Long before Hungary existed, the western half of its present territory — Transdanubia, west of the Danube — was the Roman province of Pannonia. Rome conquered it under Augustus and Tiberius in the early first century and turned it into a heavily militarised frontier land: along the bank of the Danube ran the limes, the line of forts that separated the Empire from the "barbarian" peoples of the east. The capital of Lower Pannonia was Aquincum, on what is now the Óbuda district of Budapest, with its legions, its baths, its amphitheatres and its aqueduct, whose ruins can still be visited. Sopron (Scarbantia) and Pécs (Sopianae) were also Roman towns of importance.
As the Empire fell into crisis, the middle Danube plain became a corridor and a campground for the great peoples of the steppe. In the fifth century the Huns settled here: it was in the Carpathian Basin that Attila, the most famous of their kings, had the centre of his short-lived empire, before his defeat at the Catalaunian Plains (451) and his death in 453. Attila's memory weighed so heavily on later Hungarian imagination that for centuries the medieval chronicles wanted to see the Huns as the direct ancestors of the Magyars — hence the name "Hungary" — a kinship that historians today regard as legendary rather than real.
After the Huns came other peoples — Goths, Gepids, Lombards — and above all the Avars, a horse people of Central Asian origin who around 568 founded a powerful khaganate on the Pannonian plain that lasted more than two centuries. The Avars dominated the region until, at the end of the eighth century, they were crushed by Charlemagne's campaigns (around 791-803), which brought part of Transdanubia into the Frankish world. When the Magyars arrived a century later, they found a land inhabited by Slavic populations and remnants of Avars, with no strong power to stand against them.
The founding event of the Hungarian nation is the honfoglalás, the "taking of the homeland": the migration by which, around the years 895-896, the Magyars crossed the Carpathian passes and settled in the Pannonian basin. They were a confederation of seven tribes (joined by a group of Kabars), semi-nomadic peoples of riders and archers who came from the steppes north of the Black Sea, pushed west by another steppe people, the Pechenegs. According to tradition they were led by prince Árpád, whose house would reign in Hungary for the next four centuries. A blood pact among the tribal chiefs, the so-called Vérszerződés, is said to have sealed the union under Árpád's line.
The most singular thing about this people is their language. Hungarian is not Indo-European: it is not related to German, Slavic, Latin or any of the languages around it. It belongs to the Ugric branch of the Finno-Ugric (or Uralic) family, which links it distantly to Finnish and Estonian, and more closely to two small languages of western Siberia, Khanty and Mansi, spoken today by a few thousand people in the region of the Ob river. The original homeland of the Magyars is therefore traced much further east, in the forests and steppes beyond the Ural mountains. That improbable ancestry — a Finno-Ugric island in the middle of an Indo-European sea — is one of the traits Hungarians feel as most their own and one they make an identity banner of.
For half a century the Magyars were the terror of Europe: their riders launched raids (kalandozások) that ravaged Italy, Germany, France and even the Iberian Peninsula, looting and extracting tribute. The riding stopped dead on 10 August 955 at the battle of Lechfeld, near Augsburg, where the German king Otto I inflicted a decisive defeat on them. Blocked in the west, the Magyars turned towards settlement and towards building a state, a process that would lead, a generation later, to the founding of the Christian kingdom of Hungary.
The move from pagan Magyars to Christian kingdom was the work of the house of Árpád. Prince Géza, towards the end of the tenth century, understood that his people's survival depended on joining Christian, Latin Europe, and opened the country to missionaries. But it was his son, baptised with the name Stephen (István), who completed the transformation. On Géza's death, Stephen had to impose himself by force over pagan chiefs who disputed his power, in particular his relative Koppány, whom he defeated with the backing of Christian knights.
At Christmas in the year 1000 or on 1 January 1001, Stephen was crowned the first king of Hungary with a crown that, according to tradition, was sent to him by Pope Sylvester II. With him the medieval Hungarian state was born. Stephen organised the kingdom on the European model: he divided it into counties (vármegye) governed by an ispán, founded ten dioceses with the archbishopric of Esztergom at their head, built churches and monasteries, issued written laws and made conversion to Christianity compulsory, putting down pagan rebellions harshly. He turned the semi-nomadic Magyars into a settled, Christian, feudal people, fully part of Western Christendom rather than Byzantine Orthodoxy, a choice of enormous weight for the country's future.
Stephen was canonised in 1083 and became Saint Stephen, patron of Hungary; his feast day, 20 August, is the national holiday. The "Holy Crown" (Szent Korona) associated with his name became the very symbol of Hungarian sovereignty and statehood — the doctrine of the Holy Crown held that power lay in the crown rather than in the person of the king — and it is still kept and venerated in Budapest today. The Árpád dynasty reigned until 1301 and produced other saints and famous figures, such as king Ladislaus I and Saint Elizabeth of Hungary.
In the spring of 1241, Hungary suffered one of the greatest catastrophes in its history. The Mongol armies, which had laid waste to Kievan Rus and were advancing towards the heart of Europe under general Subutai and khan Batu, grandson of Genghis Khan, broke into the Carpathian Basin. King Béla IV gathered his troops, but on 11 April 1241, at the battle of Muhi beside the Sajó river, the Hungarian army was annihilated. Béla IV barely escaped and had to flee as far as the Dalmatian coast, pursued by Mongol riders, finally taking refuge on an island in the Adriatic.
For almost a year the Mongols sacked the country with fire and sword. The destruction was appalling: a large share of the population of the Great Plain is reckoned to have died in the massacres, the famine and the epidemics, with estimates pointing to the loss of a very high fraction of the inhabitants of the lowlands, which were hit harder than the mountainous and fortified regions. Whole villages disappeared. The Mongol withdrawal in early 1242 was not down to a military defeat but to the death of the great khan Ögedei in Mongolia, which forced the princes to return for the succession: central Europe was saved almost by chance.
