A country shaped by a basin
Hungary spans much of the Carpathian Basin, a great lowland closed in by the Carpathians to the north and east, the Alps to the west and the Dinaric Alps to the south. Those mountain walls mostly stand beyond its modern borders, so the country itself is low and open. Its highest summit, Kékes, reaches only 1,014 metres. The Great Hungarian Plain fills most of the east and southeast, while hilly Transdanubia stretches west towards Austria.
The Danube flows north to south through the centre of the country and splits the capital in two: Buda rises on hills along the west bank, and Pest spreads across flat land on the east. The two were merged with Óbuda into a single city only in 1873. The Tisza is the country's other main river.
Lake Balaton, the largest lake in Central Europe, gives this landlocked country something close to a seaside. It runs for 78 kilometres but averages only about 3.3 metres deep, and its water averages 25 °C in summer. Aristocrats came first, the middle class followed in the late nineteenth century, and by the 1960s and 1970s it was a holiday place for ordinary working Hungarians.
Hot water is the other great natural gift. The crust under the basin is only about 25 kilometres thick, so heat rises unusually strongly from below and supports hundreds of geothermal wells and baths. Spa culture is part of the country's identity, and Lake Hévíz is the largest thermal lake in the world.
From the Magyars to the modern state
Hungarians trace their state to the Magyars, who moved into the basin in the decades up to about 895. Their language remains the country's most distinctive feature. Hungarian belongs to the Uralic family, and its closest relatives, Mansi and Khanty, are spoken in western Siberia. The Slavic, Turkic and German influences in it came through long contact, not shared ancestry. Stephen I became the first Christian king in 1000, and 20 August is still a national holiday in memory of him and the state's founding.
Defeat by the Ottomans at Mohács in 1526 began a long division of the country into three parts, which lasted until the end of the seventeenth century. As the Ottomans were driven out, the Habsburgs took control. The revolution of 1848 was defeated only after Russia intervened, with the Hungarian commander surrendering in August 1849. A later settlement created the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary in 1867.
The twentieth century was far harsher. After the First World War, Hungary lost 72 percent of its territory, and a third of ethnic Hungarians were left outside the new borders. Their descendants remain: about one million people in Romania declared themselves Hungarian in its 2021 census.
The Holocaust then devastated Hungary's Jews. Between 15 May and 9 July 1944, about 437,000 were deported, most of them to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Budapest's community was largely spared those trains but still faced ghettos and militia violence. Roughly 550,000 Jews from Hungary were killed in all.
After the war, Hungary became a Soviet satellite. Its 1956 revolution ended when more than 150,000 troops and 2,500 tanks arrived from the Soviet Union. The country moved peacefully to democracy in 1989, then joined NATO in 1999 and the European Union in 2004.
Life and economy today
Hungary's 2022 census counted about 9.6 million people, 334,000 fewer than in 2011. Fertility is well below replacement level, at 1.43 children per woman, and the emigration of young adults has made the decline worse. Budapest had about 1.7 million residents at that census, and about a quarter of all Hungarians live in its metropolitan area. The big cities themselves are shrinking while the areas around them grow.
Motor vehicles are central to the economy. In 2023 the Associated Press reported that the automotive industry made up more than 20 percent of exports. Battery factories for electric cars have become a newer and more divisive addition, with some residents protesting over pollution and the loss of land. Hungary keeps its own currency, the forint, rather than the euro.
Paprika flavours much of the country's cooking, in dishes such as goulash and the stew called pörkölt. The best-known wine comes from Tokaj, where vineyard classification began in 1730 and the historic landscape became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2002.
