ABSTRACT
Most villages were concentrated collections of habitations, surrounded by their plowland, pastures, meadows, vineyards, and forest lands. Official policy appears to be clearly in favor of maintaining the viability of villages. Most of the rural houses still without electricity are in the areas of dispersed settlements. Electricity had already been introduced in the countryside before World War II. But the postwar electrification program was given high priority so that all Hungarian settlements were linked to the electrical grid by 1963. The advent of almost universal electricity has meant that the public media could spread over the entire country in a way never conceived of before. Villages—or rural settlements—will survive but with different social and economic functions. Some more will become towns and even those that remain about the same size will be different in operation, in significance to their inhabitants, and in the nature of relationships to other units of settlement, urban and rural.
