Pannonian Basin

The Pannonian Basin or Carpathian Basin is a large basin in East-Central Europe. The geomorphological term Pannonian Plain is more widely used for roughly the same region though with a somewhat different sense - meaning only the lowlands, the plain that remained when the Pliocene Pannonian Sea dried out. It is a geomorphological subsystem of the Alps-Himalaya system. The river Danube divides the plain roughly in half. Most of the plain consists of the Great Hungarian Plain (in the south and east, including the Eastern Slovak Lowland) and the Little Hungarian Plain (in the northwest), divided by the Transdanubian Mountains.

The Pannonian Basin is situated in the southeastern part of Central Europe, or at the boundary between Central Europe, Eastern Europe and Southeastern Europe (Balkans). It forms a topographically discrete unit set in the European landscape, surrounded by imposing geographic boundaries - the Carpathian Mountains, the Alps, the Dinarides and the Balkan mountains. The rivers Danube and Tisza divide the basin roughly in half. It extends roughly between Vienna in the northwest, Zagreb in the southwest, Belgrade in the southeast and Satu Mare in the northeast.

In terms of modern state boundaries, the basin is centered in the territory of Hungary, but it also extends to Vojvodina, Republic of Serbia, Central Croatia and Slavonia in the Republic of Croatia, western Slovakia, the Eastern Slovak Lowland (including the southwestern tip of Ukraine), besides the border regions of northern Bosnia and Herzegovina, western Transylvania in Romania, and the eastern tips of Slovenia and Austria.