Lake Balaton

As I mentioned in my previous article on the most popular Hungarian holiday resorts, now I show you Lake Balaton, 'the Hungarian Sea'. Now I don't want to write about geographical data, but I would like to mention interesting stories and places about the lake.

Hundreds of years before, when there was a lot of water in Lake Balaton, the Tihany peninsula was an island. Old maps show this. In the middle of the 19th century, when the water level was very low there was a plan to drain the lake and its bed would have been ploughed up and cropped with grain. Fortunately this was not fulfilled. Nowadays the water level is controlled with the sluice of River Sió, which connects Lake Balaton with the River Danube.

Unfortunately the Little Balaton region (western bay of Lake Balaton, where the River Zala flows into Lake Balaton) had a similar fate when, in the 1950s years, most of its territory was dried out. The wet land was not good for intensive agricultural production. Two or three decades later the Little Balaton region was restored to its original wetland form. Nowadays as much as 14 thousand hectares is a nature reserve area where many protected birds nest.

In the 1970 - 1980s years, when Hungary belonged to the Eastern Block, Lake Balaton was a well-known meeting point for Germans. East Germany had restricted its citizens to travel abroad. West German people could not travel to East Germany, and East German people were able to travel only into so-called Socialist Countries, like Hungary. Hungary was an open country at that time and it invited guests besides east from west too. Lake Balaton became a meeting point for German families that were cut in two by the Iron Curtain. They could spend there two weeks together. At that time, it was very interesting, when I walked in a parking place that was full with Trabant, Wartburg (East German) and Volkswagen (West German) cars. When I was in a restaurant or on a beach I heard more German words than Hungarian ones. They are old stories. Nowadays there are less and less German guests but there are many people from the Netherlands and Italy.

If you visit this region, you can find various accommodations from camping sites to private houses and motels to luxuries hotels. http://www.balaton.hu/?changelang=en

As for foods and drinks there are many tasteful dishes and wines from the Balaton region. The most known dish is roasted pikeperch of Balaton, and the most famous wine of the region is from Badacsony Hill (the beautiful volcanic hill on the northern shore).

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