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 that show an incredibly wide variety of architectural designs and creativity. Walk with me in the shade of the 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 vacationers - 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 socialist Hungary were allowed to build for themselves on small plots of land. 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