Sigismund of Luxembourg had a wall built around the town. Szeged was raised to free royal town status in 1498. Szeged was first pillaged by the Turkish army on 28 September 1526, but was occupied only in 1543, became an administrative centre of the Ottomans; the town was a sanjak centre first in Budin Eyaleti. The town was freed from Turkish rule on 23 October 1686, regained the free royal town status in 1715.
In 1719, Szeged received its coat of arms from Charles III. During the next several years, Szeged prospered. Piarist monks arrived in Szeged in 1719 and opened a new grammar school in 1721. Szeged held scientific lectures and theatrical plays; these years brought not only prosperity but enlightenment. Between 1728 and 1744 witch trials were frequent in the town, with the Szeged witch trials of 1728-29 being the largest; the witch trials were instigated by the authorities, who decided on this measure to remove the problem of the public complaints about the drought and its consequences of famine and epidemics by laying the responsibility on people among them, which had fraternized with the Devil. In 1720, the ethnic Hungarian population of the town numbered about 13000 to 16000, while the number of the Serb inhabitants was 1300. Szeged is known as the home of paprika, a spice made from dried, powdered capsicum fruits. Paprika arrived in Hungary in the second half of the 16th century as an ornamental plant.
About 100 years the plant was cultivated as an herb, paprika as we know it. Szeged is famous for their szekelygulyas, a goulash made with pork and sour cream, and famous for their halászlé, fish soup made of carp and catfish. The citizens of Szeged played an important part in the Hungarian Revolution of 1848. Lajos Kossuth delivered his famous speech here. Szeged was the last seat of the revolutionary government in July 1849; the Habsburg rulers punished the leaders of the town, but Szeged began to prosper again, the railway reached it in 1854, the town got its free royal town status back in 1860. Mark Pick's shop – the predecessor of today's world-famous Pick Salami Factory – was opened in 1869. Today the inner city of Szeged has wide avenues; this is due to the great flood of 1879, which wiped away the whole town. Emperor Franz Joseph visited the town and promised that "Szeged will be more beautiful than it used to be", he kept his promise. During the next years a new, modern city emerged with palaces and wide streets.
After the First World War Hungary lost its southern territories to Serbia, as a result Szeged became a city close to the border, its importance lessened, but as it took over roles that belonged to the now lost cities, it recovered. Following the Loss of Transylvania to Romania, University of Kolozsvár (now Cluj-Napoca, moved to Szeged in 1921. In 1923 Szeged took over the role of episcopal seat from Temesvár, it was occupied by Romanian army during Hungarian-Romanian War in 1919. During the 1920s the Jewish population of Szeged reached its zenith. Szeged suffered during World War II. 6,000 inhabitants of the city were killed, the Jewish citizens were confined to ghettos and taken to death camps. Szeged was captured by Soviet troops of the 2nd Ukrainian Front on 11 October 1944 in the course of the Battle of Debrecen. During the Communist-era, Szeged became a centre of light food industry. In 1965 oil was found near the city.
Sighetu Marmației
Sighetu Marmației, until 1964 Sighet, is a city in Maramureș County near the Iza River, in northwestern Romania. Sighetu Marmației is situated along the Tisa river on the border with Ukraine, across from the Ukrainian town of Solotvyno. Neighboring communities include: Sarasău, Săpânța, Câmpulung la Tisa, Ocna Șugatag, Giulești, Vadu Izei, Rona de Jos and Bocicoiu Mare communities in Romania, Bila Cerkva community and the Solotvyno township in Ukraine; the city administers five villages: Iapa, Lazu Baciului, Șugău, Valea Cufundoasă and Valea Hotarului. The city's name derives from Hungarian name which means "island in Máramaros"; the city has 37,640 inhabitants. Romanians - 82.2% Hungarians - 13% Ukrainians - 2.3% Roma - 1.5%According to the 1910 census, the city had 21,370 inhabitants. The number of Jews was 7,981. There were 4,901 Roman Catholics. Inhabited since the Hallstatt period, the populated area lies in the Tisza Valley, an important route as being the only access to the otherwise mountainous, sparsely populated region.
