30 Most Famous Hungarians: From Houdini to the Rubik’s Cube

Hungary is a country of under ten million people that has produced an improbable share of the things the rest of the world uses: the ballpoint pen, holography, the Rubik’s Cube, the telephone exchange, the first solar-heated house and vitamin C in a form you can swallow. It also produced Houdini, Robert Capa and the football team that beat England 6-3 at Wembley.

The 30 people below are all Hungarian by birth or upbringing, and every date, birthplace and claim has been checked individually. Lists of famous Hungarians circulate with a lot of Americans of Hungarian descent on them and with several of these people credited with somebody else’s achievements, so where that happens the correction is stated. Five of the best known are summarised first.

Five of the most famous Hungarians are listed below.

1. Harry Houdini (1874-1926). Harry Houdini was born Erik Weisz in Budapest and became the most famous escape artist who has ever lived.
2. Ernő Rubik (born 1944). Ernő Rubik is the Budapest architect who built the Rubik’s Cube in 1974 and made the best-selling toy in history.
3. Albert Szent-Györgyi (1893-1986). Albert Szent-Györgyi isolated vitamin C from Szeged paprika and won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1937.
4. Ferenc Puskás (1927-2006). Ferenc Puskás captained the Golden Team that beat England 6-3 at Wembley in 1953 and won three European Cups with Real Madrid.
5. Robert Capa (1913-1954). Robert Capa was born Endre Friedmann in Budapest, photographed five wars, landed with the first wave at Omaha Beach and co-founded Magnum Photos.

1. Ági Mészáros

Ági Mészáros was one of the most loved Hungarian film and stage actresses of the 20th century, born Ágnes Éberli in Budapest and a member of the National Theatre company in Budapest for most of her career.

Her breakthrough was Talpalatnyi föld, released in 1948 and known in English as Treasured Earth, an adaptation of a Pál Szabó novel about a poor peasant family, which made her a national figure overnight. She won the Kossuth Prize, Hungary’s highest state honour for artists, twice, and was named Merited and then Outstanding Artist. She died in Budapest on 8 March 1989 and is buried at Farkasrét cemetery. Her daughter, Ági Voith, is also an actress.

![Ági Mészáros]()

2. Mária Telkes

Mária Telkes was the Hungarian-American physical chemist who worked out how to store the sun’s heat, and colleagues called her the Sun Queen. She was born in Budapest in 1900, took her doctorate at the University of Budapest in 1924, moved to the United States in 1925 and became a citizen in 1937.

Her wartime invention was a solar still that turned seawater into drinking water, issued in life rafts by the US military and credited with saving the lives of downed airmen and torpedoed sailors. In 1948 she worked with the architect Eleanor Raymond on the Dover Sun House in Massachusetts, one of the first houses heated entirely by the sun, using Glauber’s salt to hold the day’s heat and release it after dark. She also designed solar ovens and solar-heated buildings, and she was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2012. She died in Budapest in 1995 at 94, on a visit to the city she was born in.

![Mária Telkes]()

3. Houdini

Harry Houdini was born Erik Weisz in Budapest on 24 March 1874, the son of a rabbi, and the family emigrated to the United States when he was four, settling first in Appleton, Wisconsin. He took his stage name from Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin, the French conjuror he admired as a young man and whose reputation he later spent a book attacking.

He made his name escaping from handcuffs, straitjackets, packing cases, milk cans and prison cells, usually in public and usually after challenging the local police to hold him. He was also an early aviator, and in March 1910 at Diggers Rest he made what is generally recognised as the first controlled powered flight in Australia. In his last years he devoted himself to exposing spiritualist mediums as frauds, which cost him the friendship of Arthur Conan Doyle.

Houdini died in Detroit on 31 October 1926 of peritonitis from a ruptured appendix, days after a student in Montreal punched him in the stomach to test his claim that he could absorb any blow. The date, Halloween, has kept the legend going ever since. Budapest marks his birth with a plaque, and the House of Houdini museum in the Buda Castle district holds original props and letters.

