The village first appears in writing in 1329, as Gyalla — later Ógyalla in Hungarian and Stará Ďala in Slovak. That is a fact about a document, not about when people arrived: the warm, flat land north of the Danube had been farmed for thousands of years before any clerk wrote the name down. The village belonged to Komárom county, whose fortress town on the Danube was the local centre of everything that mattered. There was no castle here and no hill to put one on — this was farming country, and it stayed that way for six hundred years.Prvá písomná zmienka o obci je z roku 1329, a to pod menom Gyalla — neskôr maďarsky Ógyalla a po slovensky Stará Ďala. Je to však údaj o listine, nie o tom, kedy sem prišli ľudia: teplú rovinu severne od Dunaja obrábali roľníci dávno predtým, než niekto to meno prvý raz zapísal. Dedina patrila do Komárňanskej stolice a všetko podstatné sa vybavovalo v pevnostnom meste na Dunaji. Hrad tu nikdy nestál a ani nebolo kde ho postaviť — toto bol kraj polí a takým zostal ďalších šesťsto rokov.
