HungaryMagyarország

The Magyars were a confederation of tribes from the steppes west of the Urals. Under Árpád they crossed the Carpathians around 895 and settled the plain along the Danube and Tisza. For half a century their horse archers raided deep into Western Europe, until the German king Otto I defeated them at Lechfeld in 955.

Árpád's descendant Vajk was baptised as Stephen and crowned king in 1000 with a crown sent, by tradition, by the Pope. Stephen built dioceses, counties and a Latin-speaking court, and was later made a saint; his mummified right hand is kept in St Stephen's Basilica and carried through Budapest every 20 August. The Holy Crown, now in Parliament, became the symbol of the state itself.

The Mongol invasion of 1241–42 killed perhaps a quarter of the population. King Béla IV rebuilt with stone castles, including the first fortress on Buda's Castle Hill. Under Matthias Corvinus (1458–1490) Buda had one of the great Renaissance courts and libraries of Europe; Matthias Church on Castle Hill carries his name.

In 1526 the Ottoman sultan Suleiman the Magnificent destroyed the Hungarian army at Mohács; King Louis II drowned in the retreat. Buda fell in 1541 and the country split into three: a Habsburg-ruled strip in the west and north, the Ottoman centre, and the semi-independent principality of Transylvania in the east. The Ottomans left baths, tombs and mosques in Buda, Pécs and Eger.

A Habsburg-led alliance retook Buda in 1686 and the whole kingdom by 1699. Hungary became part of the Habsburg lands, repopulated with German, Serb, Slovak and Romanian settlers. Uprisings led by Ferenc Rákóczi (1703–1711) failed, but the nobility kept its own diet and many privileges.

On 15 March 1848 young radicals led by the poet Sándor Petőfi read out twelve demands in Pest, and Hungary won its own government. When Vienna moved to crush it, war followed; Russian troops finally defeated the Hungarians in 1849, and thirteen generals were executed at Arad. The date 15 March is still the national day, and red-white-green cockades appear on every lapel.

The Compromise of 1867 created Austria-Hungary: two states sharing a monarch, army and foreign policy. Hungary boomed. Buda, Óbuda and Pest merged in 1873, and for the 1896 millennium the city built Parliament, Andrássy út, Heroes' Square and continental Europe's first underground railway.

Defeat in the First World War broke Austria-Hungary. Under the Treaty of Trianon in 1920, Hungary lost about two-thirds of its territory and a third of Hungarian speakers, who found themselves in Czechoslovakia, Romania, Yugoslavia and Austria. The loss dominated interwar politics under the regent Miklós Horthy and still colours national feeling; 'Trianon' is a shorthand for injustice.

Seeking to regain land, Hungary joined the Axis. When Horthy tried to leave the war in 1944, Germany occupied the country, and in less than two months about 437,000 Jews from the provinces were deported, almost all to Auschwitz. In Budapest, the fascist Arrow Cross killed thousands on the Danube bank; diplomats such as Raoul Wallenberg saved many others. The siege of Budapest in 1944–45 destroyed the bridges and much of Buda.

The Communists took full control by 1949 under Mátyás Rákosi. On 23 October 1956 a student march became a national uprising: crowds pulled down Stalin's statue and Imre Nagy's government declared neutrality. Soviet tanks returned on 4 November; about 2,500 Hungarians died, 200,000 fled and Nagy was executed in 1958.

János Kádár, installed by Moscow, later loosened control into 'goulash communism', with small private businesses and more consumer goods than elsewhere in the bloc. In 1989 Hungary cut the fence on its Austrian border, letting East Germans escape west — an early crack in the Berlin Wall.

Budapest sits on a fault line with more than a hundred thermal springs. Romans built baths at Aquincum; the Ottomans built domed hammams such as Rudas and Király; and the 19th and 20th centuries added the neo-Baroque Széchenyi and the Art Nouveau Gellért. Bathing is ordinary city life: pensioners play chess in Széchenyi's outdoor pool in January.

Around 1900 Budapest had hundreds of coffee houses, where writers edited journals and people read newspapers all day for the price of a coffee. The New York, Central and Gerbeaud survive as grand rooms; Művész and Hadik keep a literary air. The cake tradition — Dobos, Esterházy, Rigó Jancsi — comes from the same era.

The 21st century added the ruin bars of District VII, the old Jewish Quarter: abandoned courtyards filled with mismatched furniture and art, starting with Szimpla Kert in the early 2000s. The same district holds the Dohány Street Synagogue, the largest in Europe, and new restaurants that put Budapest on the fine-dining map.

Paprika reached Hungary with the Ottomans and became the national spice only in the 19th century, when peasant dishes cooked in kettles — gulyás, pörkölt, halászlé — moved to city tables. Szeged and Kalocsa are the paprika towns; strings of red peppers hang from houses there in autumn.

Hungary has 22 wine regions. Tokaj in the north-east makes aszú, sweet wine from grapes shrivelled by noble rot, praised by Louis XIV as 'the wine of kings, the king of wines'; its classification of vineyards in 1737 was one of the first in the world. Eger makes the red blend Bull's Blood, Villány bold reds, and Balaton's volcanic hills minerally whites.

Pálinka, fruit brandy distilled from apricots, plums or pears, is protected by EU law: only spirit made from Hungarian fruit in Hungary can use the name. Unicum, a bitter herbal liqueur created for the Habsburg court, comes in a round bottle and a strong opinion.

Hungary joined NATO in 1999 and the EU in 2004. It keeps the forint and has set no date for the euro. The economy relies on car and battery factories owned by German, Korean and Chinese companies, on EU funds and on tourism. Inflation hit more than 25% in early 2023, among the highest in the EU, and prices have kept rising.

From 2010 Viktor Orbán's Fidesz governed with a two-thirds majority, rewrote the constitution and reshaped media, courts and universities, and clashed with the EU over rule of law, migration and Ukraine, leading to frozen EU funds. The April 2026 election was a close contest with Péter Magyar's Tisza party — check the result and the current government.

About two million ethnic Hungarians live in neighbouring countries, many holding Hungarian passports and votes. Budapest itself is more liberal than the countryside, and its mayor has often been at odds with the national government.