It is a unique Hungarian Christmas tradition to decorate the Christmas tree with szaloncukor or ‘parlour candies’. This delicious Christmas treat is inseparable from the festive season in Hungary.

A good politician comes to power with a ‘government of his friends’ already in his mind. The book emphasizes the concept of ‘friends’, because when you want to run a government, you have to appoint people to key positions, who have to be people that you as a leader trust.

The defence mechanism of the Christian world was triggered incredibly quickly in 1241, but due to various conflicts of interest, mostly international, it slowed down just as quickly and then became totally paralyzed.

In the second part of our series, we will examine another pillar of the Coptic Church that arguably played an even greater role in the history of Christianity as a whole.

Studies have found that the belief in a supranatural being that watches our decisions encourage prosocial behaviour and therefore, contributes to large-scale societal cooperation.

Tibor Baranski saved the lives of no less than three thousand Hungarian Jews according to Yad Vashem in Israel, but the actual number could be as many as twelve to fifteen thousand.

Aversion to work was not unique to the leaders of the emigration. After a while, Mihály Révész, a social-democratic journalist in exile, had enough of living abroad and tried to get a job in Budapest. But when his left-wing friends found him a job as a manual worker, he turned it down, indignantly declaring ‘I won’t be a street sweeper’.

Tivadar Csontváry Kosztka is now recognized as one of the greatest Hungarian painters who ever lived. The artist’s work, however, was discovered only a decade after he died in poverty.

The gap between reality and the striving for a pure Christian social life angered many conservative public figures in the Horthy era. In his diary, Prohászka wrote that for Hungarian men, ‘using a prostitute is like drinking a cup of coffee’.

On 23–27 November, the Vienna Book Fair featured thousands of fresh publications and hundreds of high-profile events with more than 500 authors and experts from around the world.

In this article we describe ten wonderful places in Budapest where you can relax a little in the last month of 2022.

There was a time not too far off in the recent past when very few people in the Western world would have recognized words like ‘Copt’ or ‘Coptic Christian.’ By now the popular awareness of Copts in the Western consciousness has become more consolidated, and their identity more widely recognized.

Although the official Hungarian propaganda constantly portrayed the ‘dark figures’ of the leftist emigration as plotting from abroad against Hungary, the surviving primary sources show a picture of ineffectual losers fighting among themselves.

Balázs Orbán’s work is a penetrative exegesis of the unique success of Hungarian statecraft in the past decade as well as an astute guide for all nation-states of similar stature. The Hungarian Way of Strategy is a beacon in the fog of our ideology-driven era, meant for those whose understanding of time goes beyond the fleeting moments of the present.

Altogether at least 700,000 Hungarians were taken to the Soviet Union by force to work in the infamous labour camps of the country. One third of these men and women never returned—and those who did, never received any compensation from Hungary’s Communist government.

While generational differences pushed one group of young men into the camp of the contemporary nationalist right, that did not necessarily determine their later life choices. Generational experiences did define men to some extent—but it was political and moral choices that had the final say.

According to an anti-Zionist pamphlet published during the Republic of Councils, Zionism ‘is nothing but a Jewish version of clerical reaction’ and was to be ‘fully eradicated.’

On 14 March 1876, the flood hit the Buda side of the Danube, then two days later, the river flooded Újpest, the Tabán and Lágymányos as well, and completely submerged Margaret Island. The streets of Buda looked like Venice—boats were the only feasible means of transportation.

Is heroism, self-sacrifice and risking one’s life for a noble cause indeed just a dream that flesh-and-blood people would not be capable of? Luckily, no.

Budapest was unified on 17 November 1873, and in the decades that followed the capital went through remarkable development, becoming the beautiful city that we know today.

When Arrow Cross dictator Ferenc Szálasi took over on 15 October 1944, the new authorities required all civil servants to pledge allegiance to them. It was then that Mindszenty prepared a document entitled ‘Juramentum non’ (‘no oath’ in Latin.) The motto of the document was: ‘One cannot serve the [Arrow Cross] revolution and the Church at the same time.’

In this article we will walk you through the history of the names of Budapest’s bridges and the historical events that influenced their evolution.

The building hosted performances for 56 years, but after experiencing two world wars and a revolution, its demolition was announced in 1964, citing the beginning of the construction of Budapest’s first metro line as a reason. 

Budaváry’s biography needs to be amended to also include his actions during the Holocaust, which distinguish him from other antisemitic politicians.

The death rate in the French camps was horribly high: historian Tamás Stark estimates that 10,000 of the 40,000 Hungarian POWs died.

178 years ago, Hungarian became the official language of the country.

The Grand Hotel Hungaria instantly became popular with aristocrats, inventors and actors, and it hosted many prestigious events, too: for example, the famous Golgotha of Mihály Munkácsy, the ‘Painter-Prince’, was also presented to the public here.

It is incorrect to believe that protests took place only in the final years of the USSR. Demonstrations and rebellions were an integral part of Soviet history from the very birth of the Empire.

Several edifices that were significant landmarks of pre-WWII Budapest disappeared during the 20th century—one of the most memorable of them was the Elevator House.

John C. Swanson’s book Tangible Belonging provides not only a rare insight into the life of German-speaking villagers in Hungary, but also into the complexity of ethnic identity and interwar minority formation.