Komarom-Esztergom
1000: Esztergom crowns kings. 1920: Trianon bisects Komárom city along Danube, truncates both counties, forces 1923 merger. 1947: Coal town Tatabánya displaces Esztergom as county seat. 1980s: Mining ceases, 50% job loss. 2007: Schengen reunites divided city.
On Christmas Day 1000 or January 1, 1001, Stephen I was crowned in Esztergom, making the city Hungary's first ecclesiastical capital and coronation site. Fifty kilometers west, the fortress city of Komárom controlled Danube crossings, its unified settlement spanning both banks. Two separate medieval counties, two distinct functions: Esztergom concentrated spiritual power where kings took their oaths, Komárom secured the strategic river corridor. For nine centuries this division of labor held.
June 4, 1920 cut deeper than anyone anticipated. The Treaty of Trianon made the Danube the new border with Czechoslovakia. Komárom, a unified city on both banks since medieval times, was bisected mid-river: the northern half became Komárno (Czechoslovak), the southern half stayed Hungarian. No other Hungarian settlement was physically severed by the new borders. Upstream, Esztergom County lost its northern territories to Slovakia. The wreckage was stark: Komárom County kept 44 villages from its pre-Trianon extent, Esztergom County retained 22 towns. In 1923, Hungary merged the two truncated remnants into Komárom-Esztergom County—an administrative triage, binding two wounded bodies into one functional entity.
November 20, 1947: the mining colonies around lignite deposits were formally merged into Tatabánya, a city that existed to extract coal. Within a decade, this extractive upstart became the county seat, displacing Esztergom—the city that had crowned kings—to symbolic vestige status. Tatabánya embodied communist Hungary's industrial ambitions, the county's largest lignite basin metabolized through state-owned mines. Employment peaked in the 1960s when Tatabánya ranked 7th among Hungarian industrial centers. Then the seams ran thin. Mining ceased in the late 1980s. The county lost 50% of industrial jobs in the 1990s. Population contracted. The extractive appendage had consumed itself.
December 12, 2007: Hungary joined the Schengen Area. The border controls vanished. Komárom and Komárno, severed for 87 years, functionally reunited. Residents cross the Danube bridge without stopping, shopping and working interchangeably on both banks. Meanwhile Tatabánya regenerated: the coal economy pivoted to electronics, chemicals, and medical instruments manufacturing. Esztergom remains the Primate's seat, its basilica the largest church in Hungary, drawing pilgrims and tourists but wielding no administrative authority. The county seat stayed in Tatabánya, not because of extraction—the mines are gone—but because the administrative infrastructure and transportation links had already consolidated there.
By 2026, Komárom-Esztergom is simultaneously severed and reunited, ancient and post-industrial, symbolic and functional. The bisected city operates as one economic unit across a border that still legally exists but practically doesn't. Esztergom's coronation cross remains in the basilica treasury, inert yet sacred. Tatabánya's factories produce not coal but semiconductors. The county isn't healing from Trianon—it's reorganizing around a different metabolic strategy, one that acknowledges the amputation without pretending the severed part will return.