Pan-European Picnic Site

This spot on a minor road on the border between Austria and Hungary marked a crucial turning point in recent European history, yet most people (including ourselves, until we found it) have never heard of it.

The Austrian and Hungarian governments announced that the border between their two countries would be open for three hours on 19 August 1989. This allowed 500 East Germans who had travelled to Hungary via Slovakia to pass into Austria, and carry on to West Germany. The trickle turned into a flood and 70,000 East Germans passed through Hungary to reach West Germany over the next few weeks.

Residents from both Hungary and Austria jointly held a four-day picnic in this field as a peace demonstration. By November 1989 the movement that had started in this field had resulted in the Berlin Wall being torn down.

Each year thousands of people from across Europe come to the site to repeat the four-day picnic. A large and beautiful meadow has been set aside for the purpose and this is one of several memorials on the site. In the distance can be seen one of the watchtowers for patrolling the border in the iron curtain days.

We had no idea this place existed, nor of the history. We'd spent the morning in the delightful old Hungarian town of Sopron and were just looking for somewhere to have a picnic. We saw a sign in Hungarian with the word 'picnic' on it and to begin with we couldn't understand why they needed such a big picnic site.

Quite interesting to reflect that on our first day we visited the Belvedere Palace in Vienna, where the Archduke Franz Ferdinand lived before he was assassinated in Sarajevo, famously precipitating the First World War. On our last day we saw the site where events precipitated the end of European communism 75 years later.

There are small sets of pictures from the Austria/Hungary border here and of touristy pictures from Sopron here.