HUNGARY

Hungary was part of the polyglot Austro-Hungarian Empire, which collapsed during World War I. The country fell under Communist rule following World War II. In 1956, a revolt and announced withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact were met with a massive military intervention by Moscow. Under the leadership of Janos KADAR in 1968, Hungary began liberalizing its economy, introducing so-called "Goulash Communism." Hungary held its first multiparty elections in 1990 and initiated a free market economy. It joined NATO in 1999 and the EU in 2004.

In the closing years of the 9th century a confederation of seven nomadic tribes, numbering perhaps a few hundred thousand people in all, crossed into the Carpathian Basin from the east, impelled to do so, if indirectly, by Byzantine foreign policy. Finding it well-suited to their pastoral-agricultural lifestyle, and sparsely populated, they rapidly occupied all of it, to settle there for good, marking a complete change in the history of the region.

Contemporaries -- in the mistaken belief that they were descendants of the Huns, who had occupied the region in the 5th century -- came to refer to the new people as Hungari, and soon the entire Carpathian Basin came to be known as Hungaria, giving rise to the still habitual words Hungary and Hungarian (as to Hongrois, Ungar and so forth). From Arabic sources of the time, which refer to them as majjar or madjar, it would appear that they already called themselves magyar, a variation on Megyer, the name of one of the seven tribes which had by then asserted its supremacy over the ohers.

One important trait, however, distinguished the magyar from the other peoples who came and settled in Europe at the same time. The others were, for the most part, speakers of either a Germanic or a Slavonic language, both Indo-European. The Hungarians, in contrast, brought with them a tongue of Finno-Ugric origin (enriched with traces of Turkic and Iranian influences) entwined with a distinctive outlook, folk-memories, tunes and attitudes.

Information and maps above taken from Library of Congress Country Studies and the CIA World Fact Book. Unless otherwise specified, images sourced from Wikimedia Commons.