Nagyecsed

Nagyecsed is a town in Szabolcs-Szatmár-Bereg County, Northern Great Plain Region of eastern Hungary. Before World War II it belonged to Szabolcs county.

The old name of the town was Ecsed but over time it has been renamed Nagyecsed, meaning "grand" or "great Ecsed" to distinguish it. The area had close associations with a cadet branch of the Báthory family. Elizabeth Báthory, infamous as The Blood Countess, was raised in the town's now ruined castle. Her main residence and later her prison was Csejte Castle, Upper Hungary now in Slovakia, but she was buried in the family crypt at Ecsed/Nagyecsed. Her title in Hungarian nobility was Countess Elizabeth Báthory von Ecsed. The use of the German adelsprädikat "von" meant "of".

In the Hungarian (Magyar) language, the suffix "i" at the end of the name of the village or town meant the same. For example, "Ecsedi" is a common surname in Europe. Later the suffix was modified to a "y" to annotate the aristocracy or nobility of someone from the village or town.

The town's castle was demolished in the eighteenth-century after the Kuruc uprisings.

Geography
It covers an area of 43.87 km2 and has a population of 6706 people (2005).

The town is divided in two by the river Kraszna. It formerly lay north west of the Ecsed Marsh (Ecsedi-láp), which was the largest contiguous marshland of the Great Hungarian Plain. As part of water control operations by Tibor Károlyi this was drained in the late nineteenth-century, and the lands thus reclaimed transformed into farmland.