River · Hungary
Tisza
The Tisza is the longest river in Hungary, curving slowly across the wide plains of the east. After leaving the country it joins the Danube at Stari Slankamen in Serbia.
Picture credit: Lily15 (CC BY-SA 3.0) · Györgyfi (CC BY-SA 3.0) · Györgyfi (CC BY-SA 3.0) · Wikimedia Commons
Where is the Tisza?
The river starts here: Carpathian Mountains, Ukraine.
It ends in the Danube at Stari Slankamen, Serbia.
Countries on the river: Hungary.
The story behind it
The Tisza begins in the Carpathian Mountains and then flows quietly through the Great Hungarian Plain, a flat land of fields, meadows and old river bends. Every June something amazing happens on the water: millions of long-tailed mayflies hatch at the same moment and dance above the surface for a few hours. Hungarians call this the blooming of the Tisza, and people travel far to see it. Long ago the river was straightened to hold back floods, because melting snow in spring can make it rise very quickly. The city of Szeged was almost washed away by a Tisza flood in 1879 and had to be rebuilt. Today herons stalk the shallow edges, anglers wait for catfish and carp, and farmers depend on the river to keep the dry plain green in hot summers.
Questions children ask
How long is the Tisza?
The Tisza is about 966 kilometres long in total. Roughly 579 of those kilometres run through Hungary, which makes it the country's longest river.
Which country does the Tisza flow through?
In this encyclopedia the Tisza is listed as the longest river of Hungary. It crosses the country from the north-east towards the south before it leaves again.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure on this page was checked against public reference sources before publication. Where sources genuinely disagree, the text says so.
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