Somogy County

In the late 10th century, Prince Koppány of Somogy led a rebellion against Stephen I's effort to unify Hungary, earning Somogy a reputation for fierce independence. The town of Somogyvár became one of medieval Hungary's most important religious and secular centers. This was the first population—the one that evolved there naturally. Then came extermination.

1526: The Ottoman Empire began its conquest of Hungary. By 1697, when Ottoman rule ended, the demographic catastrophe was total. Hungary's population had collapsed from 4.5 million to 3.5 million. Somogy was "reduced to a wasteland occupied by only a few seminomadic Vlach herdsmen." Villages disappeared. Fields reverted to swamp and forest. The Fifteen Years War (1593-1606) brought particular devastation—both armies "exterminating a significant portion of the population." This was a mass extinction event: not gradual decline but catastrophic collapse where more than half of settlements vanished and the survivors couldn't maintain the infrastructure their ancestors had built.

Early 1700s: The Habsburg Empire needed taxpayers and soldiers for the reunited but devastated kingdom. They artificially repopulated "Swabian Turkey"—the counties of Tolna, Baranya, and Somogy south of Lake Balaton—with German settlers from southwestern Germany, later called Danube Swabians. This was transplant biology: move organisms from one ecosystem to another, accept the shock, hope they root. By 1910, a census in the Somogy village of Boszenfa recorded 984 people, 586 (59.6%) of whom were ethnic Germans. The transplant had taken. Germans farmed the land that Hungarians had abandoned, spoke German in villages where Hungarian had once been the native tongue, built Lutheran churches where Catholic ones had stood. Founder effects shaped everything: the small founding population carried limited genetic and cultural diversity, but they survived.

May 1945: The Soviet Union demanded the complete expulsion of Germans from Hungary. The Potsdam conference formalized the transfer. Between 1945 and 1948, Hungary expelled approximately 170,000 Danube Swabians to Allied-occupied Germany. Villages that had been 60% German were emptied of Germans within three years. Boszenfa, which had been majority German since the 1700s, became "almost entirely ethnic Hungarian." This was a second mass removal—not extermination like the Ottoman period, but forced uprooting. The land was reseeded again, this time with Hungarian backfill. Another founder population, another starting-from-small.

2022: Somogy County's population was approximately 293,000, making it Hungary's most sparsely populated county. Kaposvár, the county seat, recorded 59,397 residents—down from a peak exceeding 70,000 in the late 20th century, declining at -0.99% annually. The ethnic composition is 3.7% German (remnant of the Danube Swabians who avoided expulsion or returned), 5.6% Roma, 89% Hungarian. The economy is underdeveloped compared to national averages, based on agriculture (cereals, grapes, sunflower) and Lake Balaton tourism. Animal husbandry is a declining sector.

By 2026, Somogy County is in an extinction vortex. Each demographic replacement was smaller than the last: native medieval population (unknown size, but sufficient to build Somogyvár's religious center) → near-zero after Ottoman devastation → German Danube Swabian transplant (59.6% in Boszenfa by 1910) → Hungarian backfill after 1945 expulsion (smaller than German population) → current 293,000 and declining with no replacement population visible. The pattern is clear: not natural succession but serial artificial reseeding after extermination events, and each reseeding fails to reach the carrying capacity of the previous one. The land remembers Koppány's rebellion, remembers the villages that disappeared into Ottoman swamps, remembers the German names that vanished after 1945. Now it's forgetting even the Hungarian names as the population contracts below critical mass. Somogy isn't recovering—it's completing the extinction trajectory that began in 1526 and has never reversed.