Hornád

The course and the catchment area in Slovakia and Hungary

The Hornád (Hungarian Hernád; German rarely Kundert ) is a 286 km long river in eastern Slovakia and northeastern Hungary. 195 km river length run on Slovak territory.

He is the fourth largest river in Slovakia and for its picturesque upper reaches of the Slovak Paradise is a popular vacation area. In the mountains south of its course ore deposits exploited since the Middle Ages several that have central Slovakia earlier helped to a certain prosperity.

River

The river rises between the Low Tatras and the foothills of the Slovak Ore Mountains, about 20 km southwest of Poprad.

On his part, winding River Hornád tangent to the culturally and historically known landscape Zips (see Carpathian German and Master Paul of Leutschau ) and flows through the city Ves. Unlike the other major rivers of the country like the Waag or the Hornad Hron flows eastward, so that it forms a Slovakia dividing east-west axis with the Waag. This typical parallel structure of large valleys typical of Alpidic mountains and finds himself - almost a mirror image - even in the major longitudinal valleys of Austria.

The cause of this Talverlaufs is largely due to geological fault lines, according to the Swiss geophysicist AE Scheidegger related to the large-scale fracture systems of the different orogenic phases of Earth's history. They make the landscape of Hornad - upper reaches extremely varied, which is therefore also called the Slovak Paradise.

After a third of the flow curve of the Hornad takes on the river Hnilec and forms there - between 1200 meters high mountain ranges - a 20-km long reservoir. Then the combined flow from the Slovak Ore in a wide level exits, which is now occupied by the industrial area of ​​the eastern Slovak city of Košice. The city, famous for its early Gothic St. Elisabeth Cathedral is situated high above the river on a Talschulter, and further south the town Krasna nad Hornádom founded as early as 1200.

In Košice, the valley turns to the south and reaches near the Hungarian border a funnel-shaped spur of the Great Hungarian Plain, which he further 100 km through running on Hungarian territory. East of the University of Miskolc, the now named Hernád river combined with the approximately equal Sajó to 10 km further to pour its water-rich flood in the Tisza. From the huge catchment area of this largest tributary of the Danube River ( 160,000 km ², almost two times Hungary) accounted for Hornad and Sajó almost 10 percent.

In Central Europe, there are few rivers which are close to diversity of the landscape and geology crossed the Hornád. Nevertheless, his region is touristy yet largely untapped - in contrast to the valleys and cities of his Western "big sister ", the Waag.

Nuclear power plant Kecerovce

For which in the 1980s planned nuclear power plant in Kecerovce it was planned to build several dams on Hornád to create a new connection to Torysa. This should be able to meet the water demand for four 1000 MW reactors. The connection should be created by dams in Ružín and Kysak, and a barrage at Drienov on Torysa.

Swell

• Geographic Institute de Agostini, Big World Atlas, Munich / Novara 1985
• Brockhaus, Allbuch in 5 volumes and an atlas, Volume 2, 5 and 6, Wiesbaden 1958-1960
• Hydrology of the Danube ( 4 languages ​​), 270 p. , Publ.Prihoda, Bratislava 1988.