We reluctantly decided we needed to put Hungary behind us. Today we had our longest driving day of the trip at 400 kilometers as once again we had to back track northeast to Budapest to head northwest to Sopron. Luckily it was Sunday and all of the commercial trucks are restricted so we were the slowest vehicle on the toll way.
We were driving thru a small village called Kakasd when Ton asked that I find a way to stop near what appeared to be a wooden church. François is agile by RV standards but not by car standards, but I found a place to turn around and we found a parking lot near the building which turned out to be the community center for the village.
Besides having a cool building Kakasd is a typical small village you pass thru on the highway. But because we stopped I checked the history of the village posted next to the community center. Prior to WWII the village population was split between Swabian Germans and Hungarians. After WWII the Germans were sent to Germany even though many of the families had been there for centuries. This left the city lacking people, but at the same time Hungarian minorities were being kicked out of Romania and the Ukraine and the lost Germans were replaced by these Hungarian families who had lived for centuries in Romania and the Ukraine. The wooden churches are common in Romania and Ukraine, so after the fall of communism the communities wanted to recognize their heritage by building a replica of the wooden churches from their ancestral homeland.
This little village of 1500 people was a poignant reminder of the complexity of history in Europe. I knew intellectually about the mass displacement of minorities after WWII, but reading about the impact on this little village really drove it home to me.
Tomorrow we are going to visit our last Hungarian town located in a little isthmus of Hungary that sticks into Austria. Our Austrian neighbors told us that in addition to being a cute town Sopron has the highest density of dentists in Hungary as dental work is much cheaper in Hungary than Austria and Sopron is the center of dental tourism from Austria.