Nagy. In Hungarian it means ‘great’, pronounced with a nasal ‘oi’ sound for the vowel, and with tongue to palette, spitting out the G sound. I can’t pronounce it the same way twice, but the result is surprisingly intelligible to waitresses, bar staff and our guide Tamás. It’s hard to know who is more surprised, me that it works or the locals who seem to be unfamiliar with English tourists trying.
***
Ahead of me is the puszta. The great Hungarian plain and the westernmost
stretch of steppe in Eurasia. In the very distance — unfathomably flat and far
— trees shimmer, shake and levitate, a fair distance above the clear sky
swimming beneath. Clear spring skies. The air is hot and heavy. The soil says
it hasn’t rained in weeks.
I thought I knew Hungary but I didn’t. Like
it’s language, it never seems to stay the same. It is not settled, easy to
master. I had it as Cambridgeshire on a vast scale: fen and farms. Flat, wet
and traditionally kept — grey cattle, Racka sheep, the Mangalica pigs — an East
Anglia with a better range of birds. I recently came across the poet C.P.
Cavafy in a great piece by Amy Liptrot:
You shall not find new places; other seas
you shall not find. The place shall follow you.
And you shall walk the same familiar streets
I was, the first time I was here, an East Anglian abroad in East Anglia:
all wetlands and thin copses, and birds half-familiar. Though I did see a Black
Stork and think it was, in that sun-addled moment of it sailing over on
effortless wings, the most magnificent thing.
I was wrong. Away from the old fish ponds and reedbeds, there is a vast
expanse of even older grassland. The flat sublime. A landscape impossible to
take in in its entirety.
***
The woods here are not of nature’s doing. We drove up to one, firmly
attached to the ground, though it probably levitates too if you look from the
dusty red-roofed town on the edge of the horizon. Under communism swathes of
the Hortobagy was dyked, irrigated and ploughed. Damage that is slowly being
repaired. The trees that were planted here were, oddly, American. You can find
Aspens with rookeries and Nightingales in them, and it is bizarre, incongruous
and not as ecologically useless as you might expect. For although the Hortobagy
is a natural grassland, these trees provide nesting grounds for lots of birds
that would otherwise struggle, such as the Rooks. The Rooks have to compete
with the Red-footed Falcons returning from the very south of Africa, who take
over old Rook nests. In this hot, bare wood the Rooks croak. Spring is black
and guttural. The falcons perched in the trees shriek like London parakeets.
Grey males and orange females seeing the Rooks off their stolen nest-spaces and
snatching insects over the grassland.
The grassland here is Sousliks scurrying, worrying amongst the brown waves
and white ribbons of chamomile flowers. A Saker — large, so large — hunts
overhead. Another of the Souslik’s predators, the Long-legged Buzzard, spirals
on the thermals overhead. More of a fawn and orange than the Common Buzzards
that sit on every fence and motorway sign here. The Sousliks never settle.
The falcon and the buzzard bear a familial similarity to British birds. It
is a subtle exotic, the familiar yet different. It leads to a kind of uncanny
birding where slight differences make different species, whilst the wagtail in
the long grass has a blue-grey head, long yellow stripe above its an eye and is
the same species as our Yellow Wagtail.
***
That night from the track outside our hotel on the edge of the Hortobagy,
we watch a distant storm in the south west horizon. Lightning raking the sky.
No rain falls on us, but the warm storm wind blows anyway. When the lightning
flashes it lights up the serpent-like sidewinding of dust down the track.
The Nightingales sing regardless.
***
Two days earlier we were somewhere in eastern Hungary. Somewhere off the
map in our hands, navigating by Tamás’s head into the land beyond the plain. If
you had unfair stereotypes of Hungary, here is why they are manifest. A
landscape of intensively farmed fields, flat and hedgeless. A colourless place
and a ferocious sun — we drive past a man strimming the verge while wearing
only his pants. For every absolutely gorgeous part of the country, Hungary has
these places that feel neglected, run-down and unloved. We take a couple of
minor roads and end up in the middle of a desert. A ploughed field that extends
all around into a panorama of dust and dirt. There is no cover other than a few
meagre, stunted trees by the road. All is arid and brown. A vision of
over-farmed hell. An uncared for land.
‘When we discovered this place there were 50 pairs here. Now there are 2.’
It’s hard to imagine what 50 pairs of Short-toed Larks in song, rippling
across this barren place would be like.
Tamás pokes the soil with his tripod leg.
‘They need this dry, dusty soil. They used to be a speciality of the
Hortobagy but in parts it is under grazed and they don’t breed there now. Same
with Kentish Plover and Collared Pratincole’.
The worth of a guide is that he can navigate to places like this. It
begins to feel a little like cheating when after five minutes you’re watching
half the Hungarian population of Short-toed Larks, crawling between the furrows,
a tiny sandy speck in a vast brown plane.
***
The next evening it spits with rain. Grey clouds rolling in over the
steppe, promising future storms. A big sky, bigger than I’m used to. We sought
shelter by a ruined farm, riddled with bullet holes. We passed a T34 tank on a
plinth by the road: a monument to the Battle of Debrecen, when the Hortobagy
was a front for a tank battle between the broken and soon to be defeated nazis
and the red army sweeping through eastern Europe. Or perhaps from the Soviet
occupation of Hungary — the Hortobagy is just inhospitable enough for forced
labour camps.
A Barn Owl detached itself from the farmhouse and slips into the gathering
gloom. It is not used to people being there for large parts of the Hortobagy
are restricted access and to get onto the plain requires a guide and is
strictly policed. I have mixed feelings about this but it indisputably provides
Great Bustards with the space to thrive — and all the other open grassland
loving wildlife of the area.
The landscape is charged with absence. The bullet holes in the farmhouse
chill. The trees have no leaves. There are no people, nobody working, other
than lorries thundering past a road just visible on the horizon. It is a
haunting, inscrutable place in these overcast moods. Not East Anglian in the
slightest. Whilst we are stood there nothing arrives and nothing leaves. A
couple of Roe deer bucks leap from patches of long grass to long grass, the
only movement, the only thing other than a vast still quietness.
And then we pick out one, three, then six Great Bustards out in the grass.
Not too far from the Roe Deer in size, a fabulously eccentric bird with a
fanned tail that almost reaches its head, a tigerish mottled orange and black
back, whiskers that fan out from its grey, turkey-like face. When it shakes, it
ruffles its entire plumage, flashing white like a can-can dancer.
It is an absurd bird. A relic from Europe’s past as a flat and open and
remote country; a bird for Europe’s future where places like this remain
protected for their self-evident qualities.
4 Accent 6;
Stephen Rutt 