23 Interesting Facts About Hungary, Checked and Sourced

Hungary is a landlocked country of about 93,000 square kilometres (35,900 square miles) in Central Europe, settled by the Magyars in the Carpathian Basin in 895 and 896. Hungarians call it Magyarország, the land of the Magyars, and they speak a Uralic language unrelated to any of the languages that surround it.

The facts below are the ones that hold up. Several of the stories that circulate about Hungary do not: the country is not the world’s second largest thermal lake owner by the numbers usually quoted, its capital does have a building taller than 96 metres, and the famous reason Hungarians refuse to clink beer glasses is one historians cannot find any evidence for. Each entry states what is documented and by whom.

1. Hungary has an inland sea

Hungary has no coastline, so it treats Lake Balaton as its sea. The lake covers roughly 600 square kilometres (232 square miles), which makes it the largest lake in Central Europe, and it sits about 80 km (49.7 mi) southwest of Budapest in the Transdanubian region.

Balaton is shallow rather than deep, which is why it warms up fast in summer and why families with small children fill the southern shore. The northern shore is the interesting one: volcanic hills, basalt cones, vineyards and the Tihany peninsula, which narrows the lake to about 1.6 km (1 mi) at its tightest point. The lake is a Ramsar Wetland of International Importance and was formed when five smaller lakes merged.

2. Hungary created the world’s first closed wine region

Hungary demarcated Tokaj as a protected wine region in 1737, decades before Chianti or Port, which makes it the oldest closed wine appellation in the world. A royal decree of 1 October 1737 named the 22 villages allowed to sell wine under the Tokaj name, and that boundary is the foundation of the whole idea of protected origin.

Modern Hungary has 22 wine districts, called borvidék, grouped into six wine regions. The two wines to know are Tokaji aszú, the sweet wine made from botrytised grapes that European courts once bought by the barrel, and Egri Bikavér, the red blend from Eger whose name translates as bull’s blood. Hungarian wine has absorbed Celtic, Roman, Ottoman and German influence over two thousand years, and almost none of it leaves the country.

3. Elvis Presley is an honorary citizen of Budapest

Budapest made Elvis Presley an honorary citizen in May 2011, more than 30 years after his death, for a single television appearance. On 6 January 1957, during his last appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, Presley sang the gospel standard Peace in the Valley, and Sullivan told viewers the singer wanted them to donate to Hungarian refugees fleeing the crushed 1956 uprising.

The city also named a small park after him, near the Buda end of Margaret Bridge, with the location chosen by public vote on the city’s website. Presley never visited Hungary.

4. You can ski in Hungary

Hungary is mostly flat, and it still has ski slopes. The country’s highest point is Kékes in the Mátra range, at 1,014 m (3,327 ft), roughly 100 km (62.1 mi) northeast of Budapest, and the ski centre there is one of the oldest in the country.

The runs are short and the season is unreliable, so nobody flies to Hungary to ski. What the Northern Uplands do offer is cheap lift passes, floodlit evening skiing at Kékestető, and slopes that are empty compared with the Alps. Treat it as a day out from Budapest rather than a ski holiday.

5. Hungary keeps the mummified hand of its first king

Hungary venerates the preserved right hand of Stephen I, the first king of Hungary, who ruled from about 1000 until his death in 1038 and was canonised in 1083. When his tomb was opened, the right hand was found intact, and it was separated and kept as a relic.

The relic is known as the Holy Right, and it is displayed in a gold reliquary in St Stephen’s Basilica in Budapest. Every year on 20 August, St Stephen’s Day and Hungary’s national day, it is carried through the streets of the capital in procession. It is the country’s most important Catholic relic and functions as a national symbol as much as a religious one.

6. Hungarians invented the ballpoint pen and helped build Hollywood

Hungary has produced an unusual number of inventors and film-makers for a country of under 10 million people. László Bíró patented the ballpoint pen, which is still called a biro in much of the English-speaking world, and David Schwarz, born in Keszthely, designed the first rigid airship, the direct ancestor of the zeppelin.

