The National Historical Memorial Park of Ópusztaszer, covering an area of fifty-five hectares, is located in the Southern Great Plain (Alföld), the geographical center of Hungary, surrounded by the Danube and the Tisza rivers. This is the only museum and exhibition area in Hungary which commemorates the Hungarian Conquest and settlement in the Carpathian Basin. According to legends surviving from the early Middle Ages, the chieftains of the Hungarian tribes which settled in the region at the end of the 890s gathered in Ópusztaszer under the leadership of Árpád to decide upon the laws and order of their new homeland. A statue of Árpád, erected in 1896 at the millenary celebrations of the Hungarian Conquest, is now located at the center of the park.

Although historians cannot prove the truth of these legends, many Hungarians accept them and think of Ópusztaszer as the place of the first national assembly of the founders of our state. It became a place of honor and pride for good reason. The history of Central Europe had sorely tested all the peoples living here, not only in the distant past. The Hungarians are a small nation that has been living in this region through the tempest of over 1100 years of history. For the last one thousand years they have been organized in the form of a Christian state. The nation’s wise rulers tied their people’s fate to Western Europe by means of a shared religion and culture, because they realized that this was the only way to survive and to maintain the independence of their people between East and West.

In the Historical Memorial Park, established in the last third of the twentieth century, this distant historical event is depicted by the gigantic cyclorama painting called A magyarok bejövetele (The land-taking of the Hungarians). This painting, by Árpád Feszty and his co-painters, was unveiled in 1894 and depicts the main events of the conquest in a romantic style. The cyclorama is an unique manifestation of nineteenth-century national culture, and thus a national treasure.

As an exhibition area, the Historical Memorial Park has multiple functions. In the following pages we will concentrate on the open-air ethnographical museum, which preserves the folk-cultural heritage of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With eighteen groups of houses this the second largest open-air exhibition in Hungary. From a thematic perspective, it commemorates the folk traditions of the Southern Great Plain through buildings and artifacts, which introduce the characteristic professional activities and the typical architecture and building types of various forms of settlement (isolated farmsteads, villages, small towns, and market towns). The natural environment has greatly influenced the lives of the people living in this region. In addition to the Danube and the Tisza, the region is traversed by two more rivers, the Maros and the Körös. On the loose soil deposited by the rivers over thousands of years, a special type of agriculture has been developed, which differs from that practiced on hard soil. Another interesting characteristic feature of this region is the unique settlement structure. Around the beginning of the twentieth century, this part of the Great Plain was still dominated by isolated farmsteads, located far away from organized settlements, and often even from each other. Families living in these isolated homes had to rely on themselves in their daily lives and often struggled for survival. Our open-air museum presents two types of isolated farmstead. The farmstead from the Szeged region was built in the second half of the nineteenth century. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Szeged was the largest town on the Great Plain in terms of territory, with 35–40 percent of its population living on isolated farmsteads surrounding the town. The loose alluvial soil facilitated the development of a multifaceted type of agriculture: in addition to grains, they cultivated grapes, fruit, and vegetables (mostly peppers), and kept animals. The farmstead on display, which used to house two generations together with all their goods and implements, vividly demonstrates the lifestyle of its owners. The other farmstead-type is represented by a farmstead from Szentes, which was taken over from the hard-soiled regions of the Tiszántúl, which is characterized mainly by the cultivation of grain crops. Its small size and poor furnishings indicate that its owner was a so-called “dwarf-holder,” or a farmer who had only a few acres.

The ethnographical exhibition also tries to illustrate the social changes which took place at the beginning of the twentieth century, by presenting two types of peasant landholders on their way toward becoming part of the bourgeois middleclass. (In Hungary, as in Central Europe in general, the economic and social development of the bourgeois middle class lagged behind that of Western Europe, and a real middle class had not developed before the early twentieth century.)

The house of an onion grower from Makó can be interpreted as representative of this economic and social shift, both in its architecture and furnishings. At the beginning of the twentieth century, peasants who were engaged in onion growing consciously chose the thorny path of social advancement. It is interesting to note that this was a period when thousands of impoverished peasants from other regions of Hungary decided to migrate to the United States in search of a better living.

The other illustration of these social changes is the house of a paprika farmer, relocated from the Lower Town (Alsóváros) of Szeged. This house clearly suggests a well-off peasant owner, at least in a Hungarian context, who acquired his wealth by cultivating and producing paprika. As a result of the work of paprika farmers, paprika production has developed into an industrial activity and has became the worldwide hallmark of Szeged. The process of cultivating and producing paprika is displayed in two houses of the open-air museum: in the Szeged farmstead with its horse-driven paprika mill, and in the Lower Town house, which houses a permanent exhibition on paprika production.