Hungary

A country that lost two-thirds of its territory in a single treaty and has never stopped talking about it. Magyars arrived in the Carpathian basin in the ninth century speaking a language unrelated to any of their neighbours, and Stephen I made the kingdom Christian around 1000. The Mongols devastated it in 1241, the Ottomans destroyed its army at Mohacs in 1526 and held the centre for a century and a half, and the Habsburgs took the rest. The 1848 revolution was suppressed with Russian help; the compromise of 1867 made Hungary an equal partner in a dual monarchy and let Budapest build the grandeur it still has. Then Trianon in 1920 reduced the kingdom to a third of its former area and left around three million Hungarians outside the new borders, in Romania, Slovakia, Serbia and Ukraine - a grievance that shaped the alliance with Germany and still shapes foreign policy. The 1956 uprising against Soviet control was crushed in twelve days. Hungary opened its border to East Germans in 1989, which helped bring down the Wall. Budapest sits on both banks of the Danube. The country has about 9.6 million people and is landlocked. Hungarian is Finno-Ugric, related to Finnish and Estonian and to nothing else nearby. Lake Balaton is the largest in central Europe. Hungary has produced an unusual number of Nobel laureates for its size, many of whom worked abroad. The Budapest metro's first line, opened in 1896, is the oldest on the European mainland.

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