The film contribution is larger still. Michael Curtiz directed Casablanca and won the Oscar for best director; George Cukor directed My Fair Lady and also won best director; and István Szabó won the Oscar for best foreign language film with Mephisto. On screen, Peter Lorre played in both Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon, and Béla Lugosi defined how Dracula looks and sounds to this day. All were born in Hungary.

7. Writers rub a statue’s pen for inspiration

Hungary has a real statue-touching tradition, and it belongs to one specific statue. The bronze figure of Anonymus, the unnamed royal notary who wrote the Gesta Hungarorum around 1200, sits hooded and faceless outside Vajdahunyad Castle in Budapest’s City Park.

Miklós Ligeti sculpted it in 1903, and the pen in the figure’s hand has been rubbed by so many visitors that the tip is polished to a bright sheen against the dark bronze. Writers and students come for it specifically. Hungary’s other literary statues are worth finding for their own sake rather than for luck: Attila József sits on the Danube embankment beside the Parliament, looking at the water, and Sándor Petőfi, who read out the National Song that helped start the 1848 revolution, stands on Petőfi Square near the river.

8. Hungary has more than 1,300 thermal springs

Hungary sits on one of the richest geothermal reserves in Europe, with more than 1,300 thermal springs across the country and around 120 within Budapest’s city limits alone. That is why the capital is the only major European city with a functioning thermal bath culture that runs continuously from Roman Aquincum through the Ottoman occupation to today.

The three to know are different from each other. Széchenyi in City Park is the big neo-baroque one with the outdoor pools where people play chess in the steam. Gellért is the art nouveau one, with mosaic tiling and stained glass. Hévíz, near Lake Balaton, is not a bath at all but a natural thermal lake, the largest biologically active one in the world that you can swim in, where the water sits at about 23-25°C (73-77°F) in winter and 36-38°C (97-100°F) in summer. The Ottoman-era Turkish baths, Rudas and Király, are the oldest still in use.

9. A Hungarian architect invented the Rubik’s Cube

Ernő Rubik, born in Budapest in 1944, made the first cube in 1974 while teaching architecture and design, as a physical model to explain three-dimensional movement to his students. He called it the Magic Cube, patented it in Hungary, and reportedly took over a month to solve his own puzzle.

It reached the rest of the world in 1980 under the name Rubik’s Cube and became the defining toy of that decade. Around 500 million had been sold by January 2024, which makes it the bestselling puzzle in history. Speedcubing is now a competitive sport with world records measured in single-digit seconds, and Rubik still lives in Budapest.

10. Pálinka is protected by law and can reach 86% alcohol

Pálinka is a fruit spirit that Hungarian law defines tightly, and the definition is the interesting part. Under Hungary’s pálinka law of 2008, a spirit may only be called pálinka if it is made entirely from fruit grown in Hungary, with no concentrates, no dried fruit and nothing added, and if it is mashed, distilled, matured and bottled in Hungary. It must be bottled at a minimum of 37.5% alcohol and may not be rectified above 86%.

The name is a protected geographical indication across the EU, shared only with apricot spirits from four Austrian provinces. Apricot, plum, pear and cherry are the common fruits. Hungarians will tell you it settles the stomach, wards off colds and cures most things, which is folklore rather than medicine, but it is genuinely the drink you will be offered on arriving at someone’s house.

11. The number 96 runs through Hungarian symbolism

The number 96 recurs in Hungary because the Magyar tribes led by Prince Árpád settled the Carpathian Basin in 895 and 896, and the country marked its millennium in 1896. Both the Hungarian Parliament Building and St Stephen’s Basilica are 96 m (315 ft) tall, and for a long time nothing in Budapest was built higher.

That last part is no longer true, and it is the most common outdated claim about the city. The 96 m figure was a planning convention rather than an absolute law; it was codified in 2018 as a 90 m limit with government approval required above 65 m, and the MOL Campus tower, approved before those rules took effect, opened in 2022 at 143 m (469 ft). It is now comfortably the tallest building in Hungary. The Parliament and the Basilica still share the skyline at 96 m, and they are still the two buildings that define it.

12. Hungary produced the strongest female chess player in history

Judit Polgár is the strongest woman ever to play chess, and she did it by refusing to play in women’s events. She became a grandmaster at 15 years and 4 months in 1991, breaking Bobby Fischer’s long-standing record by a month, and she is the only woman ever rated above 2700, peaking at 2735 in 2005.

