Hungary

Hungary is 93,030 km² — about a fifth larger than Czechia — with roughly 9.5 million people, no coastline, and borders with seven countries: Austria, Slovakia, Ukraine, Romania, Serbia, Croatia and Slovenia. It sits in the middle of the Carpathian Basin, which is a genuine geographical bowl, and about 84% of it lies below 200 m. It is the flattest country in Europe after the Netherlands, and it does not feel like it should be surrounded by mountains, but it is.

Three things make it unlike its neighbours. The first is the language: Hungarian is Uralic, not Indo-European, a relative of Finnish and Estonian and a much closer relative of two small Siberian languages, and it is surrounded on all sides by Slavic and Germanic speech it has nothing in common with. The second is the water: Hungary sits on a thinned section of the Earth's crust and has over 1,300 thermal springs, of which more than a hundred are inside Budapest. The third is Budapest itself, which is a nineteenth-century imperial capital built for a country twice the size of the one it now governs.

Hungary has eight UNESCO World Heritage sites for a country of nine million: the Danube banks and castle quarter of Budapest with Andrássy Avenue, the village of Hollókő, the Pannonhalma archabbey, the Hortobágy puszta, the early Christian necropolis at Pécs, the Tokaj wine region, and two shared with neighbours — the Fertő lake landscape with Austria and the Aggtelek caves with Slovakia.

And it has a national memory built around defeats rather than victories. The two dates every Hungarian knows are 1526, when the kingdom was destroyed at Mohács, and 1920, when the Treaty of Trianon took away two thirds of the country's territory. Neither is a distant curiosity: both are live in the culture, in the politics and in the map on the wall of a surprising number of restaurants.

Hungarians call themselves magyar and their country Magyarország. "Hungary" comes to the rest of Europe by a different route — probably from the Turkic onogur, "ten arrows" or "ten tribes", by way of Slavic and medieval Latin — and the resemblance to "Hun" is a coincidence that has caused fifteen hundred years of confusion. The Magyars are not descended from Attila's Huns, whatever the medieval chroniclers preferred to claim.

Two everyday quirks worth knowing. Hungarians write their surname first, as East Asians do — the composer is Bartók Béla at home and Béla Bartók abroad. And dates go year, month, day. Both are Uralic-family habits that survived the millennium in Europe intact.

The Carpathian Basin is a genuine geological depression ringed by the Alps, the Carpathians and the Dinarides, and Hungary occupies the flattest part of the floor. That geography explains almost everything about the country: it has been the natural invasion route into central Europe for two thousand years, it has no defensible frontier anywhere, and it grows a very great deal of food.

Hungary's crust is unusually thin — a consequence of the basin's formation — so geothermal heat is close to the surface almost everywhere. The result is more than 1,300 thermal springs, around 120 of them in Budapest, and a bathing culture that runs continuously from the Romans through the Ottomans to the present day. Budapest is the only capital city in the world with a working thermal spa industry on this scale.

Continental, with genuine four seasons and a wider range than Czechia's: colder winters relative to latitude, and summers that are reliably hotter. The basin traps air, so both extremes are amplified — and Budapest in July can be genuinely uncomfortable in a way Prague usually is not.

Hungary sits between roughly 45°45′ and 48°35′ north — the same band as Croatia and southern France. Budapest is in the north-centre on the Danube; Balaton is 100 km south-west; Debrecen is 220 km east; the Austrian border is two hours from the capital and the Romanian border three.

The Magyars arrived in the Carpathian Basin around 895 — the honfoglalás, the "land-taking" — a confederation of seven tribes under Árpád, coming from the steppe north of the Black Sea, mounted, and very good at what mounted steppe peoples were good at. For sixty years they raided westward as far as Spain and southern Italy, until a comprehensive defeat at the Lechfeld near Augsburg in 955 ended that as a business model.