Béla IV came back to a devastated country and set about rebuilding it, which is why he is known as the kingdom's "second founder". He drew a clear lesson from the disaster: against steppe cavalry you need stone fortresses. He pushed the building of hilltop castles — such as those of Visegrád and Buda — walled towns, encouraged the arrival of settlers (the hospites, Germans and others) and granted urban privileges. He also settled the Cumans on the plain, a steppe people who were themselves fleeing the Mongols. The network of castles born after 1241 would be decisive, centuries later, against another threat from the east: the Ottomans.
After the house of Árpád died out in 1301, foreign dynasties reigned in Hungary and took the country to its medieval peak: the Angevins (Charles Robert and Louis I the Great, who added the crown of Poland) and then Sigismund of Luxembourg, who was also emperor. It was also the period when the Turkish threat began to appear in the south. Against it stood out a Transylvanian noble of Wallachian origin, János Hunyadi, a great Christian commander who in 1456 broke the Ottoman siege of Belgrade, a victory in memory of which, they say, the midday bells are still rung across Christendom.
That hero's son was the most brilliant king in Hungarian history: Matthias I Hunyadi, nicknamed Corvinus after the raven (corvus) on his coat of arms, who reigned between 1458 and 1490. Elected king when very young, Matthias created a modern, centralised state: he reformed justice and taxation, brought the high nobility to heel and formed a professional standing army, the feared "Black Army" (Fekete sereg), one of the first in Europe, with which he fought Turks, Bohemians and Austrians and went as far as occupying Vienna, where he installed his court in 1485.
Matthias was above all a great patron of the Renaissance. Married to Beatrice of Naples, he drew Italian humanists, artists and architects to Hungary, and made his court at Buda and his palace at Visegrád centres of culture on a par with those of Italy. He assembled the Bibliotheca Corviniana, one of the largest and most famous libraries in the Europe of its day, with illuminated manuscripts of extraordinary luxury. Under his reign Hungary was a great power and a cultural focus of the first order. But his work did not outlive him: he died in 1490 without a recognised legitimate heir, the Black Army was disbanded, the nobility recovered its power and the kingdom entered a decline that, barely a generation later, would leave it defenceless against the Ottomans. Popular memory kept the image of the "just king": "Matthias is dead, justice is dead", says the proverb.
On 29 August 1526, on the plain of Mohács beside the Danube, the Hungarian army faced that of sultan Suleiman the Magnificent. It was an absolute disaster: in barely a couple of hours the Hungarian cavalry and infantry were crushed by Ottoman artillery and janissaries. Thousands of soldiers fell, along with much of the nobility and the higher clergy, and the king himself, Louis II (Lajos II), aged twenty, drowned in a stream during the flight. Mohács is the symbolic date of the collapse of the medieval Hungarian kingdom and a wound the language preserves in the phrase "more was lost at Mohács".
The defeat opened a struggle for the throne between Ferdinand of Habsburg and the noble John Zápolya, and over the following decades the kingdom split in three. After the Ottomans took Buda in 1541, the country was divided: Royal Hungary, the northern and western strip, under the Habsburgs, with its effective capital at Pozsony (today's Bratislava); central and southern Hungary, turned into an Ottoman province governed from Buda; and, in the east, the Principality of Transylvania, an autonomous Hungarian state that was a vassal of the sultan and became a refuge for Protestantism and for a degree of Hungarian freedom. This threefold partition lasted around a century and a half.
The roughly 150 years of Ottoman rule (1541-1699 across most of the territory) marked the country deeply. The central lands were left depopulated and devastated by continuous frontier warfare; many towns were partly Turkified, with mosques, baths and minarets of which traces still remain in Pécs, Eger and Buda. Hungarian resistance became legend in episodes such as the siege of Eger in 1552. The end of the occupation came with the great Christian counter-offensive of the Holy League after the failed Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1683: Buda was retaken in 1686 and, by the peace of Karlowitz in 1699, the Ottomans abandoned almost all of Hungary, which passed in its entirety into Habsburg hands.
With the Turks expelled, Hungary came under the rule of the Habsburgs of Vienna, who treated it less as an associated kingdom than as a conquered territory to be reorganised. The court's centralising absolutism, the Catholic Counter-Reformation imposed on a country with a strong Protestant presence, taxation, the billeting of imperial troops and distrust of the Hungarian nobility fed a long series of rebellions (the kuruc revolts) through the seventeenth century and the start of the eighteenth.
The largest of them all was the war of independence led by Ferenc Rákóczi II, a Transylvanian aristocrat who between 1703 and 1711 headed a general uprising against the Habsburgs, taking advantage of Vienna being tangled up in the War of the Spanish Succession. Rákóczi's kuruc came to control much of the country and the Diet proclaimed him ruling prince of Hungary, but they lacked a regular army able to sustain a war against imperial power. With resistance exhausted, the Peace of Szatmár of 1711 ended the conflict: an amnesty was promised, along with respect for certain liberties and for the Hungarian constitution, while Rákóczi, who did not accept the agreement, went into exile, first to France and finally to Turkey, where he died.
Through the rest of the eighteenth century, now pacified, the kingdom recovered in population and in economy under the long-reigning Habsburg sovereign Maria Theresa and her son Joseph II. The Great Plain, devastated by the wars, was resettled with Hungarian, German (the "Danube Swabians"), Serbian, Romanian and Slovak colonists, which sharpened the country's multi-ethnic character. Joseph II, an enlightened despot, attempted radical reforms — he abolished personal serfdom and decreed religious tolerance — but he also tried to impose German as the language of administration, which provoked a Hungarian national reaction. Out of that awakening of identity, and out of the idealised memory of Rákóczi, the nationalism of the nineteenth century would be born.