![Houdini]()

4. Simon Hantaï

Simon Hantaï was born at Bia near Budapest in 1922, trained at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts, walked across Italy, and settled in France in 1948, taking French citizenship in 1966. He is one of the most important painters of the post-war French school, and almost all his work was made outside Hungary.

His first Paris exhibition in 1953 carried a preface by André Breton, but he broke with the surrealists in 1955 over their dismissal of Jackson Pollock. In 1960 he arrived at pliage, the folding method that defines him: he folded and knotted the raw canvas, painted the outside, and then unfolded it, so the picture is made as much by what the paint could not reach as by what it touched. He said the idea came from watching his mother fold her apron.

The series that followed, the Mariales, the Meuns, the Blancs, the Tabulas and the Laissées, run from 1960 to the mid-1990s. He also withdrew from exhibiting for long periods, refusing to sell, which he explained as an objection to what the market did to painting. He died in Paris in 2008.

![Simon Hantaï]()

5. Dennis Gabor

Dennis Gabor, born Dénes Gábor in Budapest on 5 June 1900, invented holography and won the Nobel Prize in Physics for it in 1971. The family name was Günszberg until 1902.

He studied in Budapest and Berlin, worked for Siemens until 1933, left Germany because of the Nazi regime and settled in England in 1934, joining British Thomson-Houston and taking British citizenship in 1946. Holography came out of an attempt to improve the electron microscope: he realised that recording the interference pattern between light scattered by an object and a reference beam preserved the phase information as well as the intensity, so the image could be reconstructed in three dimensions. He published the idea in 1948 and it stayed a curiosity for over a decade, because it needed a coherent light source. The laser, invented in 1960, made it work.

Gabor spent his later years writing about the social consequences of technology and was a member of the Club of Rome. He died in London on 9 February 1979. His gravestone reads “Inventor of Holography”.

![Dennis Gabor]()

6. Master MS

Master MS is the name given to an anonymous painter who worked in the Kingdom of Hungary around 1506, known only from the monogram MS on his surviving panels. Nothing certain is known about him, including his given name and where he came from, and various identifications have been proposed and none accepted.

He painted the wing panels of the high altar of the parish church at Selmecbánya, now Banská Štiavnica in Slovakia, which was then a wealthy Hungarian mining town. Seven panels survive and they are now split between collections in Hungary, Slovakia and France. His Visitation, in the Hungarian National Gallery in Budapest, is the one worth crossing a city for: Mary and Elizabeth meet in front of a bank of flowers and rocks painted with a botanist’s attention, in a style that sits exactly on the join between late Gothic and the Renaissance.

He belongs on a list of famous Hungarians because he is one of the very few painters working in medieval Hungary whose hand can be identified at all, and because the Visitation is among the finest pictures made anywhere in Central Europe at that date.

![Master MS]()

7. Albert Szent-Györgyi

Albert Szent-Györgyi won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1937 for isolating vitamin C and for his work on biological combustion. He was born in Budapest in 1893, studied medicine there, and served as an army medic in the First World War until he shot himself in the arm to get out of it, which he described without embarrassment for the rest of his life.

The vitamin C work happened in two places. At Cambridge he isolated a compound he called hexuronic acid from adrenal glands, oranges and cabbages, in quantities too small to test properly. Back in Hungary as professor at Szeged from 1931, he realised that the paprika growing all around the city was full of it, and produced kilograms of the stuff, which is what allowed vitamin C to be identified and synthesised. He renamed it ascorbic acid, for anti-scorbutic.

He then discovered actin, the protein that works with myosin to contract muscle, and demonstrated that ATP supplies the energy for it. He was active in the wartime Hungarian resistance and was hunted by the Gestapo. He moved to the United States in 1947 and spent the rest of his life at Woods Hole in Massachusetts working on cell division and cancer. He died in 1986 at 93.

