The plaque was erected in 2000 on the iniative of the Hungarian ambassador to Algeria László Szabó at the Hotel Transatlantique, where Bartók stayed when he collected folk music in the Biskra region in 1913.
Bartók faced a number of challenges in the region, first of which was convincing the local women to sing for a complete stranger and foreigner as well as into a strange new device: the phonograph. (According to some sources, most of the women who sang for Bartók were prostitutes.) An even bigger challenge was the desert heat, which drove Bartók from Biskra after just three weeks of intensive work.
The short period yielded almost a hundred phonograph cylinders with 65 songs and instrumental pieces, which are now in the archives of the Hungarian Academy of Science's Music Studies Institute. The trip so impressed Bartók that he started learning Arabic and made serious plans to return to Biskra. But the plans were scrapped with the outbreak of WWI .
The trip had a noticeable influence on several of Bartók's works, notably the String Quartet No. 2 and the Miraculous Mandarin.