The Hungarian nineteenth century was the "Age of Reform": a generation of politicians and writers — count Széchenyi, nicknamed "the greatest of Hungarians", who drove modernisation, the Chain Bridge and the Academy; the radical Lajos Kossuth; the poet Sándor Petőfi — worked to modernise the country, abolish serfdom and make Hungarian the national language. The spark came on 15 March 1848 when, in the heat of the revolutionary wave shaking Europe, Pest rose peacefully: Petőfi recited his "National Song" and the "12 points" of demands for freedom were proclaimed. Vienna had to give way and accept a responsible Hungarian government, headed by Lajos Batthyány, which passed the "April laws" with far-reaching liberal reforms.
The revolution soon turned into a war of independence. The Habsburgs, helped by the kingdom's national minorities (Croats, Serbs, Romanians) who feared Hungarian nationalism, tried to subdue Hungary by force. The Hungarian army, commanded by generals such as Görgei, held out with notable success, and on 14 April 1849, with the Diet meeting in Debrecen, Kossuth had Hungary's independence declared and the Habsburgs dethroned, taking office himself as governor-president. It was a brief victory: the young emperor Franz Joseph asked tsar Nicholas I of Russia for help, and the intervention of an enormous Russian army decided the war. On 13 August 1849, at Világos, the Hungarian forces capitulated. The repression was savage: on 6 October thirteen generals were shot or hanged at Arad (the "thirteen martyrs of Arad") and, in Pest, prime minister Batthyány.
Years of absolutism and repression followed (the "Bach era"), but Austria's defeat by Prussia in 1866 forced Vienna to come to terms with the Hungarians. In 1867, thanks above all to the skill of the politician Ferenc Deák, the Compromise (Kiegyezés, Ausgleich) was signed, creating the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary: two equal states, with their own parliaments and governments, joined by the person of the sovereign — Franz Joseph, crowned king of Hungary that year — and by the common affairs of defence, foreign policy and finance. So began half a century of growth and modernisation: Budapest, unified in 1873, became one of the great capitals of Europe, and in 1896 the country celebrated the millennium of the Magyar arrival in style.
Austria-Hungary entered the First World War in 1914 alongside Germany and the Central Powers. Four years of total war exhausted the empire, and its defeat in 1918 brought about the disintegration of the dual monarchy. In Budapest, the "Aster Revolution" of October 1918 brought count Mihály Károlyi to power and proclaimed the Republic; but in March 1919, amid the chaos, the communist Béla Kun installed a short-lived and violent Hungarian Soviet Republic, overthrown months later by the intervention of the Romanian army, which went as far as occupying Budapest. Out of that whirlwind of revolution, counter-revolution, "red terror" and "white terror", the country emerged wrecked and at the mercy of the victors.
On 4 June 1920, at the Trianon palace in Versailles, Hungary signed the peace treaty that would define the rest of its twentieth century. Its terms were devastating: the historic kingdom lost around two thirds of its territory and of its population. Transylvania went to Romania; the north (today's Slovakia and Subcarpathian Ruthenia) to Czechoslovakia; the south (Croatia, the Vojvodina) to the new Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes; and a western strip, the Burgenland, to Austria. The country's population fell from some 20.8 million to around 7 million.
The most painful part, and what makes Trianon a wound that is still open, is that close to 3.3 million ethnic Hungarians were left outside the new borders — by some counts around a third of all Magyars — many of them in compact areas just on the other side of the line, in southern Slovakia, in Transylvania or in the Vojvodina. Trianon was experienced as a national mutilation and its memory dominated interwar politics, under the slogan "Nem, nem, soha" ("No, no, never"). That trauma is real and explains a great deal of Hungarian sensitivity. At the same time, it has been and still is politically instrumentalised: the claim on Hungarians beyond the borders — who have been granted citizenship since 2011 — is today a banner of nationalist governments, used both to build legitimate cultural ties and to mobilise a discourse of identity and grievance. Writing the history of Trianon means recognising at once the scale of the blow and the political use made of it, without turning mourning into an irredentist programme or playing down the emotional weight it carries for millions of people.
The regime that emerged from the trauma of Trianon was a peculiar "monarchy without a king". In 1920, admiral Miklós Horthy — former commander of the Austro-Hungarian fleet — was named regent of the kingdom of Hungary, a post he held until 1944. Hungary formally remained a kingdom, but the throne stayed vacant: when the former emperor Charles I twice tried in 1921 to recover the Hungarian crown, Horthy himself and the neighbouring powers stopped him. The regime was conservative, authoritarian and nationalist, obsessed with revising Trianon and recovering the lost territories, and marked from the start by the "white terror" against leftists and by early antisemitic legislation: the numerus clausus law of 1920, which limited Jewish access to university, was one of the first anti-Jewish laws in interwar Europe.
The revisionist ambition pushed Hungary towards Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, the only powers willing to reopen the question of borders. The policy brought apparent results: thanks to the two "Vienna Awards" (1938 and 1940), sponsored by Berlin and Rome, Hungary recovered territories from Slovakia and the northern half of Transylvania, and in 1941 it occupied areas of invaded Yugoslavia. The price was total alignment with the Axis. Hungary joined the Tripartite Pact and in June 1941 entered the war against the Soviet Union alongside Germany.
The adventure ended in military catastrophe. The Hungarian Second Army, sent to the eastern front, was practically destroyed in January 1943 at the battle of the river Don, near Voronezh, with tens of thousands dead and taken prisoner. From then on Horthy secretly looked for a way out of the war and made contact with the Western Allies, aware that Germany was losing. Hitler, who suspected as much, decided to move first. On 19 March 1944, German troops occupied Hungary (Operation Margarethe) to secure control of the country and of its wavering ally. It was the beginning of the darkest chapter.
