Danube's 'Rock of Starvation' emerges as drought devastates Hungary

Beneath Gellért Hill in Budapest, a boulder has emerged from the Danube that Hungarians have known for centuries as the Rock of Starvation. For generations, when this stone surfaced, it carried a message: the river had fallen so low that mills could no longer float, crops were failing, and famine would follow. Today, in August 2026, the rock has not merely peeked above the waterline—it has risen almost completely from the riverbed, astonishing the geologists and government scientists who came to examine it. And true to its ancient warning, Hungary is now gripped by an energy crisis so severe that the country has shut down all but one of its nuclear reactors cooled by Danube water, a first in 44 years.

The Guardian traveled more than 100 miles along the banks of Europe's longest river, crossing through villages and towns where the drought has become a daily catastrophe. In Pócsmegyer, a farming village on the Danube's edge, István Somogyi, 56, has already tallied his losses. Nearly half his harvest is gone, and he fears the total could reach 70 percent. "Everything has dried up," he said. "Since I started farming this land after communism ended, I've never seen anything like this." Somogyi had watched the warning signs accumulate—poor harvests the year before, intense heat waves—but last year the river stayed high enough to sustain the soil. This year there is no reprieve. Prime Minister Péter Magyar has warned that the economic damage from this drought will exceed even the devastating dry spell of 2022.

The exposed riverbed tells the story in physical form. In Szentendre, across the river from Pócsmegyer, vast desert-like islands have emerged where the clay cracks like a mosaic baked by heat that has pushed Budapest's temperatures near 42 degrees Celsius. In some stretches, the water barely reaches above the ankles. László Balázs, 44, head of the local river rescue service, watches people wade into the shallows seeking relief from the suffocating heat, unaware that the bottom can suddenly drop away into deep pools. At the end of June, three people went missing in the Danube over a single weekend. One body was recovered near Iváncsa; searches continued downstream for the other two.

The water crisis has struck hardest at those already vulnerable. In Szentendre, about 4,000 to 5,000 households lost running water entirely. József Gulyás, the deputy mayor, coordinated the distribution of 25 tonnes of bottled water while fielding roughly 100 emergency calls a day. "Elderly women would hug the officers delivering water and burst into tears," he said. The town's tourist information office now stores thousands of bottles in a back room, ready for distribution to the elderly and infirm. In the marginalized areas around Paks, where thousands have never had reliable access to running water, the crisis has compounded decades of neglect. Géza Orsós Renáta, 43, who lives with four children in a farmhouse without running water, now depends on a friend who brings water once a week. "Even in winter, we have to pump water and heat it in large bowls to wash," she said. "Now it is becoming unbearable."

The scale of the catastrophe became visible on July 28, when Gábor Kürti, president of the Hungarian cyclists' club and owner of a cargo bike company, rode his gravel bike for 30 kilometers along the exposed bed of the Danube. The journey, which took three hours, crossed fine gravel, large pebbles, hard-packed sand, and mud—terrain that should have been underwater. "I wanted to show that if you can cycle along the bed of the Danube for 30km, it means that, because of this climate emergency, we have literally hit rock bottom," Kürti told the Guardian. For him, the ride was not an adventure but a heartbreak. He cycled through places where he had swum and kayaked as a child, now dry enough to cross on a bicycle. "Throughout that journey, the scale of the catastrophe was unfolding before my eyes," he said.

Kürti led the Guardian into Kis-Háros-sziget, a protected floodplain forest in Nagytétény that was home to climbing plants, wild vines, and families of European beavers. The ground that visitors now walk across would normally lie several meters beneath the water. One branch of the Danube has receded so dramatically that it simply stops, blocked by the exposed riverbed. The clay surface looks like a vision of a climate-changed future, yet it is happening now. Kayakers struggle through shallow channels before giving up, lifting their boats onto their shoulders to walk home. Hungarian authorities have begun pumping water into nature reserves to prevent marshlands from drying out entirely.

In Paks, home to Hungary's nuclear power plant, municipal workers have been laboring on weekends to keep more than 700 threatened trees alive. Szilvia Farkas, 39, employed by the municipality to plant and maintain vegetation, said she has never seen so much die in her 18 years on the job. The public has been forbidden from using tap water for irrigation; residents now collect greywater to water their gardens. The Danube, which normally reaches 2 to 3 meters in depth and can rise to 8 meters, fell to a record low of 14 to 19 centimeters on August 4. As it retreated, it revealed relics long buried: the remains of a woolly mammoth, a bridge destroyed after World War II, a Nazi warship, and an unexploded British bomb.

On the drive back from Paks toward Budapest, tall clouds occasionally gather on the horizon, appearing to promise rain before fading by evening. The hopes of an entire country rise and fall with them. Somogyi, who grew up hearing the story of the Rock of Starvation passed down through generations, now watches it emerge as a warning come true. But he knows the boulder will not disappear again soon. "The drought will return next year," he said. "That is the trend. And there isn't much that we can do."