She beat 11 current or former world champions over her career, among them Garry Kasparov, Anatoly Karpov and Magnus Carlsen. Hungary has a deep chess tradition behind her, including Géza Maróczy, László Szabó, Péter Lékó and Zoltán Almási, and chess clubs are still a normal feature of Hungarian towns.

13. Hungarian paprika comes in eight official grades

Paprika is Hungary’s national spice, and it is sold in eight official grades that run from mild to fierce. The names you will see on tins are különleges, the finest and mildest, édesnemes, the noble sweet grade that most recipes mean, and erős, the hot one.

Two Hungarian paprikas hold EU protected designation of origin status, which means they can only be grown and milled where they say they are: Szegedi fűszerpaprika-őrlemény, registered in 2010, and Kalocsai fűszerpaprika-őrlemény, registered in 2012. Peppers reached Hungary through the Ottomans in the 16th century and only became the country’s signature seasoning much later. Without it there is no goulash, no chicken paprikás and no lecsó.

14. Hungary is one of Europe’s oldest states

Hungary traces itself to 895 and 896, when seven Magyar tribes under Prince Árpád crossed the Carpathians and settled the basin, and to the year 1000, when Stephen I was crowned the first Christian king. That gives it one of the longest continuous state identities in Europe.

The territory has been far less continuous than the identity. Hungary was partitioned under Ottoman rule for 150 years, absorbed into the Habsburg empire, and then lost roughly two-thirds of its territory and a third of its Hungarian-speaking population under the Treaty of Trianon in 1920, which is why large Hungarian communities still live in Romania, Slovakia, Serbia and Ukraine. Trianon remains one of the most emotive subjects in Hungarian public life.

15. Budapest was three separate cities until 1873

Budapest did not exist before 17 November 1873. Until then there were three towns facing each other across the Danube: Buda, the royal seat on the hilly west bank, Pest, the flat commercial city on the east bank, and Óbuda, the oldest of the three, built on the Roman town of Aquincum.

The Széchenyi Chain Bridge, opened in 1849, was the first permanent link between them and made the merger practical. The unified city then grew fast enough to host the millennium celebrations of 1896, which is where continental Europe’s first underground railway, the Millennium Underground under Andrássy Avenue, comes from.

16. Hungary rose against Soviet rule in 1956

Hungary’s 1956 revolution began on 23 October as a student demonstration in Budapest and became a national uprising within days. The government collapsed, Soviet troops initially withdrew, and for a few days Hungary was effectively out of the Warsaw Pact.

The Soviet army returned in force on 4 November and crushed the revolt. Around 2,500 Hungarians were killed, some 200,000 fled the country as refugees, and Imre Nagy, the prime minister the revolution installed, was executed in 1958. The uprising failed, but it stripped away most of what remained of the Soviet Union’s moral standing in western Europe, and 23 October is now a Hungarian national holiday.

17. The largest synagogue in Europe is in Budapest

The Dohány Street Synagogue in Budapest’s 7th district is the largest synagogue in Europe, seating around 3,000 people. Ludwig Förster built it between 1854 and 1859 in Moorish Revival style, drawing on North African and medieval Spanish Islamic models because, as he put it, he could identify no distinctively Jewish architectural tradition to work from.

The complex holds more than the synagogue. It includes the Heroes’ Temple, a cemetery in the courtyard, the Holocaust memorial and the Hungarian Jewish Museum, built on the site where Theodor Herzl was born. The building was damaged during the German occupation and the siege of Budapest, served a much reduced community through the communist decades, and was restored between 1991 and 1998 with state and private money. It is the centre of Neolog Judaism and one of Budapest’s most visited sites.

18. You cannot give a Hungarian child any name you like

Hungarian parents must choose from an official list of approved first names, and if the name they want is not on it, they have to apply. The list has run to several thousand names for each gender and is published publicly.

Who decides has just changed. Approvals were handled for decades by the linguists of the HUN-REN Research Centre for Linguistics, who checked proposed names against Hungarian spelling, grammar and taste. Under an amendment passed in 2025, the approved names are published in a ministerial decree and the final decision rests with the Minister of Culture, with expert input rather than expert control. The stated aim is protecting Hungarian identity; the practical effect for a foreign parent registering a birth in Hungary is that the answer now comes from a ministry.

