Let me tell you a bit about the Tisza, the biggest tributary of the Danube, Hungary’s longest river – and the river, which shaped the landscape where I grew up. I’ve recently spent a week along its central stretch. This very personal THREAD is illustrated with my photos.

The Тиса begins near Rakhiv in Ukraine – very near what some say is the geographic center of Europe – almost with Nile-sized ambitions, from the confluence of two streams, Чорна (black) & Біла (white) Tиса.

From here the Тиса/Tisa flows along what is today the border of Romania and Ukraine but was a blood-soaked battlefield in much of the early 20th century. My great-grandfather died just across the Carpathian peaks on a landmine. He was fighting on the wrong side. He didn't want to

It was also here where in 2000 three huge spills of cyanide and various heavy metals contaminated the river in the worst environmental disaster in Europe since Chernobyl. But the Tisa was reborn. My grandfather on the other side was also born here, in Romania.

Shortly afterwards it enters Hungary and begins to meander, slowly, almost 1,000 km long, through the Great Hungarian Plain, crossing some major cities – Szolnok, Szeged – but remaining, for the most part, rural and melancholic.

It is said that Attila the Hun is buried somewhere near this 1,000-km stretch. It is also where today some of Hungary’s poorest, most deprived and desolate communities live – a shameful memento of decades of bad policies.

Endre Ady, an iconic poet of the early 20th century contrasted the roughness and the stupor of this region – “the executioners of dreams” – with more intellectually stimulating places like the Ganges. But I’d rather say that it has been unduly forgotten.

A propos, poets. It is in Northern Hungary where the Tur, a minor river joins the Tisza that Sándor Petőfi, the great revolutionary poet of 19th century Hungary wrote a dreamy poem about the “meandering Tisza", full of picturesque images.

Petőfi highlighted the river’s two faces: a bucolic, tame, charming, twisting and turning strip of water, which occasionally turns into a “maniac just freed from chains” rushing “in rage across the plains” when it floods.

Indeed, before one of the great engineering projects of 19th century Hungary, the regulation of the Tisza, the river was almost 600 km longer and regularly flooded much of what is now Eastern Hungary. Now its plain is scattered with U-shaped "dead channels" overgrown with reed.

The floods didn’t go away. One in 1970 allowed my grandparents to buy a little plot of land cheaply near the river in Tiszakécske, a town in Central Hungary. Another one in 1999 saw teenage me near the house they built on that plot, working on the dyke to protect the town.

The dyke is rarely situated directly next to the river by the way. Typically, there would be woods between the river and the dyke to slow down floods before they reach the dyke, giving the Tisza the characteristic look of a flatland river.

Flood control gave birth to the Tisza Dam near Kisköre in the 1970s, which in turn resulted in an artificial lake: today Lake Tisza is one of Hungary’s most important wildlife reserves with more than 200 species of birds and an altogether awesome tourist destination.

When it comes to birds, the ubiquitous storks are the ones that really spell Tisza for me. These white-plumaged, red-beaked migrant weirdos nest atop power poles, with often a family of four or five in a nest. We used to count and compare them in every village we passed as kids.

Or take the Tisza mayflies that hatch, mature, mate and die on the river in a couple of hours in June – a remarkable spectacle that locals call the “blooming of the Tisza”. Or the crickets that start chirping on the fields at twilight. Or the mosquitoes... no, don't take them.

As you cycle on the dyke or watch your dog chase rabbits, your gaze will fall on lonely black poplars, pale silver poplars and misty white willows, shrubbery, a palette of pastel green, less fierce than in Baltic forests but no less dense.

If you wade into the dark greenish river be careful of the Scylla and Charybdis of lazy rivers: pointy water caltrops hiding in the mud or floating on the surface; and whirlpools that can suddenly pull you downwards.

When it is not polluted, flooding or otherwise scary, it is heavenly to swim or bathe in the Tisza, to smell its earthy fragrance, to embrace its soft currents; something I have done at least once every year since I was born, even after I moved abroad. Even now.

For me no summer would be perfect without this river: my first distinct memory is from its bank, the taste of peaches, sour cherries, the taste of öhöm – a kind of shepherd’s dish from pasta and vegetables – and carp remind me of it.

Walk on the riverbank, smell the air – it smells of straw bales, wild flowers, damp earth and grass – see if the swallows are flying low and rain is coming. Wait for the “evening, this big brown spider” to weave its web, as Gyula Juhasz, another great poet of the Tisza, wrote.

Somewhat straightened out but still tortuous, as the Tisza leaves Hungary it takes one last stretch across the richly multilingual plains of Vojvodina – another blood-soaked land of history – before emptying into the Danube near the town of Titel. Thank you for traveling with me.

PS: as the Tisza crosses into Serbia it passes fields that saw police brutality committed against refugees and migrants in recent years by HU and SRB authorities. A dead channel stretches near the infamous Röszke transit zone. A sad reminder that history, like the Tisza, flows on