The ‘Cursed Channel’: utopian and dystopian imaginations of landscape transformation in twentieth-century Hungary No  emi Ujh  azy a, * , Marianna Bir  o b a Department of Environmental and Landscape Geography, E€ otv€ os Lor and University,1117, Budapest, P azm any P eter stny. 1/c, Hungary b MTA Centre for Ecological Research, Institute of Ecology and Botany, V acr at ot, Alkotm any út 2-4, Hungary article info Article history: Received 23 February 2017 Received in revised form 21 December 2017 Accepted 4 January 2018 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, tradi- tionalism and conservation in Hungary. The scheme was first publicly termed the Cursed Channel in 1937 by a politician from the region, Lajos Dinny es, 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. © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Walking along the nature trails across the wetlands conserved in the Kiskuns ag National Park, one might notice information signs that mention the striking name of the neighbouring channel: ‘  Atok- csatorna’, that is, the ‘Cursed Channel’. 1 This name refers to the Main Channel of the Danube Valley (Duna-v€ olgyi f} ocsatorna, hereafter: DVCS), which was built in the 1910s and 1920s to drain the lower Danube-Tisza Interfluve; it flows through the eastern floodplain of the Danube southward across the Great Hungarian Plain, beginning close to Budapest and joining the Danube in the town of Baja (Fig. 1). Recent decades have witnessed a significant increase in public appreciation of remaining wetlands worldwide. 2 In the area, a growing number of wetlands have come under official protection since the 1970s, and several wetland restorations have been carried out. 3 Despite conservation efforts, however, by the early 1980s there was a severe decline in the level of groundwater in the region, which threatened the sustainability of several lakes * Corresponding author. E-mail address: unoemi@caesar.elte.hu (N. Ujh azy). 1 The Hungarian name itself is ambiguous: the compound ‘  Atok-csatorna’ can mean both that the channel is cursed and d maybe even more so dthat the channel itself is the curse. We chose to use the first meaning because it sounds more natural in English. 2 H. Prince, Wetlands of the American Midwest: A Historical Geography of Changing Attitudes, Chicago, 1997; G.V.T. Matthews, The Ramsar Convention on Wetlands: its History and Development, Gland, 1993. 3 A. Iv anyosi-Szab o, Ahogy elkezd} od€ ott d a term eszetv edelem el} ozm enyei a DunaeTisza k€ oz en, in: A. Iv anyosi-Szab o (Ed.), A Kiskuns agi Nemzeti Park Igazgat os ag Negyven  Eve, Kecskem et, 2015, 11e16. Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Historical Geography journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jhg https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2018.01.001 0305-7488/© 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Journal of Historical Geography 61 (2018) 1e13