The German occupation of March 1944 set off one of the fastest and most massive episodes of the Holocaust. Adolf Eichmann arrived in Budapest with a small SS unit and set up his headquarters to organise the deportation of the Hungarian Jews, the largest Jewish community still alive in Europe. It was all done with terrible speed and, what makes it worse, with the decisive participation of the Hungarian administration: it was the Hungarian gendarmerie and bureaucracy that registered their own fellow citizens, marked them with the yellow star, herded them into ghettos and put them on the trains.
Between 15 May and 9 July 1944, in barely two months, around 437,000 Jews were deported from the Hungarian provinces on some 147 trains that went overwhelmingly to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where close to 80% were murdered in the gas chambers on arrival. The flow was such that the camp's crematoria could not keep up that summer. Under international pressure — including from the king of Sweden, the Pope and Roosevelt himself — regent Horthy ordered the deportations halted in early July 1944, which for the moment saved the roughly 200,000 Jews of Budapest. But on 15 October 1944, when Horthy finally tried to leave the war, the Germans overthrew him and handed power to Ferenc Szálasi and his fascist Arrow Cross party (Nyilas).
The Arrow Cross months were ones of open terror against the Jews of Budapest: death marches towards the Austrian border, an overcrowded ghetto and killings on the bank of the Danube, where thousands of people were shot and thrown into the river — the "shoes on the Danube bank" are their memorial today. In the middle of the horror, diplomats such as the Swede Raoul Wallenberg and the Swiss Carl Lutz saved tens of thousands with safe-conduct passes and "protected houses". In total, between 500,000 and 565,000 Hungarian Jews are estimated to have died, more than half the pre-war community. Meanwhile the war was reaching the capital: the Red Army encircled Budapest at the end of 1944 and fought a brutal house-by-house siege that lasted until 13 February 1945 and left the city in ruins, with all its bridges over the Danube blown up by the retreating Germans.
Occupied by the Red Army, Hungary fell into the Soviet orbit. After a few years of democratic façade, the Communist Party, led by Mátyás Rákosi, took full power by what he himself called "salami tactics": eliminating rivals slice by slice. By 1949 a total Stalinist dictatorship was in place: forced collectivisation of the countryside, heavy industrialisation, a cult of Stalin, an omnipresent political police (the ÁVH) and a wave of terror with rigged trials — such as the one that sent the communist leader László Rajk himself to the gallows — along with torture, mass imprisonment and labour and internment camps, like the one at Recsk or the sites where "class enemies" were deported to the puszta of Hortobágy.
The suffocation broke open on 23 October 1956. What began as a student demonstration in solidarity with reformist Poland turned within hours into a national revolution: the great statue of Stalin was pulled down, people fought the ÁVH and the Soviet tanks, and the reformist communist Imre Nagy took over the government, promised free elections, the end of the one-party system and Hungarian neutrality, announcing withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact. Moscow would not tolerate it: on 4 November 1956 the Red Army launched a massive offensive on Budapest and crushed the revolution. Some 2,500 people died, around 200,000 Hungarians fled into exile, and harsh repression followed: Imre Nagy, after being tricked with a safe-conduct pass, was tried in secret and executed in 1958. He became the martyr of 1956.
The man Moscow put in charge after the crushing, János Kádár, governed the country for more than three decades and, paradoxically, led it towards a more bearable version of socialism. After the first years of repression, Kádár launched the "New Economic Mechanism" in 1968, which introduced elements of the market, a degree of private initiative and consumer goods. So was born "goulash communism" (gulyáskommunizmus): in exchange for not questioning the regime or the tie to the USSR, Hungarians enjoyed a standard of living and an everyday freedom greater than those of their neighbours in the bloc, which earned Hungary the nickname of the "happiest barrack" in the socialist camp. That relative comfort coexisted with foreign debt and the absence of political freedoms.
The system came apart at the end of the eighties. On 19 August 1989, near Sopron, the Pan-European Picnic was held, a peaceful demonstration during which a stretch of the border with Austria was opened for a few hours and hundreds of East Germans holidaying in Hungary crossed to the West: it was the first breach in the Iron Curtain, weeks before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Hungary opened its border completely in September, a "negotiated transition" was worked out at the round table between the party and the opposition, and on 23 October 1989 the new, democratic Republic of Hungary was proclaimed. Free elections followed in 1990, the withdrawal of Soviet troops in 1991 and integration into Western structures: Hungary joined NATO in 1999 and the European Union in 2004. Since 2010 the country has been governed by Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz party, whose "illiberal democracy", its confrontation with Brussels and its national discourse — heavily centred, among other things, on the memory of Trianon — define contemporary Hungary.
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Before Budapest existed, Aquincum stood on the right bank of the Danube, capital of the Roman province of Lower Pannonia. Founded in the first century on top of a military camp, it grew into a city of tens of thousands of inhabitants, with its legionary fortress, its civilian town, two amphitheatres — one military and one civil — baths, temples and a system of aqueducts. Marcus Aurelius, the philosopher emperor, spent periods on this frontier of the empire fighting the Germanic peoples, and it was here, it is believed, that he wrote part of his "Meditations".
The Danube was the limes, the fortified line marking the edge of the Roman world against the "barbarians" of the east. Aquincum was therefore a military post of the first order, a point of contact and collision between Rome and the steppes. Its ruins — the Aquincum museum and archaeological park, the remains of the military amphitheatre — survive today in the Óbuda district, in northern Budapest.
Óbuda (literally "Old Buda") inherited that site through the Middle Ages. The continuity is remarkable: the Magyars later settled on Rome's old Pannonian capital, and out of that ancient core, together with the medieval fortress of Buda and the merchant town of Pest on the opposite bank, the capital of Hungary would in time be born.
