Hungary historical timeline

Origins

Rome held the west of the country as Pannonia, but Hungary properly begins in 895, when Magyar tribes crossed the Carpathians and settled the basin. They raided westward for two generations until a defeat at Lechfeld in 955 ended it, and in the year 1000 Stephen I was crowned as a Christian king. The language they brought is Uralic, not Indo-European — a relative of Finnish and Estonian, surrounded on every side by Slavic and Germanic neighbours.

Turning points

The Mongols destroyed the kingdom in 1241 and it rebuilt. Matthias Corvinus ran a Renaissance court in the fifteenth century. Then in 1526 the Ottomans won at Mohács and the country was divided three ways for a hundred and fifty years. Habsburg rule followed, a revolution in 1848 was put down with Russian help, and the Compromise of 1867 made Budapest the co-capital of Austria-Hungary. The Treaty of Trianon in 1920 then removed roughly two thirds of the territory and left about a third of ethnic Hungarians outside the new borders — the single most important fact in modern Hungarian politics, and still argued about. The Second World War brought alliance with Germany, then occupation and the deportation of most of the country’s Jews in 1944. The revolution of 1956 was crushed by Soviet tanks. And in 1989 Hungary opened its border to Austria and let East Germans walk through, which helped bring the Wall down.

Influential people

Stephen I, whose crown is in the parliament building. Matthias Corvinus. Lajos Kossuth, the voice of 1848. Ferenc Liszt, and Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály, who walked the villages with recording equipment and rebuilt European music around what they found. Ernő Rubik, whose cube was a teaching aid first. And the Budapest-educated physicists — Szilárd, Teller, Wigner, von Neumann — whom American colleagues called the Martians.

Cultural evolution

The language is the identity, and Hungarians will tell you so. The thermal baths are Roman in origin, Ottoman in architecture and entirely civic in use — people go to them the way other cities go to cafes. Paprika arrived with the Ottomans and became the defining seasoning within a couple of centuries. The táncház movement of the 1970s revived village dance and music as something to do rather than to watch, and it is still going. Tokaji, made from botrytised grapes, was a court wine across Europe before Bordeaux was classified.

Present-day significance

Hungary is a member of the European Union and NATO, keeps its own currency, and has had a sharply contested relationship with Brussels since 2010. Carmaking and engineering carry the economy. Budapest receives visitor numbers far beyond the country’s size, and the baths, the Danube frontage and a very active ruin-bar scene are most of the reason.