![Albert Szent-Györgyi]()

8. Lajos Szathmáry

Lajos Szathmáry was born on a train fleeing Transylvania for Budapest in June 1919 and became one of the most influential chefs in the United States. He held a doctorate in psychology from the University of Budapest, served in the Hungarian army, was a prisoner of war, and reached New York in 1951 with a dollar and change in his pocket.

He cooked his way up from short-order work to catering for the east coast, then moved to Chicago and spent years developing frozen meals for the food industry, work that ended up on airline trays and, by his account, on NASA missions. In 1963 he opened The Bakery on Lincoln Avenue in Chicago, a restaurant with no menu prices posted outside and a beef Wellington that became famous, and he ran it until 1989.

He was also a serious scholar of food. He assembled one of the great private collections of cookbooks and culinary manuscripts, much of which went to the University of Iowa, edited historical reprint series, wrote bestselling cookbooks and appeared on hundreds of television and radio programmes. He died in Chicago in 1996 at 77.

![Lajos Szathmáry]()

9. László Berczeller

László Berczeller was the Hungarian food chemist who tried to put soy into the European diet forty years before anyone else took it seriously. He was born in Budapest in 1890 into a Jewish medical family, and became interested in soy foods after a dinner at the Japanese Club in Berlin in 1913.

His invention was Edelsoja, a full-fat soy flour made by a heat-treatment process he patented, which removed the beany taste that had defeated earlier attempts. Through the 1920s and 1930s it was licensed and produced in several European countries and baked into bread, biscuits and soups, and promoted as a cheap protein source for people who could not afford meat. Nutritionists across Central Europe backed it.

The politics of the 1930s destroyed the business and very nearly him. He left for France and died in Paris in 1955. Soy flour in European food is now unremarkable, which is the argument for his being on this list.

![László Berczeller]()

10. Károly Lotz

Károly Lotz painted the ceilings of half the great public buildings of Budapest. He was born in 1833 at Homburg vor der Höhe in Germany and brought to Hungary as a small child, trained in Pest and Vienna, and spent his career as a Hungarian painter and professor.

His frescoes are the reason to know the name: the auditorium ceiling and staircase of the Hungarian State Opera House, work in St Stephen’s Basilica, the Hungarian National Museum, the Parliament and the Matthias Church, plus mythological and allegorical schemes in private palaces. He also painted the Hungarian plain, horses, portraits and nudes, using his stepdaughter Kornélia as a model for many of them.

He worked in the grand academic manner, taking his cue from the Venetian ceiling painters, and it suited a city that was building itself a monumental centre in a hurry in the decades around the 1896 millennium. He died in Budapest in 1904.

![Károly Lotz]()

11. Olga Gyarmati

Olga Gyarmati won the first Olympic women’s long jump ever held, at London in 1948, with a leap of 5.695 m (18 ft 8 in). She was born in Debrecen in 1924 and started in athletics there in 1941.

She was a genuine all-rounder, taking 31 individual Hungarian titles across sprints and jumps, and she was the first Hungarian woman to break 12 seconds for 100 m, the first under 12 seconds for the 80 m hurdles, and the first over 6 m in the long jump. She competed at three Olympic Games, in 1948, 1952 and 1956, and won long jump and 200 m golds at the World University Games.

She did not go home after the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, which took place weeks after Soviet tanks put down the Hungarian uprising, and settled first in England and later in Massachusetts, where she died in 2013. She was the second Hungarian woman to win an Olympic athletics gold, after Ibolya Csák.

![Olga Gyarmati]()

12. Krúbi

Krúbi, the stage name of Krisztián Horváth, is one of the two rappers who define Hungarian popular music in the 2020s. He was born in 1994, started as a vocalist in a metal band and moved to rap in 2017.

His records, from the 2018 debut Nehézlábérzés through Ösztönlény in 2020 and the work that followed, mix rap with metal, jazz and electronic production, and his lyrics are dense with wordplay, literary reference and politics. He has been openly critical of the Hungarian government, the state media and the education system, which is unusual enough in Hungarian mainstream music to be part of why he matters.