For centuries, what is now Budapest was three separate towns on the banks of the Danube: Buda, perched on the hill of the western bank, with its royal castle and the Palace quarter; Óbuda, further north; and Pest, the flat merchant town on the eastern bank. Buda became the royal capital after the Mongol invasion, when Béla IV ordered the hill fortified, and reached its peak with the Renaissance court of Matthias Corvinus in the fifteenth century. With the Ottoman conquest of 1541, Buda was for a century and a half the seat of the Turkish pasha, and it was only retaken by the Christians in 1686, after a bloody siege that left it flattened.
The great leap came in the nineteenth century. The building of the Chain Bridge (Széchenyi lánchíd), opened in 1849 — the first permanent bridge over the Danube in the area — physically joined Buda and Pest. In 1873 the three towns were officially merged into one: Budapest. In the following decades, in the heat of the dual monarchy's growth and the millennium celebrations of 1896, the capital went through a building boom that gave it its present face: the imposing neo-Gothic Parliament on the riverbank, Andrássy avenue, the first metro line on the European continent (1896), the Opera House, the great boulevards and the thermal baths.
The twentieth century hit the city hard: the Soviet siege of the winter of 1944-45 left it in ruins with all its bridges blown up, and in 1956 its streets were the stage of the revolution. Rebuilt, Budapest is today one of the most beautiful capitals in Europe, with its historic core and the banks of the Danube listed as a World Heritage Site by Unesco.
Upstream from Budapest, where the Danube makes its great bend and now marks the border with Slovakia, stands Esztergom, the town most loaded with symbolism in Hungarian Christianity. Here, on the castle hill, prince Vajk was born around the year 975, later baptised and crowned as Stephen I, the first Christian king of Hungary. Esztergom was the kingdom's first capital and the place where, in the year 1000, the Hungarian state was set in motion.
Stephen made Esztergom the seat of the country's principal archbishopric. Since then, the archbishop of Esztergom has been the primate of Hungary, the highest authority of the Hungarian Catholic Church, and the town has been the religious centre of the nation for a thousand years. That role also marked it in hard times: in the twentieth century, cardinal József Mindszenty, archbishop of Esztergom, embodied the Church's resistance to communism, was imprisoned and tortured by the Stalinist regime and took refuge for fifteen years in the United States embassy after the 1956 revolution.
The monument that crowns the town is the Basilica of Esztergom, the largest church in Hungary, an enormous nineteenth-century neoclassical building raised on the foundations of medieval cathedrals. Its dome dominates the landscape of the Danube Bend and is visible from the Slovak bank. Esztergom thus preserves in stone the memory of the kingdom's birth and of its thousand-year bond with Latin Christendom.
Right in the Danube Bend, where the river narrows between mountains, stands Visegrád, dominated by the ruins of its hilltop castle and by the so-called Solomon Tower. The fortress was built after the Mongol invasion of 1241 as part of the new network of stone castles, and in the fourteenth century, under the kings of the House of Anjou, Visegrád became for decades a royal residence and the capital of the kingdom.
One of the great diplomatic events of medieval Europe took place here: the Congress of Visegrád of 1335, in which the Hungarian king Charles I Robert brought together king John of Bohemia and Casimir III of Poland to settle disputes, seal an alliance and encourage trade routes that would bypass rival Vienna. That meeting of the three central European kings is so well remembered that in 1991, when communism fell, Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia (later Czechia and Slovakia) named their regional cooperation the "Visegrád Group" in direct homage to the medieval summit.
Visegrád's greatest splendour came in the fifteenth century with Matthias Corvinus, who turned the Gothic royal palace into a lavish Renaissance residence, with marble fountains, hanging gardens and Italian-style decoration that chroniclers of the time described in astonishment as an "earthly paradise". That palace, buried and forgotten for centuries after the Turkish wars, was rediscovered by archaeology in the twentieth century and can be visited today, evoking the moment when this corner of the Danube was one of the centres of the European Renaissance.
A few kilometres from Budapest, on the bank of the Danube, Szentendre is a small town of cobbled streets, coloured houses and churches with baroque bell towers that give it a Mediterranean air unusual in Hungary. That character has a precise historical origin: the arrival of Serbian refugees fleeing the Ottoman advance in the Balkans.
The decisive episode was the "Great Migration of the Serbs" of 1690, when, after a failed anti-Ottoman uprising, tens of thousands of Orthodox Serbs led by patriarch Arsenije III Čarnojević crossed into Habsburg territory. Many settled in Szentendre, which became a prosperous trading centre and the seat of an important Serbian Orthodox community. They built the town's baroque churches and its Orthodox cathedral, and gave it its distinctive look. Over time the Serbian community shrank, but its architectural and spiritual mark remains.
From the early twentieth century, Szentendre also became a celebrated artists' colony: Hungarian painters and sculptors settled here, drawn by its light and its atmosphere, and the town filled with studios, galleries and museums. Today, a step from the capital and at the gateway to the Danube Bend, Szentendre combines its Serbian and baroque heritage with its artistic vocation, and it is one of the favourite escapes from Budapest.
Lake Balaton, in Transdanubia, is the largest lake in central Europe: some 77 kilometres long and up to 14 wide, but shallow and mild, ideal for swimming. In a country with no sea, shut into the middle of the continent since Trianon left it without a coast, the Balaton stands in for a shoreline, which is why Hungarians fondly call it "the Hungarian sea" (magyar tenger). Its northern shore, steeper and volcanic, holds vineyards, hills and thermal waters; the southern shore, with flat sandy beaches, concentrates the big resorts.
Human presence around the lake is very old. The Romans, who called the region Pannonia, grew vines here and left villas and roads; the medieval abbey of Tihany, in the eleventh century, marked the taking root of Christianity; and during the Turkish wars the area was a contested frontier. The vineyards on the volcanic slopes of the north, such as those of Mount Badacsony, have produced prized wines for centuries.
