How a language with no relatives built a national culture

What the language is

Hungarian is a Uralic language, distantly related to Finnish and Estonian and to a set of small languages in the Urals, and unrelated to every language spoken on its borders. Slovak, Ukrainian, Romanian, Serbian, Croatian, Slovene and German surround it, and none of them shares a root with it.

The oldest written record is a fragment in the founding charter of the abbey of Tihany from 1055. The document is mostly Latin and contains several Hungarian terms embedded in it, among them a phrase describing a route up a military road, which makes it the point at which the language enters the written record.

The structure is what makes it difficult for outsiders. Hungarian has a large number of grammatical cases, vowel harmony, no grammatical gender, and it builds long words by attaching suffixes rather than by using prepositions, so a single word can carry what an English sentence needs several words for.

The consequence for the culture is isolation and self-sufficiency. A literature written in a language no neighbour reads has a domestic audience and almost no natural export market, which is why Hungarian music, film, science and mathematics travelled internationally while Hungarian writing largely did not.

Why the music travelled

Hungary produced a run of composers out of all proportion to its size: Franz Liszt, Franz Schmidt, Leó Weiner, Ernő Dohnányi, Béla Bartók, Zoltán Kodály, György Ligeti and Miklós Rózsa, with a further generation of contemporary composers after them.

Two of those changed how music was made rather than adding to a repertoire. Bartók and Kodály went into the countryside with recording equipment and collected peasant music systematically, transcribing what people actually sang rather than what nineteenth-century composers had assumed they sang, and they built a modernist musical language out of the results.

The distinction matters. What had been taken for Hungarian folk music in European concert halls was largely urban Roma performance in a style shaped for paying audiences, and the material Bartók and Kodály found in the villages was structurally different, older and stranger. Their work is simultaneously ethnography and composition.

Kodály then turned it into pedagogy. The method of music teaching that carries his name, built on singing, folk material and starting very young, was adopted across the school system and then internationally, which is a rare case of a national musical tradition being exported as a teaching method rather than as a repertoire.

What the baths are

Hungary has a wealth of thermal springs supplying numerous baths and spas across the country, and Hungarian baths feature Classical, Turkish and Roman architectural styles.

Those three styles are three occupations. The Romans built baths in Pannonia, the Ottomans built them during a century and a half of rule and several are still working, and the nineteenth and twentieth-century Hungarian state built the grand spa palaces that most visitors picture. The same water, drawn from beneath more than 80% of the territory, has been used continuously under three different empires.

What the baths are socially is closer to a public institution than to a leisure facility. They are used by every age group, prescribed for medical conditions and partly funded through the health system, and a Hungarian bath on a weekday morning is full of people receiving treatment rather than tourists having an experience.

The Budapest baths are the famous ones and the country is covered with smaller ones. Almost every town of any size has thermal water and a bath built over it, and the spa towns of the Alföld and Transdanubia run a health tourism that is a mass domestic activity.

What happened to the culture in the twentieth century

The failed revolution of 1956 against the Soviet-dominated communist dictatorship is the hinge, and its aftermath produced a specific cultural situation. Some years afterwards the cultural climate eased slightly, which led to more creative freedom than existed in the neighbouring states.

Film is where that shows most clearly. Important films of the 1960s were directed by a generation including István Gaál and András Kovács, and Hungarian cinema of the following decades acquired an international reputation for a formal seriousness that the relative freedom made possible.

The arrangement had limits that everyone understood. What was permitted was ambiguity, allegory and formal difficulty; what was not permitted was direct statement about 1956, the Soviet relationship or the legitimacy of the system, and Hungarian art of the period developed a vocabulary for saying things indirectly that survived the system it was designed for.

The wider inheritance is scientific as much as artistic. Hungary produced a remarkable concentration of mathematicians, physicists and engineers in the first half of the twentieth century, many of whom left, and their work belongs to the countries they emigrated to and to the schools that trained them.

What is on the table

Hungarian food is the most immediately recognisable part of the culture abroad and it is more varied than the export version suggests.

Paprika is the signature and it is a recent arrival. The peppers came from the New World, were adapted to the Hungarian climate over centuries, and became the defining seasoning only in the nineteenth century, so the dish the world knows as Hungarian is younger than the country's national anthem.

Beyond it the cooking is central European with Ottoman and Balkan additions: stews of various kinds, freshwater fish from the Danube and the Tisza, pork in many forms, sour cream, dumplings, and a substantial pastry and cake tradition inherited from the same imperial kitchen that produced the Viennese one.