After 895 in the 10th century the area became part of Kingdom of Hungary. The first mention of a settlement dates back to the 11th century, the city as such was first mentioned in 1326. In 1352, it was the capital of Máramaros comitatus, just outside Transylvania. After the defeat at the Battle of Mohács and the death of Louis II of Hungary, in the ensuing struggle for the Hungarian throne, the kingdom was divided into Royal Hungary of Habsburg Ferdinand I, Holy Roman Emperor and the Eastern Hungarian Kingdom of John Zápolya the Voivode of Transylvania. In 1570 the Principality of Transylvania was formed. Transylvania, including Maramureș, became an autonomous principality within the Ottoman Empire from 1541. In 1711, King Charles III returned Máramaros County to his Hungarian domain. During the early centuries of the Kingdom of Hungary Vlachs and Rusyns were settled in the sparsely populated county and a sizable Jewish community formed through immigration and the town became a center of cultural and political life of these communities.
The Jewish community was led by the Teitelbaum family — a scion of which would lead the present-day Satmar Hasidic community.1918 saw the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. On November 22, 1918, in an assembly of Romanians from Maramureş took place in the town's central square, electing a national council and deciding to send a delegation to the Great National Assembly at Alba Iulia, which voted the union of Transylvania with Romania and the consequent establishment of Greater Romania; the Allied Powers accepted the Romanian demands and Transylvania including Máramaros County was formally ceded to Romania in the Treaty of Trianon in 1920. In 1919, six Romanian schools opened in Sighet: a boys' high school, a girls' high school, a boys' elementary school, a co-ed commercial gymnasium, two commercial high schools; the Maramureș ethnographic museum opened in the cultural palace in 1926. During the interwar period, over twenty newspapers appeared in the town, as well as a number of literary reviews.
As a result of the August 1940 Second Vienna Award during World War II, it came under Hungarian administration during the war. A first deportation of Jews from Sighet took place in 1942; the second occurred after Passover 1944, so that by April, the town's ghetto contained close to 13,000 Jews from Sighet itself and the neighboring places of Dragomirești, Ocna Șugatag and Vișeu de Sus. Between May 16 and 22, the ghetto was liquidated in four transports, its inhabitants sent to Auschwitz concentration camp. Among the deportees was Sighet native and future Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel. In 1947, there were some 2,300 Jews in Sighet, including survivors and a considerable number of Jews from other parts of Romania. By 2002, the town had 20 remaining Jews; the Treaty of Paris at the end of World War II voided the Vienna Awards, Sighetu Marmației, administered by Romania since October 1944, formally returned to the country in 1947. In 1948, the new Communist regime nationalized the city's factories, three publishing houses and banks.
In 1950, with the counties replaced by regions, Sighet lost its status as an administrative center. In 1960, the building of neighborhoods with apartment blocks began. 1962 saw the opening of a wood processing factory. Turning out furniture and other wood products, it had over 6000 employees and played an important part in the city's economic development. After the Romanian Revolution, it fell upon hard times, with nine private firms employing some 3500 in 2012. A second important employer during the Communist period was a textile factory. In May 2014 a commemoration was held in honor of the 70th anniversary of the deportations in May 1944. Events included a Klezmer concert, Sabbath services in the one remaining synagogue, a memorial service at the Holocaust Monument at the site of the deportations, as well as an exhibit on life in Sighet prior to the deportations; the exhibit contained contributions by their families. Additionally, visits were organized to the Jewish Cemetery as well as the Holocaust Museum located in the childhood home of Elie Wiesel.
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Pannonian Basin
The Pannonian Basin, or Carpathian Basin, is a large basin in Central Europe. The geomorphological term Pannonian Plain is more used for the same region though with a somewhat different sense, with only the lowlands, the plain that remained when the Pliocene Epoch Pannonian Sea dried out, it is a geomorphological subsystem of the Alps-Himalaya system a sediment-filled back-arc basin. Most of the plain consists of the Great Hungarian Plain and the Little Hungarian Plain, divided by the Transdanubian Mountains; the Pannonian Basin lies in the southeastern part of Central Europe. It forms a topographically discrete unit set in the European landscape, surrounded by imposing geographic boundaries - the Carpathian Mountains and the Alps; the Rivers Danube and Tisza divide the basin in half. It extends between Vienna in the northwest, Bratislava in the northeast, Ostrava in the north, Zagreb in the southwest, Novi Sad in the south and Satu Mare in the east. In terms of modern state boundaries, the basin centres on the territory of Hungary, but it covers regions of western Slovakia, southeastern Poland, western Ukraine, western Romania, northern Serbia, the tip of northeast Croatia, northeastern Slovenia, eastern Austria.