The Balaton became a mass tourist destination from the end of the nineteenth century, with the arrival of the railway, and above all in the twentieth. Its warm water, its holiday villages, its thermal baths — such as those of nearby Lake Hévíz, the largest bathable thermal lake in the world — and its vineyards made it the great holiday spot for Hungarians. Under socialism and to this day, the Balaton is a byword for summer, rest and popular leisure.
On a peninsula that pushes into the lake and almost splits it in two stands Tihany, crowned by its two-towered Benedictine abbey, one of the most famous images of the Balaton. The monastery was founded in 1055 by king Andrew I (András I), who is buried in its Romanesque crypt, the only royal chamber of that period preserved intact in Hungary.
What makes Tihany unique in Hungarian cultural history is its founding charter. The 1055 document, which lists the lands and goods donated by the king to the abbey, is written in Latin, as was usual, but it slips in dozens of words and names in Hungarian. It is the oldest known text containing words written in the Hungarian language: some 58 Magyar words in all, among them the celebrated phrase "feheruuaru rea meneh hodu utu rea", which in modern Hungarian would be "Fehérvárra menő hadi útra" ("towards the military road that goes to Fehérvár"). That handful of words is the first written trace of a language that had been spoken for centuries but was not yet being written down.
That is why the Tihany founding charter is a linguistic relic of incalculable value: it lets scholars look in on eleventh-century Hungarian, with forms and sounds that later evolved. The original document is kept in the archive of the archabbey of Pannonhalma. The baroque abbey that crowns the peninsula today was rebuilt in the eighteenth century, but beneath it remain king Andrew's Romanesque crypt and the memory of the text that opened the written history of the Hungarian language.
Through the decades of socialism, the Balaton was far more than the Hungarians' seaside: it became one of the few places in the whole Eastern bloc where citizens of East Germany (GDR) and West Germany (FRG) could meet face to face. The reason was geographical and political. East Germans were forbidden to travel west, and West Germans could not freely visit the east; but both could spend their holidays in the "friendly" and relatively open Hungary of goulash communism. And the holiday destination par excellence was the Balaton.
So, year after year, families divided by the Berlin Wall arranged to meet at the campsites and beaches of the lake in order to see one another: grandparents meeting their grandchildren, separated siblings, couples from either side. The Balaton became an emotional meeting point for a German people split in two, a place where the Iron Curtain turned, for a few summer weeks, a little more permeable. The GDR's political police, the Stasi, watched these contacts, well aware of what they meant politically.
It is no accident that it was precisely in Hungary, and in that summer of reunions beside the Balaton, that the first crack in the Iron Curtain opened in 1989. Thousands of East Germans holidaying in Hungary took advantage of the opening of the border with Austria — the Pan-European Picnic in August and the full opening in September — to flee to the West. The Balaton, the setting for so many clandestine reunions, was also the prelude to the fall of the Wall and to German reunification.
At the western end of the Balaton lies Keszthely, the oldest town on the lakeshore and one of the most historically significant. Its main monument is the Festetics Palace, an imposing baroque residence of the aristocratic Festetics family, whose halls, gardens and library — the celebrated Helikon, with tens of thousands of volumes — make it one of the most beautiful palaces in Hungary.
The Festetics name is tied to a landmark in European history. In 1797, count György Festetics founded the Georgikon in Keszthely, regarded as the first institution of higher agricultural education in Europe. At a time when farming was still anchored in traditional practice, the Georgikon taught scientific agronomy, animal husbandry and forestry, and it pioneered the modernisation of the countryside. The institution endured, and today the town keeps a Georgikon museum recalling that enlightened venture.
Keszthely, with its palace, its university descended from the Georgikon, its cultural life — the "Helikon" concerts — and its closeness to the thermal lake of Hévíz, is a historic and educational centre of the western Balaton, very different from the resort bustle of the southern shore. It represents the enlightened, aristocratic face of the lake region.
On the southern shore of the Balaton, Siófok is the largest town on the lake and its great summer capital. Its origins go back to Roman times: around the year 292, emperor Galerius ordered a canal dug here to regulate the level of the Balaton and drain it towards the Danube through the river Sió, a work that gave the place its name and its reason to exist. For centuries Siófok was a modest village of locks and fishing.
Its transformation came with the railway and tourism. From the end of the nineteenth century, with the arrival of the train, the southern shore of the Balaton — flat sandy beaches and water that warms up early — filled with villas, bathing establishments and hotels, and Siófok became the lake's main holiday centre. Siófok was also the birthplace, in 1882, of the composer Imre Kálmán, one of the great masters of Viennese and Hungarian operetta.
Under socialism, Siófok was the epicentre of the Balaton's mass popular tourism, with its campsites, its trade union holiday homes and its crowds of holidaymakers from Hungary and the rest of the Eastern bloc. It is still the liveliest town on the lake, known for its beaches, its nightlife and its summer atmosphere. It embodies the popular, tourist vocation of the southern shore, the noisiest and most democratic face of the "Hungarian sea".
The north and east of Hungary bring together two very different landscapes. To the north stretch the Highlands, the foothills of the Carpathians, with massifs such as the Mátra and the Bükk, wine valleys, old mining towns and a line of frontier castles. To the east opens the Great Plain (Alföld), the vast flatland running down to the Tisza, a land of livestock, farming and endless horizons. It is a region of contrasts that has played key roles in Hungarian history.
Through the 150 years of Ottoman rule, this strip was a frontier land of permanent war. The northern fortresses — Eger first among them — were the dyke that held back or slowed the Turkish advance towards the heart of Europe, and out of their sieges came the country's greatest heroic legends. Further east, the Great Plain was largely under Ottoman administration or exposed to its raids, which emptied broad districts of people.
In the following centuries the region also stood out for its strong Protestant stamp: while the Habsburg court pushed the Catholic Counter-Reformation, eastern Hungary, with Debrecen at its head, became a bastion of Calvinism. World-famous vineyards, castles out of legend, the herders' grassland and a stubborn Protestantism make up the personality of these northern and eastern lands.
