Abony

Abony is a town in Pest County, Hungary, in the Cegled subregion of Central Hungary, about 85 kilometers southeast of Budapest between the Danube and Tisza rivers. It had 15,681 residents as of 2008 across 128 square kilometers, much of it on the floodplain of the Tisza. On January 25, 1849, General Mor Perczel's Hungarian forces won a battle at Abony during the war of independence. The town had a substantial Jewish community from the eighteenth century, with a synagogue built in 1756, until its residents were deported to Auschwitz in 1944. The poet Sandor Petofi visited the town in 1847, and a folk song referring to it as Nagyabony appears in the music of Zoltan Kodaly. Agriculture, including crop farming and viticulture, remains the town's main economic activity.