The ‘Cursed Channel’: utopian and dystopian imaginations of landscape transformation in twentieth-century Hungary

Abstract This paper examines the utopian and dystopian discourses surrounding the Main Channel of the Danube Valley, often referred to as the ‘Cursed Channel’, which flows through the eastern floodplain of the Danube southward across the Great Hungarian Plain. Plans for the channel were originally drawn up at the end of the nineteenth century during the era of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but the channel was only completed after the dissolution of the monarchy in the 1920s. The debates concerning the social and ecological aspects of this project were part of the broader political discourse about modernity, traditionalism and conservation in Hungary. The scheme was first publicly termed the Cursed Channel in 1937 by a politician from the region, Lajos Dinnyes, who later served as Hungary's prime minister for a brief period after World War II. By the late 1940s, with the rise of Soviet influence, Hungary was caught up in the sovietization of science and policy, including water management. In the wake of the gradual communist takeover of Hungary, the epithet of the Cursed Channel gained new currency, influencing discourse on local implementations of the Great Stalin Plan for the Transformation of Nature. Tracing the history of the channel and people's perceptions of it, the paper illuminates the construction of a hydrosocial dystopia, and explores the dialectics of utopian and dystopian imaginations of hydrosocial landscapes. We argue that dystopian and utopian geographical imaginaries connected to the Cursed Channel were influential in the transformations of landscape and hydrosocial governance in twentieth-century Hungary.