Since the beginning of time, humans have been drawn to creating their own communities. More than 2500 years ago, Pythagoras founded Homakoeion, a vegetarian commune based on intellectualism, mysticism, and equality of the sexes. Around the same time, followers of Buddha in India joined together in ashrams to live in a productive, spiritual manner.

In the 2nd century, the Essene communes flourished in the area of the Dead Sea. By the 4th century CE, the first Christian monasterial communities were established. In the 15th century, the foundation of the Hutterian Brethren led to the establishment of numerous spiritual communes, from which the modern-day Hutterites and Bruderhof communes (still working) are derived. At the turn of the 17th and 18th centuries, the Amish created communities based on a strict interpretation of Mennonite principles. A hundred years later, the Shakers founded communal groups, pursuing spirituality, dancing and singing.

In 1848, Oneida, a utopian religious community, was founded by John Humphrey Noyes in New York. In 1910, Deganya, the first kibbutz, was founded near the Sea of Galilee, and it is still going strong today. By 1920, following the communist revolution in Russia, thousands of communes had sprung up, only to be suppressed later by Stalin. In the sixties, the hippies founded several thousand communes, most of which were short-lived. In the early seventies, co-housing, a new form of urban community living was conceived in Denmark. In the early nineties, the first eco-villages started in the US and Russia.

The idea of creating an intentional community first came to Tom while he was still living in Hungary. We studied copies of the Whole Earth Review magazine and the CoEvolution Quarterly, we invited Elliot Aronson, the prominent social psychologist, professor and author of “The Social Animal” to Budapest, where he gave a lecture about the subject for the audience of our “Interdisciplinary Scientific Student Association”.

Yet the community movement was stifled in Hungary, which was still communist at the time. Later, Tom managed to come to the “New World”, where many intentional communities were established and working. In the USA, after the recent societal events in 2020–22, there has been a surge of people looking to escape the cities and live in rural environments, thus being receptive to our vision.