What followed is the decision that made Hungary a European country rather than a footnote. Árpád's great-great-grandson Vajk was baptised as István — Stephen — and on Christmas Day 1000 or 1 January 1001 was crowned with a crown sent by Pope Sylvester II. He founded bishoprics, imposed Latin Christianity, organised the country into counties that in many cases still exist, and had his pagan relatives comprehensively suppressed. He was canonised in 1083 and 20 August, his feast, is the national day.

On 29 August 1526, at Mohács in the south, a Hungarian army of perhaps 25,000 met an Ottoman army two or three times its size under Suleiman the Magnificent. The battle lasted about two hours. The king, Louis II, aged 20, drowned in a stream while fleeing. Most of the nobility and much of the senior clergy died with him. Mohács in Hungarian is not a place name so much as a word meaning national catastrophe, and it is used that way in ordinary speech to this day.

The kingdom split three ways: the Ottomans took the centre, the Habsburgs took a northern and western strip called Royal Hungary, and Transylvania became a semi-independent principality paying tribute to the Sultan — which is how it ended up as the refuge of Hungarian Protestantism and of Hungarian culture generally. Buda fell in 1541 and was held for 145 years.

Freed from the Ottomans, Hungary found itself thoroughly inside the Habsburg monarchy, and spent the eighteenth century in a relationship it never accepted. Rákóczi's War of Independence (1703–11) was the first serious attempt to leave and produced most of the country's melancholy folk music. The second attempt was 1848, and it is the one that matters.

On 15 March 1848, in the middle of the European revolutionary year, a group of writers and students in Pest — including the 25-year-old poet Sándor Petőfi — occupied a printing press, published the Twelve Points and Petőfi's Nemzeti dal (National Song) without censorship, and started a revolution. Within a month Hungary had a responsible government, the abolition of serfdom, freedom of the press and its own laws. Within a year it was at war with Vienna, and by April 1849 it had declared full independence.

Eighteen years after crushing the revolution, Vienna made a deal with the people it had crushed. The Compromise of 1867 (Kiegyezés) created Austria-Hungary: one monarch, one army and one foreign policy, but two parliaments, two governments and two halves of an empire whose Hungarian half ran its own internal affairs entirely. Franz Joseph was crowned King of Hungary and stayed one for fifty years.

What followed was the most prosperous half-century in Hungarian history. Budapest — three separate towns until Buda, Óbuda and Pest were merged in 1873 — grew faster than almost any city in Europe, from about 300,000 to nearly a million by 1914. Almost everything a visitor now photographs was built in those forty years.

This is the single most important date in modern Hungarian consciousness and the one foreigners understand least, so it is worth being precise. After the collapse of Austria-Hungary, a short-lived democratic republic and an even shorter Soviet republic under Béla Kun, the peace treaty signed at the Grand Trianon palace at Versailles on 4 June 1920 reduced the Kingdom of Hungary from 325,000 km² to 93,000 km².

In plain numbers: Hungary lost two thirds of its territory and about 60% of its population. Transylvania went to Romania — an area larger than what remained of Hungary. Upper Hungary became Slovakia. Croatia and the Vojvodina went to the new Yugoslavia; Burgenland to Austria; Ruthenia to Czechoslovakia. Around 3.3 million ethnic Hungarians, roughly a third of the total, found themselves living in other countries without having moved.

Hungary entered the Second World War alongside Germany in 1941 and lost most of its Second Army at the Don bend in January 1943 — around 100,000 men killed, wounded or captured in a few weeks. By 1944 Horthy was trying to leave the war, and on 19 March 1944 Germany occupied the country to stop him.

What followed was the fastest deportation of the Holocaust. Between 15 May and 9 July 1944, in under eight weeks, roughly 437,000 Hungarian Jews were deported, overwhelmingly to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where most were murdered on arrival. It was organised by Eichmann with a small German staff and carried out by the Hungarian gendarmerie and administration — a fact that Hungarian public memory has repeatedly tried to place elsewhere, and which the historical record does not permit.