Wine belongs with the food and the regions are distinct. The sweet wines of Tokaj in the north-east were among the most prized in Europe for centuries, the volcanic hills above Balaton and the southern region of Villány produce differently again, and the whole sector has spent three decades recovering from four decades of production for volume.

Why the literature stayed home

Hungarian writing has a long record and a short list of readers outside the country, and the two facts are the same fact.

Renaissance literature flourished under the reign of King Matthias Corvinus between 1458 and 1490. Janus Pannonius wrote in Latin and is counted among the most important writers in Hungarian literature, the only significant Hungarian Humanist poet of his period. The first printing house in Hungary was founded during the same reign by András Hess in Buda, and the first book printed in the country was the Chronica Hungarorum.

The decisive moment came much later. The Hungarian enlightenment arrived about fifty years after the western European one, through Vienna, and it prompted a deliberate reform of the language whose greatest figure was Ferenc Kazinczy. Hungarian became usable for scientific writing at that point and hundreds of words were coined to name things that had no Hungarian name.

That is an unusual thing for a literature to have done: a generation of writers decided the language was insufficient and rebuilt it, and the modern literary language dates from their work rather than from a gradual drift.

The classics that followed have remained largely unknown outside the country. János Arany, a nineteenth-century poet still much loved at home for his ballads, sits with Sándor Petőfi, the poet of the revolution of 1848, and with Endre Ady, Mihály Babits, Dezső Kosztolányi, Attila József and János Pilinszky, and almost none of that work travels.

The exceptions are recent and mostly in translation into German, French and English. Sándor Márai, Péter Esterházy, Péter Nádas and Imre Kertész found readers abroad, and Kertész, a Holocaust survivor, won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2002. Magda Szabó and a longer list of others belong to the same slow opening.

What the hands made

Hungarian folklore takes in tales, music, dance, decorated pottery, carvings and embroidery, and the current popular style of Hungarian folk art took shape at the beginning of the eighteenth century, built on flowers and leaves with an occasional bird or spiral.

The dances are catalogued by type rather than performed as one thing. The ugrós jumping dances go back to the Middle Ages, the karikázó is a circle dance performed by women alone and accompanied by singing, the verbunkos evolved from the recruiting performances of the Austro-Hungarian army, and the csárdás, which developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, is the national dance in the sense that a foreigner would mean it.

Embroidery varies by region and the regional distinction is the whole subject. The finest work in Hungary proper comes from Sárköz in Transdanubia and from the Matyóföld on the Great Plain, while the embroideries of Kalotaszeg in Transylvania are sewn chiefly in a single colour, red, blue or black. Those Kalotaszeg patterns were preserved and popularised in the early twentieth century by several women who recorded them before the tradition thinned.

Manufacture grew out of the same craft. Herend Porcelain was founded in 1826, became a supplier to the Habsburg dynasty and to aristocratic customers across Europe in the middle of the nineteenth century, and many of its classic patterns are still in production. It was privatised after the fall of communism, is now three quarters owned by its management and workers, and exports to more than 60 countries.

The most widely handled Hungarian object is younger and is not folk art at all. The Rubik's Cube was invented in Hungary in 1977, and it has probably travelled further than everything else on this page.

What is inscribed and what survives

Hungary holds 8 properties on the UNESCO World Heritage List, seven cultural and one natural, and the list covers the Danube panorama of Budapest with its castle district and Andrássy avenue, the village of Hollókő, the abbey of Pannonhalma, the Hortobágy puszta, the early Christian cemetery of Pécs, the Tokaj wine region, the Fertő lake region shared with Austria and the Aggtelek caves shared with Slovakia.

Three of those are shared or cross-border, which is a fair reflection of a country whose cultural region is larger than its territory. Hungarian-speaking populations, buildings and traditions sit in Romania, Slovakia, Serbia and Ukraine, and Hungarian cultural policy addresses them explicitly.

Budapest itself is the largest single cultural asset. A capital built at speed in the late nineteenth century for a country twice the size, with the parliament, the avenues, the bridges and the bath houses of that period intact, is a city whose fabric records an ambition the state that inherited it could not sustain.

What the whole inheritance amounts to is a culture that has spent a thousand years being the only one of its kind in its neighbourhood, absorbing from every direction, and remaining recognisably separate throughout. The language did most of that work, and it is still doing it. Hungary: history goes into how the culture came to be surrounded by borders and Hungary: travel where to see it.