About Hungary

Hungarian Studies at SSEES | Hungarian Language | Hungary in brief

The first Hungarians, under their leader Árpád, reached the Danube basin in the ninth century, after at least half a millennium spent moving steadily westwards from the Urals, some of the time in symbiotic cohabitation with Turkic tribes.  An early report from Byzantium notes that the "tourkoi speak two languages" and in one of them "they address their leader as ourum" i.e uram "my lord". After a series of raids  which terrified Europe (they even ravaged France and Spain), the Hungarians were organized into a settled community under Géza and especially his son Vajk, who converted to (western) Christianity and became a powerful and charismatic leader as Stephanus/István, receiving a crown from the Pope in the year 1000 and canonization soon after his death.

Historic Hungary included parts of present-day Poland, Austria, Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Romania (Transylvania and the Banat) as well as the whole of the Slovak Republic, and was a major European power and a kaleidoscope of peoples, languages, and religions, until its central and southern parts were occupied by the Ottoman Turks in the early 16th century. The Reformation reached Hungary at the same time and struck particularly deep roots in the less accessible, eastern parts of the kingdom. The Austrian Habsburgs helped to drive out the Ottoman Turks at the end of the 17th century, but also crushed a nationalist rebellion in Transylvania and eastern Hungary in the first decade of the 18th and imposed their rule despite a major war of independence in 1848-9, led by Lajos Kossuth and bloodily suppressed. An accommodation with the Hungarians was reached in 1867, giving birth to the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary. For almost fifty years there was unprecedented industrial expansion and cultural progress, with Budapest reaching a population of some 2 million by the beginning of the 20th century. For example, a Hungarian company put in a bid for the electrification of the London underground system, and indeed Budapest had the first electric underground railway on the continent, in 1896.

The collapse of the old world's empires into the First World War had an especially catastrophic outcome for historic Hungary, which lost two-thirds of its territory and about half its population in the peace treaties that followed the end of the War. The foreign policy of 'rump' Hungary was dominated by the longing to be reunited with its lost territories and its cut-off kinsmen, which drove it ever more deeply into the arms of the power that was already its major economic partner, Germany, since Hitler promised to help in this endeavour. Occupied by its increasingly desperate ally in 1944, Hungary lost more than half a million of its Jewish and Roma population to the death camps and endured a traumatic liberation by the Soviet army. By 1948 a Moscow-trained communist leadership had imposed a Stalinist dictatorship, which erupted in a revolutionary uprising in October 1956.  Although this was unmercifully crushed by Soviet tanks, some small consolation for the bloodshed could perhaps be seen in János Kádár's eventually more relaxed rule over the next three decades.  Hungary was the first to allow East Germans to pass through unhindered to the West and thus played a crucial role in bringing down the Berlin Wall and communist rule in the East.

In the last decade and a half the Republic of Hungary has joined NATO and the European Union and has embarked on the necessary if not always straightforward transition to fully-fledged democracy. When it has come to terms with its tumultuous past through the richness of its unique cultural heritage, it will achieve a present not only worthy of its history but able also to endure into the future. To this end it is vital that it receive more attention from a better-informed outside world.

This page last modified Thursday 16 December 2010.