19. Hungarians traditionally do not clink beer glasses

Hungarians will often refuse to clink beer glasses, and every Hungarian can tell you why. After the 1848-49 revolution against the Habsburgs was defeated, 13 Hungarian generals were executed at Arad on 6 October 1849, and the story says Austrian officers celebrated by clinking their beer mugs. Hungarians are said to have sworn off the gesture for 150 years, which would have expired on 6 October 1999.

Historians cannot support the story. There is no contemporary record of how the Austrians marked the executions, clinking glasses was not an Austrian custom in the first place, and one Hungarian historian has suggested wine producers had a hand in popularising it. The custom is real even if its origin is not, and it is fading: most Hungarians under 40 now clink beer like everyone else. If your host does not, follow their lead.

20. McDonald’s was the first Western fast-food chain behind the Iron Curtain here

McDonald’s opened its first Hungarian restaurant on 29 April 1988 on Régiposta Street in central Budapest, while the country was still communist. It drew queues around the block, and what people talked about afterwards was as much the air conditioning and the clean toilets as the burgers.

Prices were high relative to Hungarian wages, which made a visit an occasion rather than a meal. The company expanded quickly after 1989 and now runs restaurants across the country, alongside Hungarian chains and the langos and gyros stands that do far more everyday trade.

21. Hungary has cowboys

The csikós are the mounted herdsmen of the puszta, the grassland plains of eastern Hungary, and they still work. Their heartland is Hortobágy National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and the largest continuous natural grassland in Europe, where they tend the native breeds: Hungarian Grey cattle, Mangalica pigs and Racka sheep with their spiralled horns.

The riding displays put on for visitors are genuinely impressive, including the puszta five, in which one rider stands astride two horses while driving three more ahead. The kit is traditional and specific: blue trousers, a white shirt with wide sleeves, a dark waistcoat and a wide-brimmed hat, plus the karikás, a long whip cracked to move stock. Hortobágy is a three-hour drive east of Budapest.

22. The Hungarian alphabet has 44 letters

Hungarian uses the Latin alphabet and gets 44 letters out of it, against 26 in English. There are 14 vowels, seven short and seven long, including ő and ű, which almost no other language uses, and 30 consonants.

The extra letters come from combinations treated as single letters: eight digraphs, cs, dz, gy, ly, ny, sz, ty and zs, and one trigraph, dzs. Each has its own sound, its own name and its own place in the dictionary. Hungarian itself is a Uralic language, related distantly to Finnish and Estonian and to nothing else in the region, which is why it looks unlike every language spoken on its borders.

23. Hungary has the highest VAT rate in the European Union

Hungary charges 27% VAT on most goods and services, which is the highest standard rate in the EU and has been since it rose from 25% in 2012. Finland is next at 25.5%, then Croatia, Denmark and Sweden at 25%.

Reduced rates of 18% and 5% apply to categories including basic foodstuffs, hotel accommodation, books and medicines, which is why a supermarket basket and a hotel room feel cheaper relative to a restaurant bill than you might expect. The rate is built into every price you see, since Hungarian prices are quoted inclusive of tax.

How did Hungary get its name?

Hungary’s name comes from the Turkic word Onogur, meaning ten tribes, and not from the Huns. The chain runs from Onogur through Old Bulgar into Byzantine Greek as Oungroi, then into Medieval Latin as Ungri and Hungaria, and finally into English as Hungary.

The “land of the Huns” reading is a folk etymology that stuck because the Latin form looks like it should mean that, and because Attila ruled the same territory in the 5th century. There is no linguistic link. Hungarians call their own country Magyarország, from Magyar, the name the people have always used for themselves, so the country effectively has two unrelated names: the one its neighbours gave it and the one it gave itself.

What language do they speak in Hungary?

Hungarians speak Hungarian, a Uralic language in the Finno-Ugric branch, which puts it in the same family as Finnish and Estonian and outside the Indo-European family that covers almost every other European language. It is also spoken by Hungarian minorities in Romania, Slovakia, Serbia, Ukraine, Austria, Croatia and Slovenia.