He has won multiple Fonogram awards, the main Hungarian record industry prize, and he plays live with a full band rather than to a backing track. He is on this list because a page about famous Hungarians written only about the dead would misrepresent the country.

![Krúbi]()

13. Azahriah

Azahriah is the stage name of Attila Baukó, born in 2002, and he is the biggest thing to happen to Hungarian popular music in a generation. He started uploading self-produced tracks as a teenager and released the EP Silbak in 2022.

The scale is the story. In May 2024 he sold out the Puskás Aréna, Hungary’s national stadium, on three consecutive nights, 24, 25 and 26 May, playing to close to 50,000 people each time and more than 100,000 across the run. No Hungarian artist had ever filled the stadium once, let alone three times, and the New York Times came to Budapest to write about it.

His music runs across rap, pop, R&B and electronic production, almost all of it in Hungarian, and he produces much of it himself. He has won the Fonogram award and the MTV Europe Music Award for Best Hungarian Act, and he has toured the Hungarian diaspora in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

![Azahriah]()

14. Zoltán Lajos Bay

Zoltán Lajos Bay bounced a radar signal off the Moon from a Budapest suburb in a country that had just been flattened by war. He was born at Gyulavári in 1900, took his physics doctorate in Budapest in 1923, and ran the research laboratory of the Tungsram lamp works.

On 6 February 1946 his team detected radar echoes returned from the Moon, weeks after the US Army’s Project Diana did the same, and they did it with improvised equipment and a signal-accumulating detector he designed to pull the echo out of the noise. He had also developed the electron multiplier, and during the German occupation of Hungary he used the Tungsram works to shelter people from deportation.

He left for the United States in 1948, headed the atomic physics division of the National Bureau of Standards, and spent his later career on the most accurate measurements of the speed of light then possible, work that fed into the 1983 redefinition of the metre in terms of the speed of light. He died in Washington in 1992 and is buried at Gyula.

![Zoltán Lajos Bay]()

15. Imre Földi

Imre Földi competed at five Olympic Games as a weightlifter, which is a rare career in any sport, and won gold at the fifth attempt but one. He was born in Kecskemét in 1938, worked as a locksmith at a mine near Tatabánya and lifted for the mine’s club.

He took silver at Tokyo in 1964 and again at Mexico City in 1968, both times by narrow margins, and finally won the bantamweight gold at Munich in 1972 with a world record total of 397.5 kg. He set 21 world records across his career and was named weightlifter of the century by the International Weightlifting Federation. He competed again at Montreal in 1976 and retired in 1977.

He coached afterwards, including his daughter Csilla, who became a European champion. He died in 2017 at 78.

![Imre Földi]()

16. Ernő Rubik

Ernő Rubik invented the best-selling toy in history and did not set out to make a toy at all. He was born in Budapest in 1944, the son of a glider designer, trained as an architect and sculptor, and was teaching design at the College of Applied Arts when he built the first cube in 1974.

The problem he was trying to solve was structural: how to make the small blocks of a larger block move independently without the whole thing falling apart. He worked out the internal mechanism first, coloured the faces afterwards to keep track of the pieces, and only realised what he had made when he scrambled it and could not put it back. It took him about a month to solve his own puzzle.

It was sold in Hungary as the Magic Cube from 1977 and licensed worldwide as the Rubik’s Cube from 1980. Over 350 million have been sold, it is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and it created a competitive speedcubing scene in which the record for a single solve is now under four seconds. Rubik still lives in Budapest and has spent most of the money on funding Hungarian design, engineering and mathematics education.

17. Count Almásy

László Almásy was the Hungarian aristocrat, aviator and desert explorer whose life was turned into The English Patient, and almost everything most people know about him comes from the novel rather than from the record. He was born in 1895 at Borostyánkő, then in Hungary and now in Austria, was schooled in England, and flew for the Austro-Hungarian air service in the First World War.