Few stories condense the spirit of Hungarian resistance as much as the siege of Eger in 1552. In the autumn of that year, a huge Ottoman army of tens of thousands of men under Kara Ahmed Pasha laid siege to the fortress of Eger, in the north of the country. It was defended by barely 2,100 to 2,300 men — professional soldiers, peasants and even a few dozen women — under the command of captain István Dobó. The imbalance was overwhelming, close to seventeen to one.
Against all odds, the defenders held. For 39 days they endured artillery fire — it is said that nearly 12,000 shells fell inside the fortress — and threw back five major assaults. The women of Eger fought alongside the men on the walls, and the morale and cunning of the besieged made up for their numerical inferiority. In the end, exhausted and with winter closing in, the Ottomans lifted the siege and withdrew. The victory at Eger, at a moment when almost the whole country was falling into Turkish hands, had immense moral value.
The episode became an eternal symbol of patriotic heroism thanks to the novel "Egri csillagok" ("Eclipse of the Crescent Moon", literally "Stars of Eger"), which Géza Gárdonyi published in 1899 and which is still required reading in Hungarian schools. It is worth remembering, so as not to mistake the legend for the whole story, that the glory of 1552 had its flip side: in 1596 Eger did fall to the Ottomans and stayed Turkish for almost a century, until 1687. From that period the town, today also famous for its red wine "Bull's Blood" (Egri Bikavér), kept the northernmost minaret in the Ottoman world.
In the north-east of the country, where the last spurs of the Carpathians meet the plains, lies the Tokaj-Hegyalja wine region, one of the oldest and most prestigious in the world. Its flagship product is Tokaji Aszú, a golden sweet wine made from grapes affected by "noble rot" (Botrytis cinerea), a fungus which, in the humid and sunny conditions of the Tisza and Bodrog valleys, dehydrates the berries and concentrates their sugar.
Tokaj aszú has a documented history going back centuries: it was already being made with today's techniques in the seventeenth century, and its fame travelled the European courts. It was called "vinum regum, rex vinorum", the wine of kings and the king of wines, a phrase tradition attributes to Louis XIV of France. It was the favourite wine of tsars, popes and emperors, and in 1737 the region received one of the first vineyard demarcations and classifications in the world, well before those of Bordeaux or Porto, so Tokaj can claim to be one of the birthplaces of appellations of origin.
The history of the wine ran alongside that of the country: the princes of Transylvania, such as the Rákóczis, had their estates here, and the tokaji trade was both a source of wealth and a diplomatic instrument. In the twentieth century, communist collectivisation flattened and degraded production, but after 1989 the region revived with investment and quality wineries. In 2002 the "Tokaj Wine Region Historic Cultural Landscape" was inscribed on Unesco's World Heritage list, in recognition of a thousand years of a living winegrowing tradition.
Debrecen, the largest city in eastern Hungary, is known as the "Calvinist Rome". When the Protestant Reformation spread across Europe in the sixteenth century, Debrecen embraced it so firmly that it became the great bastion of Hungarian Calvinism, while the court in Vienna imposed the Catholic Counter-Reformation on the rest of the kingdom. Its Reformed College (Református Kollégium), founded in the sixteenth century, was for centuries one of the main centres of Protestant education in central Europe, and the Great Reformed Church, with its two-towered neoclassical façade, is the largest Protestant church in the country and the city's symbol.
That character as a redoubt of Hungarian spiritual independence made Debrecen the country's capital twice at moments of crisis. The first was during the war of independence of 1848-49: when the Austrian army threatened Pest, the revolutionary government moved to Debrecen, and it was there, in the Great Reformed Church, that on 14 April 1849 the Hungarian Diet, at the urging of Lajos Kossuth, proclaimed Hungary's independence and the dethroning of the House of Habsburg. Kossuth was appointed governor-president. That independence lasted only a few months, until the revolution was crushed by the Austrian and Russian armies.
Debrecen became the provisional capital again at the end of the Second World War: in late 1944, while Budapest was still in German hands and under siege, the Hungarian Provisional National Government was formed in the city, under Soviet control, and signed the armistice with the Allies. Twice, in 1849 and in 1944, the political fate of the country was decided in this capital of Calvinism and of the eastern plain.
West of Debrecen stretches Hortobágy, the largest continuous grassland of the Hungarian puszta: an endless plain of pasture, salt flats and empty horizons that is the heart of the Great Plain. For centuries it was the realm of the mounted herders, the csikós, and of native livestock breeds — the long-horned grey ox, the spiral-horned racka sheep, the mangalica pigs — with their flocks, their sweep wells and their coaching inns (csárda). The stone Nine-Arched Bridge is its most famous image. Its natural and cultural value, evidence of a traditional pastoral herding going back more than two millennia, saw Hortobágy National Park inscribed on Unesco's World Heritage list in 1999.
But the puszta also holds a dark memory of the communist period. In the harshest years of Mátyás Rákosi's Stalinism, between 1950 and 1953, the regime forcibly deported to Hortobágy thousands of people considered "class enemies": well-off peasants (the so-called kulaks), former landowners, officers, people of "bourgeois" origin or simply under suspicion. They were taken from their homes, often at night and with only what they were wearing, and confined in forced labour camps scattered across the plain, made to do agricultural work in very hard conditions and under guard.
In those internment camps of the puszta — there were a dozen of them in the Hortobágy area — thousands of deportees, including the elderly and children, went through deprivation, illness and forced labour, until the camps were dissolved after Stalin's death in 1953. It is a far less known story than that of Eger or of the wine, but it is part of this plain's past: beneath the serene beauty of the puszta beats the memory of communist repression as well.
