Hungary

Hungary fills the low heart of the Carpathian Basin, a bowl of plains whose rim of high mountains lies beyond its borders. The Danube swings south at the Danube Bend and splits the country in two. East of it stretches the Great Plain, where grey cattle and racka sheep graze the Hortobágy grassland and the Tisza loops through farmland. West lies Lake Balaton, shallow and warm in summer, and hot springs well up almost everywhere.

Magyar tribes under Árpád crossed the Carpathians in the 890s, and Stephen I was crowned the first king in 1000. Mongols devastated the kingdom in 1241. After the Renaissance court of Matthias Corvinus came defeat at Mohács in 1526 and Ottoman rule in the centre until Buda was retaken in 1686. The revolution of 1848–49 failed, but the Compromise of 1867 created Austria-Hungary. The Treaty of Trianon in 1920 cut away most of the old kingdom, Soviet tanks crushed the uprising of 1956, and in 1989 Hungary opened its border fence with Austria.

Hungarians put the family name first. Bartók and Kodály recorded thousands of village songs on wax cylinders, and paprika from Szeged and Kalocsa reddens gulyás and fisherman’s soup. Tokaji aszú is pressed from grapes shrivelled by noble rot, and the thermal baths are a social institution. László Bíró’s ballpoint pen and Ernő Rubik’s cube began here. Audi builds engines and cars at Győr and Mercedes-Benz at Kecskemét, and the plain grows wheat, maize and sunflowers.