high in hill regions such as the Bükk, Zemplén and Mecsek. The pull of vibrant and cosmopolitan Budapest has exacerbated the problem of rural depopulation started during the Communist period. Impossibly neat peasant houses, manicured lawns and no barking dogs is usually a sign, however charming at first glance, that you are passing through a village where most inhabitants have died out and the cottages are now holiday homes.
In Budapest streets and squares have been renamed and statues removed in an attempt to erase the memory of the Communist era, but many village communities have neither the resources nor the inclination to indulge in symbolic acts. As a result many of the old street names continue to exist: Béke utca (Peace Street); Felszabadulás utca (Liberation Street); Vörös Hadsereg utca (Red Army Street); not to mention Lenin utca.
A History of Hungary’s Walking Movements
It is a mistake to view the development of recreational walking in Hungary as a harmless pastime detached from history. The growth of walking clubs followed the same pattern as the rest of Europe, members of the professional classes, who had more leisure time, taking the lead. Hungary’s first club, Magyarországi Kárpát Egyesület (MKE), Hungarian Carpathian Association, was founded in 1873 and it played a major role in the exploration of the Tatras. During the 1880s its Budapest section decided to explore the Pilis and in 1891 seceded from the MKE and set up the Magyar Turista Egyesület (MTE), Hungarian Association of Walkers. During its first two years its members had waymarked 240km (148 miles) of trails, built refuges, cleared wells and springs, and founded a magazine, Turisták Lapja. The first of the workingclass clubs, the Munkás Testedzők Turista Egyesülete (MTTE), Hungarian Workers’ Sport Walkers Association, was set up in 1908. A group of printers created the Természetbarátok Turista Egyesülete (TTE), Association of the Friends of Nature, in 1910, and another important working-class club, the Magyar Turista Szövetsége (MTSZ), Union of Hungarian Walkers, was founded in 1913. Over the next 20 years there were other clubs, adding to the confusion of acronyms. Their aim was to promote class-consciousness, healthy living and temperance, and they maintained links with the Austrian Natur Freund clubs and the wider social democratic movement. Inevitably the political affiliations of many walking clubs led to splits and mergers. After much bitter infighting the MKE, MTE and TTE merged under the MTSZ. At the Treaty of Trianon after World War I, Hungary lost the Tatras to Czechoslovakia, but as if to compensate the walking movement in Hungary expanded. Ideology continued to play a part and many clubs were aligned with rightist or leftist causes.
The growth of independent walking movements ceased in 1944 when the Germans deposed the Regent, Miklós Horthy, and handed power to the Hungarian Fascist party, the Arrow Cross. After the war the Communist regime disbanded all the pre-war walking clubs whether ‘bourgeois’, rightist (some clubs had had members active in the Arrow Cross) or socialist. A new organisation, the Magyar Természetbarát Szövetség (Union of the Hungarian Friends of Nature), was set up on the Soviet model in 1949. To add to the confusion (or perhaps encourage the idea that the new organisation was a continuation of the more politically acceptable pre-Communist Union of Hungarian Walkers with the same acronym), the Friends of Nature organisation was called the MTSZ.
Between the wars about 50 walking hostels had been built by the efforts of members of various walking clubs, but when the Communists gained power they were collectivised. This was a particularly bitter blow to the members of the disbanded working-class clubs who had struggled hard to find the resources to build the hostels. Unfortunately the state tourist agency had no long-term interest in the buildings and many hostels were neglected. In 1974 the state allocated the buildings to catering and tourism enterprises for the purpose of making a profit, but many were allowed to decay until they were unsafe and had to be demolished.
In 1987 the MTSZ became independent of the state and in 1990, a little over a hundred years after its foundation, the MTE was re-formed. Since the political transition of the late 1980s walking has, according to some Hungarians, declined, although masochistic challenge walks modelled on the Czech tradition have become popular. By the end of the twentieth century a new generation not burdened by history or ideology was taking up walking, and walking club membership was rising.
The National Blue Route
In 1938 the MTSZ set up Hungary’s first long-distance walk, the Szent István-túra (Saint Stephen’s Way). The 852km (526 mile) route started at Tapolca in the Balaton region and finished at Tokaj-hegy, the southernmost hill of the Zemplén. Its first chairman was Jenő Cholnoky, the revisionist geographer who bitterly opposed the redrawing of Hungary’s borders at the Treaty of Trianon. After World War II the route fell into disuse, but during the 1950s the Budapest railway workers’ union revived it. At first the route was managed by and for the exclusive use of railway workers. The union produced a guidebook and introduced a badge scheme for walkers who completed the whole distance. In 1961 it was taken over by the Communist MTSZ, whose members founded the ‘Blue Route Movement’, a campaign to lengthen the original Saint Stephen’s Way. This led to the creation of the Országos Kéktúra (National Blue Route), which crossed the length of Hungary starting at Nagy-Milic on the Czechoslovakian border in the east and finishing at Írott-kő on the Austrian border. Considering the sensitivity of these frontiers during the Cold War it was quite an achievement. The MTSZ installed stamping points along the various stages of the route (they can still be seen today) and a certificate was issued to walkers who completed all 1093km (675 miles).
Regéc Castle, Zemplén, Walk 17
In the early 1980s Pál Rockenbauer walked the National Blue Route with a film crew and the outcome was the very popular television documentary One Million Steps Around Hungary. Rockenbauer took the opportunity to highlight the unavailability of basic walking gear and the lack of budget accommodation along the route for walkers. He was also exasperated by signs of rural decline such as vandalism, litter, the depopulation of villages due to the Communist government’s centralisation policies, and insensitive planning by local authorities.
The political changes in 1988 prompted the MTSZ to suggest a commemoration walk for the 950th anniversary of Saint Stephen’s death and the fiftieth anniversary of the Saint Stephen’s Way. The event was approved and the frontier controls relaxed in order for the two groups of walkers to start at different ends and meet at the middle in Dobgókő as their predecessors had done in 1938.
In 1995 the National Blue Route was officially connected to the E3, the pan-European long-distance path linking Spain with Turkey. Unfortunately the link is broken at the Austrian and Slovakian borders, where it is necessary to come off route and use an official border crossing via the main road. A few Hungarians do walk the entire National Blue Route, which also crosses the Great Plain, and have the badge to prove it. Many of the stages linking the hill ranges can be boring or involve lengthy road bashing, but if you are interested, contact the headquarters of the MTSZ (see Appendix 4) or visit the Cartographia map shop to obtain a copy of the official booklet, Országos Kéktúra: Útvonalvázlat és Igazoló Füzet. It has spaces to stamp the stages, but take your own inkpad as the ones at the stamping points dry out. Cartographia also publishes Országos Kéktúra, an illustrated guide to the whole route. The text is in Hungarian, but its 1:40 000 maps are invaluable for their coverage of all the stages.
WALKS IN NORTHERN HUNGARY
THE AGGTELEK
After the Treaty of Trianon, when Hungary’s borders were redrawn, Jenő Cholnoky, the Hungarian geographer, condemned the outcome as ‘a geographical absurdity, which history will deservedly condemn’. Without adding weight to revisionist claims, the Slovak-Hungarian border, which divides the Gömör- Torna karst in two, is at the very least a geological absurdity. Millions of years ago the hills on both sides of today’s frontier began as sediments covered in a tropical sea. After the water receded, the exposed limestone was eroded, creating a landscape of karst forest, alpine meadows,