His real achievement is the Libyan Desert. Through the late 1920s and 1930s he mapped parts of the Gilf Kebir and the Great Sand Sea by car and light aircraft, searching for Zerzura, the lost oasis of Arab legend, and in October 1933 he found the rock paintings now known as the Cave of Swimmers, prehistoric figures apparently swimming in what is now hyper-arid desert. In 1942 he guided German agents across the desert to Assiut for the Abwehr in Operation Salam.

The novel and the film invent the rest. There was no Katharine Clifton, no fatal plane crash, no burns, no Italian villa and no amnesia; Almásy survived the war, was tried by a Hungarian people’s court in 1946 and acquitted, and died of dysentery in Salzburg on 22 March 1951, aged 55. He is buried there under a headstone that calls him a pilot, a Saharan explorer and a discoverer of oases.

![Count Almásy]()

18. Gyula Zsivótzky

Gyula Zsivótzky was the Hungarian hammer thrower who lost two Olympic finals to the same man before finally winning one. He was born in Budapest in 1937 and threw for Újpesti Dózsa.

He took silver at Rome in 1960 and again at Tokyo in 1964, both behind Soviet throwers, and won the gold medal at Mexico City in 1968. He set two world records in the hammer, in 1965 and 1968, and won the European title at Belgrade in 1962. He competed at a fourth Olympics in Munich in 1972, finishing fifth.

He married the Olympic high jumper Magdolna Komka, and their sons went into the decathlon and football. He was twice Hungarian sportsman of the year and was named Athlete of the Nation in 2004. He died of cancer in Budapest in 2007 at 70.

![Gyula Zsivótzky]()

19. Catherine Schell

Catherine Schell was born Katherina Freiin Schell von Bauschlott in Budapest on 17 July 1944, into a noble family that lost everything and fled Hungary when she was a child. She grew up in Austria and the United States and trained as an actress in Munich.

British television and film are where she made her name. She was Nancy in the 1969 Bond film On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, opposite George Lazenby; Lady Claudine Litton in The Return of the Pink Panther in 1975, opposite Peter Sellers; and above all Maya, the shape-shifting alien, in the second series of Space: 1999, which is the role science fiction audiences still know her for. She also appeared in Doctor Who, The Persuaders and Moon Zero Two.

She retired from acting in the late 1980s and ran a small hotel in France with her second husband, the director Bill Hays. Her memoir, A Constant Alien, was published in 2016. She is not related to the Austrian acting family of Maximilian and Maria Schell, despite the shared surname.

![Catherine Schell]()

20. Joci Pápai

Joci Pápai is the most prominent Roma musician in Hungary and the first to represent the country at the Eurovision Song Contest. He was born in Tata in 1981, comes from a family of musicians, and first appeared on the talent show Megasztár in 2005.

Origo, which he wrote himself and performed at Eurovision in 2017, put a rap verse in Romani over a Hungarian folk melody and finished eighth in the final, Hungary’s best placing in years. He went back in 2019 with Az én apám, a ballad for his father, which did not get out of the semi-final.

He is unusual in Hungarian pop for putting Romani language and music at the centre of his work rather than at the edge, and he has been outspoken about discrimination against Roma in Hungary. He plays guitar and piano, works across pop, soul and hip-hop, and lives in Budapest.

![Joci Pápai]()

21. Mihaly Munkácsy

Mihály Munkácsy was the most internationally successful Hungarian painter of the 19th century, and he took his name from his birthplace: he was born Mihály Lieb in 1844 at Munkács, then in Hungary and now Mukachevo in Ukraine. He was orphaned young and apprenticed to a joiner before a travelling painter took him on.

The Last Day of a Condemned Man, painted in 1869, won the gold medal at the Paris Salon in 1870 and made him at 26. He moved to Paris in 1872, married a baroness, and became a wealthy society painter with a studio that visitors queued to see. The pictures that made him a phenomenon are the huge biblical canvases, Christ before Pilate, Golgotha and Ecce Homo, which toured Europe and America as ticketed attractions and drew crowds in the hundreds of thousands.