Two features make it hard for outsiders. Hungarian is agglutinative, so grammatical information is stacked onto the end of a word as suffixes rather than expressed with prepositions, and it has vowel harmony, so the suffix you use changes to match the vowels in the root. English is widely spoken in Budapest and among younger Hungarians, and much less so in villages.

What is the symbol of Hungary?

The Holy Crown of Hungary, also called the Crown of Saint Stephen, is the country’s central national symbol. It is a gold crown set with enamels and stones, and it is unusual in that Hungarian constitutional tradition treated the crown itself as the source of legal authority rather than the person wearing it.

The crown has been kept in the Hungarian Parliament Building since 2000, guarded and displayed in the domed hall, and it appears on the national coat of arms with its distinctively bent cross on top. Its history includes being buried, smuggled out of the country and held by the United States at Fort Knox until it was returned to Hungary in 1978.

Why should you visit Hungary?

You should visit Hungary for its thermal baths, its wine regions and the fact that it is still noticeably cheaper than its western neighbours. Those three things together are hard to find anywhere else in Europe.

Budapest carries the trip for most first-time visitors: the Parliament on the Danube, Buda Castle on the hill opposite, the Dohány Street Synagogue, the ruin bars of the 7th district and the Széchenyi baths in City Park. Beyond it, Lake Balaton is the summer country, Tokaj and Eger are the wine country, and Hortobágy is the plain. Distances are short, the rail network reaches almost everywhere, and a week covers a lot of ground.

What are the best things to do in Hungary?

The things worth planning a trip around are listed below.

1. Soak in a thermal bath. Széchenyi, Gellért and the Ottoman-era Rudas in Budapest are the famous three, and Hévíz near Balaton is a natural thermal lake you swim in rather than a building.
2. Spend a day at Lake Balaton. Swim on the shallow southern shore, or take the northern shore for the volcanic hills, the Tihany peninsula and the vineyards above the water.
3. Drive or cruise the Danube Bend. The river turns sharply north of Budapest between the Visegrád hills, past the castle at Visegrád, the basilica at Esztergom and the galleries of Szentendre.
4. Taste in Tokaj. The world’s first demarcated wine region makes sweet aszú in cellars cut into volcanic rock, and it is a three-hour drive northeast of the capital.
5. Cross the puszta at Hortobágy. Watch the csikós ride, see the grey cattle and the Racka sheep, and stand somewhere with no hill in any direction.

Does Hungary have castles?

Hungary has hundreds of castles and fortified palaces, and the most visited is Buda Castle in Budapest. The complex on Castle Hill above the Danube houses the Hungarian National Gallery and the Budapest History Museum, and its architecture runs from Gothic foundations through Baroque rebuilding to a 20th-century restoration after the siege of 1944 and 1945.

Beyond the capital, the ones worth the journey are Eger Castle, which held off an Ottoman siege in 1552, the hilltop citadel at Visegrád above the Danube Bend, the Baroque Gödöllő Palace that Empress Elisabeth used as a retreat, and Vajdahunyad Castle in City Park, which is not old at all: it was built for the 1896 millennium as a pastiche of Hungarian architectural styles. There is a fuller guide to every notable castle in Hungary.

Is it expensive to visit Hungary?

Hungary is one of the cheaper countries in the European Union to visit, and Budapest is noticeably cheaper than Vienna, Prague or Munich. Hungary uses the forint rather than the euro, so you will be paying in a currency with a lot of zeros: roughly 364 HUF to the euro and about 314 HUF to the US dollar in September 2026.

The 2026 numbers that give you the shape of it are listed below.

1. A half-litre of local draught beer costs 900 to 1,600 HUF (about €2.50 to €4.40, $2.90 to $5.10, £2.10 to £3.80), at the higher end in the ruin bars and along the Danube.
2. A main course in a neighbourhood Hungarian restaurant costs 1,500 to 3,000 HUF (about €4 to €8, $5 to $9.50, £3.50 to £7).
3. A full-day weekday ticket to the Széchenyi baths with a locker, booked online, costs around 13,200 HUF (about €36, $42, £31), rising at weekends.
4. The same at Lukács, a working local bath rather than a tourist one, costs around 7,000 HUF (about €19, $22, £17).

