Severe earthquakes
The most severe earthquake on the territory of historical Hungary occurred in 1443 in Zólyomlipcse near Besztercebánya (today’s Banská Bystrica, Slovakia).
Geophysicists from Budapest’s ELTE University have reconstructed the largest earthquakes of the past in the Carpathian Basin, assigned the possible epicenter and estimated the magnitude. The Zólyomlipcse earthquake was still felt in Vienna and even in Silesia, on today’s Richter scale it would probably have reached a magnitude of 6.7. That sounds like a lot, but it is at most one-thirtieth of the energy released by the devastating earthquake in Turkey and Syria in early February.
The earthquakes of 1763 in Komárom and 1834 in Érmellék (today in Romania) are likely to have been just as strong as the earthquake of 1443 – the latter caused destruction even in Debrecen, 50 km away. The earthquakes of 1911 in Kecskemét and 1956 in Dunaharaszti, which each reached a magnitude of 5.5, have already been measured. A study by the ELTE researchers on the subject was published in the journal “Seismological Research Letters” at the beginning of March.