24 September is the Feast of St Gerard in the Hungarian Catholic Church. St Gerard’s cult is still very much alive in Hungary: in the Hungarian Defence Forces, he is the patron saint of technical troops, and because of his significant literary activity, he is the patron of Catholic schools and teachers.

The year 1000 is not only memorable for Hungarians: at the turn of the first millennium, unexpected events took place in the whole of Europe, including on the fringes of the continent barely touched by Latin Christianity, in Poland and Hungary, where Christian conversion had been going on for years.

Throughout Hungarian history, the country was often referred to as Mary’s realm, the Regnum Marianum. On the occasion of the Hungary’s Millennium celebrations in 1896, Pope Leo XIII sent an encyclical letter to the Hungarian nation, granting permission for Hungarian Catholics to celebrate the feast of the patroness Boldogasszony.

As every year, the Cake of Hungary is selected ahead of August 20, with those attending the holiday events being the first to taste the creations of Hungary’s best pastry chefs. The competition this year was won by the torte named Tipsy Fig Respectus of the Levendula és Kert (Lavender and Garden) cake shop from Szigetszentmiklós, located on Csepel Island. Essential ingredients of the cake include Aszú wine, figs and honey.

‘Veszprém is clearly looking for its place. However, it is close to Budapest, Vienna, Győr, and Lake Balaton, the landscape is also beautiful and its location and millennia of tradition all predestine it to be a cultural capital and a gastronomic centre. It has all the necessary ingredients.’

27 June is the Day of Hungarian Border Guards. The geographic location of our country and the very fact that it is the eastern bulwark of Western Christianity obliged it in the past and is still predestining it today to be one of the guardians of European civilisation and the peace of the continent.

What does the lower reach of the River Garam mean to Hungarians? For some, it is just a region of the Uplands, for others, a beautiful, wide, flat, and fertile valley surrounded by hills, while many people do not even know where to look on the map when they hear its name. For ethnic Hungarian local historian Gábor Juhász, it represents his homeland, a place where his ancestors had lived for hundreds of years.

According to the most fundamental concept of the Holy Crown doctrine, everyone who has political rights in the territory of the country is a member of the crown, a part of its ‘body’.

There is a myth, to be dispelled, that the Romans were always cruel conquerors. In truth, those who lived under the rule of the Caesars had plenty autonomy, be it in the public or private sector of society. It was that rationality and pragmatism of Roman law, which regulated regulated the lives of the conquered peoples, that structured Western culture as  is evident from a host of historical, cultural, political, and societal elements.

The earliest Hungarian princes and kings can also be found among the many ancestors of today’s British Royal family: between British King Charles III and the Pagan Hungarian Prince Árpád, leader of the conquering Hungarians, there were forty generations marching through Europe’s more than a thousand-year-old history.

Pope Francis is visiting the Hungarian community for the third time in just four years, but his first official trip specifically to Hungary will only take place this weekend.

Charlemagne’s figure, as well as the myths and legends associated with him, had a great influence on medieval Western European chronicles and fiction, but medieval Hungarian historiography—similarly to Central European—was surprisingly little affected by it.

In addition to strengthening the alliance between the Kingdom of Hungary and the German Empire, Blessed Gisela’s marriage to St Stephen permanently committed the country to Western-style Christianity and development.

The more than two-metre-high equestrian statue in the Bamberg Cathedral has been a real tourist attraction since the 18th century, not least due to the horseman’s mysterious identity.