Note the pattern: the thermal baths are the expensive part of a Budapest day, and eating and drinking are not. There is a fuller breakdown of prices in Hungary, and the saving is real enough that a week here costs less than four days in Vienna.

What are the main public holidays in Hungary?

Hungary’s main public holidays are St Stephen’s Day on 20 August, the revolution anniversaries on 15 March and 23 October, Christmas and Easter. Two of the five commemorate failed uprisings, which tells you something about the country.

• 20 August, St Stephen’s Day. The national day marks the foundation of the state and its first king, with the Holy Right carried in procession through Budapest and a large fireworks display over the Danube.
• 15 March. The anniversary of the 1848 revolution against Habsburg rule, marked with speeches and cockades in the national colours.
• 23 October. The anniversary of the 1956 uprising, and also the date the republic was declared in 1989.
• Christmas, 25 and 26 December. Both days are public holidays, and the Advent markets on Vörösmarty Square and outside St Stephen’s Basilica run through December.
• Easter. Monday is a public holiday, and the village of Hollókő, a UNESCO site, is known for its traditional Easter celebrations.

Dates and closures for the full year are set out in the guide to Hungary’s most popular holiday dates. Plan around 20 August in particular, because Budapest fills up and rooms go early.

How to get to Hungary and around it

Budapest is the entry point for almost every visit to Hungary, and the country is small enough that everything in this guide is a day trip or a short hop from it. Trains run from Vienna in under three hours and from Bratislava in about two and a half, and the Hungarian rail network reaches Balaton, Eger, Debrecen and Pécs directly from Budapest.

Book long-distance rail through trains in Hungary, which is usually the fastest way between cities, or compare it against Flixbus in Hungary, which is slower and generally cheaper on the same routes. For a base in Budapest or on the Balaton shore, compare rates through hotels in Hungary. A hire car only makes sense for Hortobágy, Tokaj and the northern Balaton wine villages, where the train does not reach the interesting parts.

WonderfulWanderings Pro Tips

The 4 tips below turn the checkable half of these facts into things you can act on in a shop, at a table or in front of a statue.

1. Buy paprika by its registered name, not by the word Hungarian. The phrase on its own carries no protection, and only 2 Hungarian paprikas hold EU protected designation of origin: Szegedi fűszerpaprika-őrlemény, registered in 2010, and Kalocsai fűszerpaprika-őrlemény, registered in 2012. On the grade, édesnemes is the noble sweet one most recipes mean, különleges is the finest and mildest, and erős is the hot one.
2. Follow your host on clinking beer glasses. The custom is real, its origin is not: historians can find no contemporary record of Austrian officers clinking after the Arad executions of 6 October 1849, and the 150-year vow would have expired in 1999 on its own arithmetic. Most Hungarians under 40 now clink like everyone else, so watch what the table does rather than announcing the rule.
3. Rub the pen on the Anonymus statue and leave the writers alone. The one genuine statue-touching tradition in Budapest belongs to Miklós Ligeti’s hooded Anonymus outside Vajdahunyad Castle in City Park, whose pen tip is polished bright from use. The Attila József and Sándor Petőfi statues that some lists send you to touch are places to stand and look.
4. Check the label before you pay pálinka prices. Under the 2008 law the name is reserved for spirits made entirely from fruit grown in Hungary, with no concentrate, no dried fruit and nothing added, mashed, distilled, matured and bottled in Hungary, and bottled between 37.5% and 86% alcohol. A fruit spirit that does not meet all of that is not pálinka, whatever the bottle looks like.

About the author. This guide is written and maintained by the Wonderful Wanderings editorial team. Wonderful Wanderings was founded in 2012 by Sofie Couwenbergh, and the team covers Hungary for independent travellers, including the thermal baths, wine regions, castles and city stays worth booking. Every fact on this page is checked against a source that can be named, from the EU protected-name register and Hungary’s pálinka law to the Research Centre for Linguistics and the Hungarian National Bank’s exchange rates, and the claims that do not survive that check are removed rather than repeated.