One of the strangest places in Hungary lies beside the Tisza River in a village called Gergelyiugornya. Hugged by a bend in the river, it’s a relatively narrow, woody flood basin area packed with small cottages, showing incredibly wide variety of architectural design and creativity. Walk with me among the shades of poplar trees and see the weird weekend homes and summer houses.
This part of Ugornya is a quite unusual place where grotesque houses are growing out of the moist soil, so close to each other, that holiday makers – mostly teenagers and young adults – can listen to every neighbour’s summertime tracklist, dominated by the largest beat-pumping sound system.
Most of these houses were built in the 80s, when the workers of the socialist Hungary were allowed to build for themselves. And because people weren’t too wealthy back then, they used their own imaginations to design, and cheap materials to build: pine plank, fibreboard, container sheets, slate, corrugated slate, concrete, railway rails. The result is a one-of-a-kind forest city, a weird riverside suburbia, where funny, surprising, even awesome cabins amuse the visitor.
Photo: Attila Nagy/Gizmodo