The name "Pannonian" comes from a province of the Roman Empire. Only the western part of the territory of modern Hungary formed part of the ancient Roman Province of Pannonia. In English-language, the terms "Pannonian Basin" and "Carpathian Basin" are used synonymously; the name "Pannonian" is taken from that of a province of the Roman Empire. The historical province was not coterminous with the geographical plain or basin. Pannonia Inferior covered much of the western half of the basin, as far as the Danube. Pannonia Superior included the western fringe of the basin as well as part of the Eastern Alps, as far as Virunum; the southern fringe of the basin was in Moesia. The eastern half of the basin was not conquered by the Romans and was considered part of Sarmatia, inhabited by the Iazyges; the parts north of the Danube were not in the empire. The term Pannonian Plain refers to the lowland parts of the Pannonian Basin as well as those of some adjoining regions like Lower Austria and Silesia; the lands adjoining the plain proper are sometimes called peri-Pannonian.
The term Carpathian Basin is used in Hungarian literature, while the West Slavic languages, Serbo-Croatian languages, German language, Romanian language use Pannonian: in Hungarian the basin is known as Kárpát-medence, in Czech. The East Slavic languages, namely Ukrainian, use terms Tisa-Danube Basin or Middanubian Basin In Hungarian geographical literature various subdivisions of the Carpathian Mountains are considered parts of the Carpathian Basin on the basis of traditional geopolitical divisions. Julius Pokorny derived the name Pannonia from Illyrian, from the Proto-Indo-European root *pen-, "swamp, wet". Although rain is not plentiful, it falls when necessary and the plain is a major agricultural area. For its early settlers, the plain offered few sources of metals or stone, thus when archaeologists come upon objects of obsidian or chert, copper or gold, they have unparalleled opportunities to interpret ancient pathways of trade. The Pannonian plain is divided into two parts along the Transdanubian Mountains.
The northwestern part is called Western Pannonian plain and the southeastern part Eastern Pannonian plain. They comprise the following sections: Western Pannonian Plain: Vienna Basin Little Hungarian Plain Eastern Pannonian Plain: Great Hungarian Plain Pannonian Island Mountains Transdanubian Mountains Drava–Mura lowlandsNote: The Transylvanian Plateau and the Lučenec-Košice Depression and some other lowlands are sometimes considered part of the Pannonian Plain in non-geomorphological or older divisions. Large or distinctive areas of the plain that do not correspond to national borders include: Bačka/Bácska Šajkaška Telečka Gornji Breg Banat Pančevački Rit Veliki Rit Gornje Livade Baranya/Baranja Burgenland, Austria Crişana Jászság Kunság Little Hungarian Plain Mačva Međimurje Moravia, Czech Republic Moslavina Podravina Podunavlje Pokuplje Pomoravlje, around M
Natural History (Pliny)
The Natural History is a book about the whole of the natural world in Latin by Pliny the Elder, a Roman author and naval commander who died in 79 AD. It is one of the largest single works to have survived from the Roman Empire to the modern day and purports to cover all ancient knowledge; the work's subject area is thus not limited to. It is encyclopedic in scope; the work is divided into 37 books, organised into ten volumes. These cover topics including astronomy, geography, anthropology, human physiology, botany, horticulture, mining, sculpture and precious stones. Pliny's Natural History became a model for encyclopedias and scholarly works as a result of its breadth of subject matter, its referencing of original authors, its index; the work is dedicated to the emperor Titus, a son of Pliny's close friend, the emperor Vespasian, in the first year of Titus's reign. It is the only work by Pliny to have survived, the last that he published, he began it in 77, had not made a final revision at the time of his death during the AD 79 eruption of Vesuvius.
Pliny's Natural History was written alongside other substantial works. Pliny combined his scholarly activities with a busy career as an imperial administrator for the emperor Vespasian. Much of his writing was done at night; as for the nocturnal hours spent writing, these were seen not as a loss of sleep but as an addition to life, for as he states in the preface, Vita vigilia est, "to be alive is to be watchful", in a military metaphor of a sentry keeping watch in the night. Pliny claims to be the only Roman to have undertaken such a work, in his prayer for the blessing of the universal mother: Hail to thee, thou parent of all things! and do thou deign to show thy favour unto me, alone of all the citizens of Rome, have, in thy every department, thus made known thy praise. The Natural History is encyclopaedic in scope. However, it does have structure: Pliny uses Aristotle's division of nature to recreate the natural world in literary form. Rather than presenting compartmentalised, stand-alone entries arranged alphabetically, Pliny's ordered natural landscape is a coherent whole, offering the reader a guided tour: "a brief excursion under our direction among the whole of the works of nature..."