On 23 October 1956 a student march in Budapest, in solidarity with reform in Poland, turned into a national uprising within hours. The crowd pulled down the enormous Stalin statue in the City Park, leaving only the boots on the plinth; the secret police fired on demonstrators at the radio building; and within days the government had collapsed. Imre Nagy, a reform communist, became prime minister, announced a multi-party system, and on 1 November declared Hungary neutral and out of the Warsaw Pact.

The Soviet Union appeared to withdraw and then came back. On 4 November, several thousand tanks re-entered Budapest. Organised resistance held out for about a week, and strikes continued into January. Around 2,500 Hungarians and 700 Soviet soldiers were killed; roughly 200,000 people — two per cent of the population — fled west in the following weeks, mostly through Austria. It is the reason there is a Hungarian diaspora in Canada, Australia and the United States.

János Kádár, installed by the Soviets in 1956, ran Hungary for thirty-two years. After executing several hundred people in the retribution that followed the uprising, he spent the rest of his rule buying social peace — and made Hungary, by a distance, the most liveable country in the eastern bloc.

The formula was the New Economic Mechanism of 1968: limited market pricing, semi-private small business, and a general policy of leaving people alone provided they left politics alone. Kádár's own phrase for it was "he who is not against us is with us" — a deliberate inversion of Rákosi's Stalinism. Outsiders called it goulash communism, and it produced full shops, private plots, a second economy, and permission to travel west every few years.

Viktor Orbán was prime minister from 1998 to 2002 and has been prime minister continuously since 2010, winning four consecutive elections with parliamentary supermajorities. That makes him the longest-serving elected head of government in the European Union, and Hungarian politics is not comprehensible without him.

What has actually changed is a matter of record rather than opinion. A new constitution — the Fundamental Law — was written and passed in 2011 by the governing party alone and has been amended repeatedly since. The Constitutional Court's jurisdiction over budgetary matters was curtailed and its bench enlarged and reappointed. The electoral system was redrawn in 2011 in a way that converts a plurality of votes into a two-thirds majority of seats. Most of the regional press and a large share of national media were consolidated into a foundation aligned with the government. The Central European University was legislated out of Budapest and moved its US-accredited programmes to Vienna in 2019.

Around 9.5 million people, and falling — Hungary's population peaked at 10.7 million in 1980 and has declined every year since, through low birth rates and, more recently, emigration within the EU. Something like half a million Hungarians live and work in Austria, Germany and the UK. Successive governments have spent very large sums on natalist policy — income tax exemption for mothers of four or more, subsidised loans forgiven on childbirth — with modest effect.

For a country of nine million, Hungary's output of scientists is difficult to explain and has been the subject of a good deal of speculation. The standing joke among American physicists in the 1940s was that the brilliant Hungarians at Los Alamos were actually Martians who had chosen Hungary as their cover story, on the grounds that their accents and abilities were otherwise inexplicable.

Hungarian cooking is built on three things: paprika, lard and sour cream, with onions doing most of the structural work. It is not a subtle cuisine and it does not pretend to be. It is also considerably more varied than its reputation — there are freshwater fish soups, stuffed vegetables, a whole civilisation of pancakes and one of the better pastry traditions in Europe.

Hungary has 22 wine regions and a viticultural history running to the Romans, and it spent the twentieth century wrecking its own reputation — first with phylloxera, then with collectivised bulk production for the Soviet market. The recovery since 1990 has been dramatic and is still not widely known outside the region, which makes Hungarian wine one of the better-value things in Europe.

Budapest was three towns until 1873: hilly, quiet, aristocratic Buda and Roman Óbuda on the west bank, and flat, commercial, growing Pest on the east. They still feel like different cities and the division is the most useful thing a visitor can hold on to. Buda is where you look at things; Pest is where you do things.

