Hungarian history in two minutes

Hungarians came from far to the east: nomads on horseback who lived in tents and thundered towards Europe at astonishing speed. In 896 they made it to the Carpathian Basin. You can see the leaders of the tribes on their horses at Heroes' Square.

Under Saint Stephen, Hungary became a Christian country. He was ruthless with the pagans, and Hungary stayed Christian. Through generations of royal marriages, it became an integral part of Europe.

Then we started losing more and more wars. First came the Tatars, pretty much the Mongols, Genghis Khan and company. Then came the Turks, who were here for 150 years. You can still see some of the baths they built. After 150 years they left, and for a while we were independent, but the surrounding powers kept going back and forth, fighting one another. We lost, and lost, and lost. We have lost pretty much every battle since the 1500s.

That includes the First World War, after which Hungary lost most of its territory. Cross the border out of Hungary today and, almost anywhere you go, you're in land that used to be Hungarian.

In the Second World War we were again on the wrong side, and lost. Then, to make things a little more exciting, we got 40 years of socialism. By the '80s it was a very light version (more on that in my story below), but in the '50s it was a hardcore dictatorship. One of our national holidays is the 1956 revolution against the Russians, when even teenagers without guns fought Russian tanks. That's seriously heroic.

In 1989, with the Berlin Wall coming down, Hungary joined the democratic nations again. For some people that was a hardship, though. You have to understand that many people lost the security they had in those years, because now it's a dog-eat-dog world. That's why you see extremely rich and extremely poor Hungarians side by side.

Today Hungary belongs to both NATO and the European Union, so it is firmly part of the West again, and thanks to the EU the borders have mostly disappeared. The dream of many Hungarians is to one day reach the quality of life of Western Europe.