The work is unified but varied: "My subject is the world of nature... or in other words, life," he tells Titus. Nature for Pliny was divine, a pantheistic concept inspired by the Stoic philosophy which underlies much of his thought, but the deity in question was a goddess whose main purpose was to serve the human race: "nature, life" is human life in a natural landscape. After an initial survey of cosmology and geography, Pliny starts his treatment of animals with the human race, "for whose sake great Nature appears to have created all other things"; this teleological view of nature was common in antiquity and is crucial to the understanding of the Natural History. The components of nature are not just described in and for themselves, but with a view to their role in human life. Pliny devotes a number of the books to plants, with a focus on their medicinal value. Pliny's premise is distinct from modern ecological theories, reflecting the prevailing sentiment of his time. Pliny's work reflects Rome's imperial expansion which brought new and exciting things to the capital: exotic eastern spices, strange animals to be put on display or herded into the arena the alleged phoenix sent to the emperor Claudius in AD 47 – although, as Pliny admits, this was acknowledged to be a fake.
Pliny repeated Aristotle's maxim. Nature's variety and versatility were claimed to be infinite: "When I have observed nature she has always induced me to deem no statement about her incredible." This led Pliny to recount rumours of strange peoples on the edges of the world. These monstrous races – the Cynocephali or Dog-Heads, the Sciapodae, whose single foot could act as a sunshade, the mouthless Astomi, who lived on scents – were not new, they had been mentioned in the 5th century BC by the Greek historian Herodotus but Pliny made them better known."As full of variety as nature itself", stated Pliny's nephew, Pliny the Younger, this verdict explains the appeal of the Natural History since Pliny's death in the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79. Pliny had gone to investigate the strange cloud – "shaped like an umbrella pine", according to his nephew – rising from the mountain; the Natural History was one of the first ancient European texts to be printed, in Venice in 1469. Philemon Holland's English translation of 1601 has influenced literature since.
The Natural History consists of 37 books. Pliny devised a summarium, or list of contents, at the beginning of the work, interpreted by modern printers as a table of contents; the table below is a summary based on modern names for topics. Pliny's purpose in writing the Natural History was to cover all learning and art so far as they are connected with nature or draw their materials from nature, he says:My subject is a barren one – t
Bodrog
The Bodrog is a river in eastern Slovakia and north-eastern Hungary. It is a tributary to the river Tisza; the Bodrog is formed by the confluence of the rivers Ondava and Latorica near Zemplin in eastern Slovakia. It crosses the Slovak–Hungarian border at the village of Felsőberecki in Hungary, Streda nad Bodrogom in Slovakia, where it is the lowest point in Slovakia, continues its flow through the Hungarian county Borsod-Abaúj-Zemplén, until it meets the river Tisza, in Tokaj. A town along its course is Sárospatak, in Hungary, its length is 67 km. Its watershed area is 13,579 km ²; the river is rich in fish
Slovakia
Slovakia the Slovak Republic, is a landlocked country in Central Europe. It is bordered by Poland to the north, Ukraine to the east, Hungary to the south, Austria to the west, the Czech Republic to the northwest. Slovakia's territory spans about 49,000 square kilometres and is mountainous; the population is over 5.4 million and consists of Slovaks. The capital and largest city is Bratislava, the second largest city is Košice; the official language is Slovak. The Slavs arrived in the territory of present-day Slovakia in the 6th centuries. In the 7th century, they played a significant role in the creation of Samo's Empire and in the 9th century established the Principality of Nitra, conquered by the Principality of Moravia to establish Great Moravia. In the 10th century, after the dissolution of Great Moravia, the territory was integrated into the Principality of Hungary, which would become the Kingdom of Hungary in 1000. In 1241 and 1242, much of the territory was destroyed by the Mongols during their invasion of Central and Eastern Europe.