Pest is the flat side, and it is where nine tenths of the city actually lives, eats and works. It is laid out on two ring roads and a set of radial avenues cut through in the 1870s on the Paris model, and it is one of the most architecturally coherent nineteenth-century cities left in Europe — partly because it was built in forty years, and partly because it was too poor between 1945 and 1990 to knock any of it down.

The two things Budapest is now best known for internationally are a Roman-Ottoman inheritance and a twenty-year-old accident, and they pair unreasonably well: a morning in hot mineral water and an evening in a courtyard full of salvaged furniture is a genuinely good day.

North of Budapest the Danube runs west to east, hits the Visegrád hills and turns sharply south. The Dunakanyar — the Danube Bend — is the prettiest short stretch of country in Hungary and is a straightforward day trip: an hour by train, by bus, or by boat from the city.

Balaton is 592 km², the largest lake in central Europe, and the sea of a country that has no sea. It is also almost absurdly shallow — an average depth of 3.3 metres, with a maximum of 12 in a single spot by the Tihany peninsula. That shallowness is the whole character of the place: the water warms to 25–27 °C in summer, you can wade a long way out on the southern shore, and it is the reason the lake is a family institution rather than a sailing one.

Most visitors see Budapest and go home, which is a mistake of the same order as seeing Prague and skipping Bohemia. The Hungarian countryside is flat, empty, cheap and much stranger than the capital.

Hungary is, per head of population, one of the most successful Olympic nations in history — around 190 gold medals from a country of under ten million, which puts it in the top ten of the all-time table. The strength is concentrated in a handful of disciplines and is not evenly distributed at all.

Hungary is in the EU and in Schengen, so from anywhere in central Europe there is no border formality at all. From Prague it is close enough that flying makes very little sense.

Hungary is one of the cheaper EU countries, though central Budapest has caught up with Prague and in a few things overtaken it. The countryside has not, and the gap between the capital and everywhere else is large.

For Czech travellers: the Czech Embassy in Budapest is on Rózsa utca in District VI — check the current address and emergency line on mzv.cz. MZV ČR issues no travel warning for Hungary beyond ordinary caution. Registration in DROZD is free and takes two minutes, and is more use than most people assume when a car breaks down 200 km from anywhere.

Hungary is the neighbour Czechs think they know and mostly do not. It is close, it is cheap, it is easy — six and three quarter hours by train, no border, no visa, cards everywhere — and a very large number of Czech visitors get as far as Budapest for a weekend, do the castle and the baths, and never come back. That is a waste of a country whose interior is emptier, older and considerably odder than the capital.

It is also a country whose politics are impossible to leave out of an honest description, and I have not left them out. What has happened to the constitution, the courts, the electoral system, the media and the universities since 2010 is set out above from the record, as is the ongoing dispute with the EU over frozen funds. Equally on the record: Hungary is safe, functional and welcoming, none of this touches a visitor, and treating nine and a half million people as an extension of their prime minister is both rude and wrong. Hungarians argue about this more fiercely than any foreigner does.

Practically: go in May, June or September. Give Budapest three days minimum and split them between the two banks. Do a bath and do it properly — early morning at Széchenyi, or Rudas at sunset. Then get out of the capital: Eger for the cellars, Pécs for the best small city in the country, the Danube Bend for an easy day, and Balaton's north shore rather than its south. Order the soup and the stew by their right names, drink the Furmint dry, and if someone hands you a small glass of pálinka at ten in the morning, that is not a test — it is just how the day starts.

On the images

The photographs here are illustrative reconstructions rather than documentary images, and this set is unusually accurate — Buda Castle, the Chain Bridge, Széchenyi, Heroes' Square, Eger's minaret, Tihany, Hollókő and the puszta horsemen are all recognisably themselves. Three captions carry corrections that matter: the "goulash" images show pörkölt and, in one case, a Czech bread bowl; the paprikás sauce should be pink from sour cream rather than red from tomato; and Balaton is green-grey rather than turquoise. Nothing was rejected. The wine bottle's label, like most generated lettering, does not read as real text.