Tolna County

The Ottoman occupation of the 16th and 17th centuries brought "almost total devastation and destruction" to the Pannonia Plain. Villages disappeared, fields went fallow. When the Habsburg Monarchy expelled the Ottomans after the 1683 siege of Vienna, vast stretches of southern Transdanubia lay depopulated. The Austrian crown needed taxpayers and soldiers. Beginning in 1689, German colonists from Swabia, the Palatinate, Hesse, Westerwald, Fulda, Bavaria, and Franconia were resettled south of Lake Balaton, across the counties of Tolna, Baranya, and Somogy. This region came to be called "Swabian Turkey"—Turkey for the Ottoman devastation, Swabian for the Germans who filled the demographic void. By 1840, when the term was formalized, 200,000 to 250,000 German-speaking inhabitants had built farms, churches, and villages where Hungarian settlements had once stood. The transplant had taken.

May 1945: The Soviet Union demanded the expulsion of all ethnic Germans from Hungary. The Potsdam Conference formalized the transfer. Those designated for deportation from Tolna County were assembled at a prison facility in Szekszárd, the county capital, where all deportees from Tolna and Baranya were collected. Between 1945 and 1948, at least 11,455 deportees from Tolna, Baranya, and Somogy were expelled to Allied-occupied Germany—though sources note this likely underestimates actual numbers. Villages that had been majority German for 250 years were emptied within three years. By the 2011 census, only 4% of Tolna County's population (roughly 9,000 individuals) identified as German. The transplant had been removed.

Somogy County, also part of Swabian Turkey, never recovered from this extraction. Its population entered a death spiral—serial replacement failure, extinction vortex, declining toward functional extinction. Tolna County followed a different trajectory. In the 1980s, during the communist era, Hungary built the Paks Nuclear Power Plant on the Danube River in Tolna County. Four VVER-440 Soviet-designed pressurized water reactors, combined net capacity 1,889 megawatts. The plant generated approximately 50% of Hungary's electricity, supplying 15-16 terawatt-hours annually. Employment impacts included around 2,000 direct jobs at the facility and approximately 10,000 positions in supplier firms and local services. "Local effects of economic transition were cushioned by the ongoing operations of the Paks Nuclear Power Plant, a key employer... which helped maintain job stability amid the dissolution of centrally planned industries elsewhere in Tolna County." This was metabolic replacement: distributed German agricultural metabolism (thousands of small farms) was removed, but centralized nuclear energy metabolism (single facility producing half the nation's electricity) was implanted.

2022: Tolna County's population was 207,931. Unlike Somogy (extinction vortex) or Nógrád (death spiral), Tolna stabilized. The county underwent a phase transition from one stable state (distributed agriculture) to another (centralized energy production). December 2024: Hungary approved pouring first concrete for Paks II, an expansion adding two new reactors. When commissioned, total plant output will reach 4,400 megawatts, and nuclear energy's share in the national mix will climb to 70%. Tolna, once a peripheral agricultural county dependent on external markets for its grain, is becoming the energy center that Hungary depends on for its grid stability.

2026: Tolna County is a tube worm anchored to a hydrothermal vent. Giant tube worms at deep-sea vents rely entirely on chemosynthetic bacterial symbionts to convert mineral-rich vent fluids into energy—no photosynthesis, just converting an extreme local resource into fuel for the ecosystem. Paks Nuclear Plant similarly converts uranium into 50-70% of Hungary's electricity. The county went from photosynthetic agriculture (German farmers using sunlight, soil, and rain) to chemosynthetic power generation (Paks reactors using uranium fuel rods). This isn't succession—it's a fundamental shift in metabolic architecture. The county became an electric eel: 80% of the electric eel's body mass is electric organ, a single-purpose energy generator. Tolna County is similarly dominated by its power plant, a centralized electrical powerhouse generating energy for the entire national organism. The Danube Swabians are gone, but the county survived the transplant removal because it received an artificial organ that fulfilled a more critical function than the one that was extracted. Tolna feeds the grid. Hungary runs on Tolna. This is trophic reversal: from peripheral agricultural producer to foundational energy supplier, from exploited to essential.