The area was recovered thanks to Béla IV of Hungary who settled Germans which became an important ethnic group in the area in what are today parts of central and eastern Slovakia. After World War I and the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Czechoslovak National Council established Czechoslovakia. A separate Slovak Republic existed during World War II as a totalitarian, clero-fascist one-party client state of Nazi Germany. At the end of World War II, Czechoslovakia was re-established as an independent country. A coup in 1948 ushered in a totalitarian one-party state under the Communist regime during whose rule the country existed as a satellite of the Soviet Union. Attempts for liberalization of communism in Czechoslovakia culminated in the Prague Spring, crushed by the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968. In 1989, the Velvet Revolution ended the Communist rule in Czechoslovakia peacefully. Slovakia became an independent state on 1 January 1993 after the peaceful dissolution of Czechoslovakia, sometimes known as the Velvet Divorce.
Slovakia is a developed country, with a high-income advanced economy and a high Human Development Index, a high standard of living and performs favourably in measurements of civil liberties, press freedom, internet freedom, democratic governance and peacefulness. The country maintains a combination of market economy with a comprehensive social security system. Citizens of Slovakia are provided with universal health care, free education and one of the longest paid parental leave in the OECD; the country joined the European Union on 1 May 2004 and joined the Eurozone on 1 January 2009. Slovakia is a member of the Schengen Area, NATO, the United Nations, the OECD, the WTO, CERN, the OSCE, the Council of Europe and the Visegrád Group. Although regional income inequality is high, 90% of citizens own their homes. In 2018, Slovak citizens had visa-free or visa-on-arrival access to 179 countries and territories, ranking the Slovak passport 10th in the world; as part of Eurozone, Slovak legal tender is the world's 2nd-most-traded currency.
Slovakia is the world's largest per-capita car producer with a total of 1,040,000 cars manufactured in the country in 2016 alone and the 7th largest car producer in the European Union. The car industry represents 43% of Slovakia's industrial output, a quarter of its exports; the first written mention of name Slovakia is in 1586. It derives from the Czech word Slováky; the native name Slovensko derives from an older name of Slovaks Sloven what may indicate its origin before the 15th century. The original meaning was geographic, since Slovakia was a part of the multiethnic Kingdom of Hungary and did not form a separate administrative unit in this period. Radiocarbon dating puts the oldest surviving archaeological artefacts from Slovakia – found near Nové Mesto nad Váhom – at 270,000 BCE, in the Early Paleolithic era; these ancient tools, made by the Clactonian technique, bear witness to the ancient habitation of Slovakia. Other stone tools from the Middle Paleolithic era come from the Prévôt cave in Bojnice and from other nearby sites.
The most important discovery from that era is a Neanderthal cranium, discovered near Gánovce, a village in northern Slovakia. Archaeologists have found prehistoric human skeletons in the region, as well as numerous objects and vestiges of the Gravettian culture, principally in the river valleys of Nitra, Ipeľ, Váh and as far as the city of Žilina, near the foot of the Vihorlat and Tribeč mountains, as well as in the Myjava Mountains; the most well-known finds include the oldest female statue made of mammoth-bone, the famous Venus of Moravany. The statue was found in the 1940s in Moravany nad Váhom near Piešťany. Numerous necklaces made of shells from Cypraca thermophile gastropods of the Tertiary period have come from the sites of Zákovská, Podkovice and Radošina; these findings provide the most ancient evidence of commercial exchanges carried out between the Mediterranean and central Europe. The Bronze Age in the geographical territory of modern-day Slovakia went through three stages of development, stretching from 2000 to 800 BCE.
Major cultural and political development can be attributed to the significant growth in production of copper in central Slovakia and northwe
Körös
The Körös is a river in eastern Hungary and western Romania. Its length is 128.6 km from the confluence of its two source rivers Fehér-Körös and Fekete-Körös to its outflow into the Tisza. Its drainage basin area is 27,537 km2, it has three source rivers, all of which have their origin in the Apuseni Mountains in Transylvania, Romania: Crișul Alb, Crișul Negru and Crișul Repede. The confluence of the rivers Fehér-Körös and Fekete-Körös is near the town Gyula; the Körös downstream from Gyula is called the Kettős-Körös. 37.3 km further downstream, near Gyomaendrőd, the Sebes-Körös joins the Criș/Körös. The section downstream from Gyomaendrőd is called the Hármas-Körös; the Körös flows into the Tisza River near Csongrád. It was known in antiquity as the "Chrysus", Crisia, Grisia, or Gerasus, while an archaic German name is Kreisch
Ukraine
Romania
Hungary
Serbia
