The most recent example, therefore, is Kolontár, where Prime Minister Viktor Orbán personally announced that the area of the town affected by the sludge should not be repopulated. Instead, the local majors have already marked out the territory for the new districts of both Kolontár and Devecser. As for the abandoned part of the town still covered with the sludge, locals plan to erect a memorial in remembrance of the victims of the catastrophe.

Nagygéc – this small village counted 700 inhabitants when an unprecedented flood of the Tisza inundated the entire area in May, 1970. The flood was even more devastating than expected, since the Romanian army destroyed one of the local security dams by the Tisza in order to secure a nearby rocket-launcher military base. After the inundation, the cabinet council prohibited the reconstruction of any buildings and withdrew the village’s independence. Today only one person lives in Nagygéc permanently, while those houses that were rebuilt after all are used as holiday homes.

Nagyecsér flourished before WW II, but the collectivization and privatization of local lands during the fifties forced many of the peasants to leave their farms and, consequently, their homes. During the following decades, the local school lost all of its pupils, and newer generations moved from the area. The devolution of the village ended during the 90s when it became completely uninhabited.

In Iharkút, the village was sacrificed in favor of the aluminum industry after a large deposit of bauxite was found underneath it. In 1981, the government withdrew Iharkút’s independence and evacuated the people to the nearby Pápa. They even exhumed the cemetery while digging down to establish the new strip mine. Today the only remnant of the village is the large pit of the mine – where, by the way, the first dinosaur fossils of Hungary were found, too. Ex-inhabitants also erected a monument in memory of their village, which literally disappeared off the face of earth.

Translated from Origo.hu by Bernát Iváncsics