In July, 38 staff of Aggtelek National Park visited the Gladyszow breeding centre in Regietow, Poland (http://treehugger.hu/node/1085). This week, 14 staff from the centre visited Aggtelek. The Hucul or Carpathian is a pony or small horse breed originally from the Carpathian Mountains. It has a heavy build and possesses great endurance and hardiness. The breed is also referred to as the Carpathian pony, Huculska, Hutsul, Huţul, Huţan or Huzul. The breed gets its name from the Hutsul people, who live mostly in the Carpathian's in Ukraine and in Romania, but also in an area in the East Carpathian Mountains north of the river Bistritz, officially named "Huzelei."

When the group arrived to the Tengerszem Hotel in Jósvafő we of course greeted them with homemade national park plum palinka. After they found their rooms, I took them on a short walk along the Fürkész Nature Trail down to the stunningly turquoise "tengerszem," or glacial tarn. The short walk through a forested mossy and leafy park and along small man-made canals passes by the outlet for the Jósva Stream, responsible for much of the karst cavern systems in the area. The water flows out of the Baradla Cave at 10 degrees into the lake, and in times of flooding froths out of the gated exit. Even though I work in the Directorate office a short walk away, I do not visit this beautiful and tranquil place enough.

Following a lunch of wild boar stew, we embarked on a horse and carriage tour of the village and made our way out to the pasture where about 130 of the 231 hucul horses in the Aggtelek herd reside. Here, the mares, foals and fillies pasture, while the stallions are in Perkupa, and others are in Szinpetri and at the Manor House Horse Riding Centre. Horse riding tuition for children and seasonal riding camps are held at the Manor House. The journey followed along the rocky streambed of the wooded Tohonya Ravine, through the Gergés-lápa Pasture, and finally arrived at the stunning scenes of Lófej (Horsehead) Valley. According to Gabor, our carriage driver and one of the Park's successful hucul carriage race competitors, the horses pulling our carriages were not hucul, but rather a cold blooded breed from south Balaton near the Austrian border.

After a bit of a warmup back at the hotel, the group went on the medium length tour of the Baradla Cave from the Red Lake Visitor's Centre. They were in such awe, they decided to extend their stay the next day to also visit the Rakoczi Cave. Our visitors dined on traditional Hungarian stuffed cabbage in the evening.

The next morning ranger Imre "Muki" Mihalik took us on a private tour of Derenk, an abandoned Polish village nearby Szögliget and accessed through a road leading from the Salamander House Environmental Education Centre and Hostel.The village at one time were harvesting and selling fruit from 4000 fruit trees and herding more than 700 cows. As one of the consequences of the Trianon Treaty after WWI, the village was cut off from its orchards and markets to the north. They were soon down to 1000 fruit trees. With these changes, many turned to smuggling across the new border in order to market their goods. In 1943, Hungary's dictator Admiral Horthy decided he wanted to use the area for hunting (as he also did in Gyűrűfű), and forcibly removed the villagers. Derenk was the last village in Hungary with an ethnic-majority of Poles. On the other hand, this was probably the best thing for the survival of the villagers themselves. The settlement was extremely insular, resulting in inbreeding and a very high infant mortality rate. Evidence of this can be seen from the memorial erected in the cemetery listing both names and ages at death. Horthy's order to abandon the village spread the population out and added fresh blood to the genes. Sites of the former houses and their owners are marked with white and red signs, which also identify where the previous owners moved to. The annual summer Derenk Bucsu (festival) brings back former residents and their relatives to honour the settlement and the families. There is a former school building still standing, and a small chapel. The school hosts a small exhibition about the former village. Tamas, Kriszti and Peti met us here with a welcome bogracs of hot mulled wine. Back for lunch at the Salamander House, Lajos had cooked up a huge pot of gulyas, and Rita and Agi had several trays of kenyer langos (a kind of Hungarian pizza made with a sour cream base rather than tomato base) baking in the outside buboskemence.

Kata and I also used the time to close the house up for the winter. The cute baby wild boars we saw during the summer were (un)kind enough to dig up all our precious garlic bulbs we had planted. However, the three rows of winter wheat are doing very well. Simon and Dori came over for Sunday brunch, when we inaugurated the new dutch oven with a walnut (theirs) turkey dish. We also invented a dessert made from a puliszka base, but mixed with coconut cream and toasted hazelnuts, topped off with a cherry sauce from our first cherry harvest this summer. On another occasion, I made a dish of drunken beans (beer beans). See you in the spring Süni Ház!