Summary

After 1945, the repartition of land granted a few acres to the inhabitants  of Ópusztaszer (meaning 'Old Plain Village'). Considering geographical circumstances, these were insufficient to subsist on. Obviously, this also contributed to the gradual drop in the number of the community's populacion after 1945. While 2,738 people lived in the village in 1960, the national census found only 2,130 residents in 1995. This decline can alsó be regarded as a consequence of the large-scale social changes that caused quite a few people to leave for towns to study there, and many of them to stay and live there from then on. On the other hand, with improving transportation and the industrialisation in the socialist era, a part of the population found jobs at Kistelek, Csongrád, Sándorfalva or in the town of Szeged. Following a shorter or longer period of commuting, they found it more natural to settle down where they worked.

Another contributing factor was the establishment of a co-operative in the framework of agricultural restructuring. In the knowledge of the geographical circumstances in the area, this co-operative must not have operat-ed with excellent results. The former cooperative 'Chieftain Árpád' was liquidated in the late 1990s. If there was any effort to industrialise the area, it was insignificant. Only the conversion of the former Pallavicini cas-tle into a staterun, social and health-care home created a few jobs.

Today a parish hall, a post office, a primary school with eight classes, and a kindergarten operate. The settlement runs an elderly people's day-care home that can temporarily work as a residential home as well. Its budget amounts to a hundred million forints. The population on the average is middle-aged. Even today many people live in the outskirts. Two food stores and a few little shops, opened recently, can be found in the village. A doctor's consulting office, a pharmacy and a library also operate here. The settlement has been wearing the name 'Ópusztaszer', instead of Pusztaszer' (meaning 'Plain Village') since 1973.

At the end of the 19th century, the Pallavicini's had a chapel built as the family's burial-place at Anyás, a few kilometres far from their castle. The adversarial class-warfare attitude and human ignorance doomed the chapel to be totally robbed, abandoned and, by the early 1960s, its parts to be carried everywhere. in 1982 Károly Pallavicini, after dancing attendance upon the great, succeed in obtaining a permit to unearth the remains of coffins and bones and to have them reburied at Sándorfalva.

Massive archaeological diggings, commeneed in 1970, and the accompanying tourisin, first scientific and random, developed for the 1980s to becomc consciously organised, historical tourism with increasingly large number of visitors from the country, what is more, from abroad. With its continuously widening sights, the Opusztaszer National Historical Memorial Park attracts hundreds or thousands of visitors every year. The operation of the Park enabled several new jobs to be created for the people living in the nearby. At the same time, disadvantageous changes also occurred after the political changes in 1989 and 1990. The military headquarters located in the village was wound up, and the liquidation of the co-operative also meant the termination of several jobs.

The community's village-feast coincides with the Opusztaszer celebration that is held on 20th August each year. The settlement has had a new coat-of-arms designed to cover up events from their history of more than a thousand years.

The community's pride, the memorial park that has earned national reputation to the settlement is situated roughly one and a half kilometres far from the centre of the village, in the place of the Pusztaszer grange of the Pallavicini family's former manor. Most of the buildings in the grange have been pulled down over the last twenty years so as to meet the demands of the increasing tourism. The more and more significant memóriái park lays on 56 hectares. Entering, a visitor will encounter a monument inaugurated in 1896. The garden of ruins presents the remains of the church and chapel that were built more than a 1000 years ago. The Feszty panoráma offers an attraction known world-wide that illustrates the Hungárián tribes entering the Carpathian basin. The continuously developing open-air ethnographical museum shows the visitor the typical houses and buildings of Dél-Alföld, i.e the South Plain. Another valuable sight is the exhibition showing the main values of the natural protection area.

During its history with the exception of a short period, the Pusztaszer estate as a whole was largely in one hand, it was not cut to pieces among several landlords. After the Turks left Hungary, Pusztaszer underwent a specific development, in particular from the early 19th century. The plain land was a part of the manor, therefore its history is also a part of the history of the manor. In the Middle Ages it was usually a castle or a fort that served as the centre of a manor. As latifundia in the classic sense came to being here as laté as in the 18th century when landowners preferred living in Vienna, no real centre could evolve. Despite its specific, character-istic features, Pusztaszer was a typical example, a real constat of nearly all the contradictions of the Hungarian society and economy of all time. One can find here high and lesser nobility, foreign and Hungarian noblemen, latifundia and towns, serfs and landlords, tenants and holders, mortgagees and owners, aristocrats and comitats, litigation ad domineering, chasing out and settling down, oppression and rewarding. If two relatives come to an agreement with a third party, five others will immediately turn to court, or secretly offer a better deal. Among the rivalling, spiteful parties names from the most famous Hungarian families can also be found. It is a contradictory, specific and yet typical history. It is and it is not only local history. Pusztaszer is a symbol, the scene of decisive events in Hungary' history. According to the legend, the Hungarian conquest in the Carpathian basin came to an end at Pusztaszer, and the repartition of land was also commenced here. On Ferenc Erdei's initiative a national memorial com-mittee was set up in 1970 with the aim to convert the area of the former Szer monastery into a memóriái park, and thus to make it deserve its sig-nificance that it had achieved in Hungary's history. The diggings carried out with extensive social support, the village museum still constructed, the Feszty panoráma and the museums operating here grant a worthy environment to the area that reminds us of the Hungarian people's important historical events.