The south and west of Hungary make up Transdanubia (Dunántúl), the region west of the Danube that was the core of ancient Roman Pannonia and the area most tied, by geography and history, to central and Mediterranean Europe. It is a land of gentle hills, vineyards, old episcopal towns and a dense historical layering: Roman, medieval, Ottoman and Austrian strata overlap in its cities.
During the Turkish wars, much of southern Transdanubia came under Ottoman rule, with Pécs as one of its important towns, while the west, closer to Vienna, stayed under Habsburg control and filled with German-speaking population. That mixture — Hungarians, Germans (the "Danube Swabians"), Croats, Serbs — gave the region a particularly plural character.
The west, moreover, became in the twentieth century the front line of the Cold War: the border with Austria was for decades the very edge of the Iron Curtain, with its electrified fence and its watchtowers. It was precisely here, near Sopron, that in 1989 that border began to fall. Towns loaded with history and a border that shaped the fate of Europe define the Hungarian south and west.
Pécs, the main city of southern Hungary, has one of the longest and richest histories in the country. In Roman times it was called Sopianae and was an important centre of the province of Pannonia; in the fourth century, as Christianity spread through the Empire, the city became a focus of the new faith and its Christians built a remarkable set of burial chambers and chapels.
That early Christian necropolis of Sopianae is today the greatest archaeological treasure of Pécs. It is a group of underground tombs and burial chambers from the fourth and fifth centuries, many of them decorated with high-quality wall paintings on biblical themes — scenes from the Old and New Testaments — which make them one of the most important early Christian funerary complexes north of the Mediterranean. For its exceptional value as evidence of early Christianity in this part of Europe, the early Christian necropolis of Pécs was inscribed on Unesco's World Heritage list in the year 2000.
The historical continuity of Pécs carried on into the Middle Ages: in 1367, at the initiative of king Louis I the Great, the first university in Hungary was founded here. An episcopal and learned city, Pécs was for centuries a focus of scholarship and art in the south of the kingdom, before the arrival of the Ottomans opened a very different chapter of its history.
After the disaster at Mohács — which happened a few kilometres from here — and the partition of the country, Pécs fell under Ottoman rule in 1543 and remained Turkish for some 143 years, until 1686. It was one of the most notable cities of Ottoman Hungary, and from that century and a half it kept some of the finest examples of Islamic architecture in the country.
The most emblematic monument is the former mosque of Pasha Qasim (Gazi Kászim pasa), built in the sixteenth century over a medieval church on the city's main square. It is the largest surviving Ottoman-era building in Hungary: a square-plan structure crowned by a great green dome. After the Christian reconquest it was turned back into a Catholic church, and it is still a Christian place of worship today, but it clearly keeps its mosque silhouette, with its dome and its arches, in a unique architectural blend. Inside, symbols of the two religions sit side by side.
Pécs also has the mosque of Yakovali Hassan, smaller and the only one in the country that keeps its minaret intact, along with remains of Turkish baths. That Ottoman heritage, layered on top of the Roman and the medieval Christian, makes Pécs one of the most stratified and cosmopolitan cities in Hungary, where you can read at a glance the different civilisations that passed through the Carpathian Basin. In 2010, that cultural richness earned it the title of European Capital of Culture.
In the far north-west of the country, hard against the Austrian border, Sopron — Roman Scarbantia, German-speaking Ödenburg — is one of the towns that keep their medieval and baroque core intact, because the wars of the twentieth century barely touched it. But its place in Hungarian memory is owed above all to an episode of 1921.
After the First World War, the Treaty of Trianon and that of Saint-Germain awarded Austria a strip of western Hungary, the Burgenland, mostly populated by Germans. Sopron was to pass to Austria as well. But Hungarian resistance — including an armed insurrection by volunteers in the summer and autumn of 1921 — and the negotiations led to the Venice Protocol, which exceptionally provided for a plebiscite. It was the only border referendum authorised by the Entente in the whole of the former kingdom of Hungary.
The vote was held on 14 and 16 December 1921. Even though close to half the town's population was German-speaking, 72.8% of Sopron's voters chose to remain Hungarian; adding the eight neighbouring villages, the result in Hungary's favour was 65%. Sopron was thus the only significant territorial revision in Hungary's favour after Trianon, a symbolic consolation in the middle of the disaster. In recognition of that loyalty, the town received the title of "Civitas Fidelissima", the most loyal town, and the anniversary of the vote is celebrated as the "Day of Loyalty". At a time when the country was losing almost everything, Sopron became an emblem of loyalty to the homeland.
Hungary's western border, next to Sopron, was during the Cold War one of the most tension-laden stretches of the Iron Curtain: the line separating the Soviet bloc from the Western world. From the early fifties, the communist regime sealed it with barbed wire, minefields, ploughed strips to pick up footprints and watchtowers, to stop people fleeing to Austria. Crossing it could cost you your life.
At the end of the eighties, with a reformist Hungary and Gorbachev's USSR, that border began to open. In May 1989 the Hungarian government started dismantling the electrified fence with Austria, a gesture of enormous symbolic weight. But the decisive moment came on 19 August 1989 with the Pan-European Picnic, a peaceful demonstration organised near Sopron, at which it was agreed to open an old border gate for three hours. The idea came, among others, from Otto von Habsburg, son of the last Austro-Hungarian emperor.
During that picnic, hundreds of East German citizens holidaying in Hungary — many of them up from the Balaton — used the opening to cross en masse into Austria and the free world: more than 600 people escaped that day, without the Hungarian guards stopping them. It was the first real breach in the Iron Curtain, and it set off a chain reaction. Weeks later, on 10 September, Hungary opened its western border completely to East Germans, and in November the Berlin Wall came down. That corner of the Sopron border, where in 1921 the town had voted to stay in Hungary, was in 1989 the place where the communist bloc began to crumble.