Wasteland

"Pusta" or wasteland (after the Hungarian word "puszta"), designates a spacious, level steppe in Hungary; it is a spacious, level terrain which is not worked, but used for raising livestock, horses and pigs in the open. The puszta is a form of organised, planned, collective habitation, specific to Hungary, Slavonia and Baranja, constructed in 18th and 19th centuries on the needless Slavonian plains owned by well-to-do aristocratic families. The wasteland was always inhabited by those who had no land, settlers, restless spirits, wanderers unable to stay in one place, but there were those who stayed in the wasteland for generations.