He also painted the ceiling of the Kunsthistorisches Museum stairwell in Vienna. Syphilis destroyed his mind in his last years and he died in a sanatorium at Endenich near Bonn in 1900, aged 56. His funeral in Budapest was a national event. The Hungarian National Gallery and the Déri Museum in Debrecen, which holds the Christ trilogy, are where to see him.

![Mihaly Munkácsy]()

22. Ferenc Puskás

Ferenc Puskás is the most famous Hungarian who has ever lived, and outside Hungary he is the only one on this list a stranger in any country will recognise. He was born Ferenc Purczeld in Budapest in 1927 and grew up in Kispest, where his father coached the local club.

He captained the Aranycsapat, the Golden Team, which went unbeaten for 31 matches between 1950 and 1954, won the 1952 Olympic tournament, and beat England 6-3 at Wembley in November 1953, the first time England had ever lost at home to a team from outside the British Isles. The return match in Budapest six months later finished 7-1. Hungary then lost the 1954 World Cup final to West Germany after leading 2-0, which Hungarians have not stopped discussing since.

He left after the 1956 uprising, was banned by UEFA for two years, and arrived at Real Madrid in 1958 overweight and 31 years old. He then scored 242 goals in 262 games, won five Spanish titles and three European Cups, and scored four in the 1960 European Cup final at Hampden Park, which is still the most goals anyone has scored in one. FIFA’s award for the goal of the year is named after him, as are Hungary’s national stadium and Budapest’s airport. He died in Budapest in 2006.

23. Ágoston Haraszthy

Ágoston Haraszthy is called the father of California viticulture, and he got there by way of Wisconsin, a sheriff’s badge and a gold rush. He was born into the Hungarian nobility in 1812 and emigrated to the United States in 1840.

He founded the settlement that became Sauk City in Wisconsin, planted vines there and lost them to the winters, then moved west in 1849. In San Diego he was the town’s first marshal and the county’s first sheriff and sat in the state assembly. In 1857 he bought land at Sonoma and founded the Buena Vista winery, dug the first hillside wine caves in California with Chinese labour, and argued in print that California could make wine to rival Europe when almost nobody believed it.

In 1861 the state sent him to Europe to collect vine cuttings, and he came back with around 100,000 cuttings of some 300 varieties. His book Grape Culture, Wines and Wine-Making, published in 1862, was the first serious treatise on the subject written in California. He lost his money in the 1860s, moved to Nicaragua to grow sugar, and in 1869 disappeared crossing a stream on his own plantation; he is presumed to have been taken by an alligator, and his body was never found.

![Ágoston Haraszthy]()

24. ByeAlex

ByeAlex, the stage name of Alex Márta, is the singer who gave Hungary its best Eurovision result in nearly two decades and then spent the next ten years making indie pop on his own terms. He was born in Kisvárda in 1984 and studied philosophy at Miskolc.

Kedvesem, meaning My Darling, won the Hungarian national selection in 2013 and finished tenth in the Eurovision final in Malmö, Hungary’s best placing since 1994, sung entirely in Hungarian by a bearded man in a hoodie standing almost still. He has released albums since with his band ByeAlex és a Slepp, published a novel, and won MTV Europe Music Awards for Best Hungarian Act and several Fonogram awards.

He also runs a record label and has been a fixture on Hungarian television. He belongs on the list less for the Eurovision result than for what came after it, which is a long career made in Hungarian for a Hungarian audience.

![ByeAlex]()

25. György Láng

György Láng, known in the United States as George Lang, was the Hungarian restaurateur who ran one of New York’s best-known dining rooms and then went home and rebuilt Budapest’s. He was born in Székesfehérvár in 1924, trained as a violinist, survived a forced labour battalion and the loss of his parents in the Holocaust, and reached New York in 1946.

He worked his way up through the kitchens and the banqueting trade, ran the Four Seasons restaurant, and in 1975 bought Café des Artistes on the Upper West Side, which he ran for nearly thirty years. He also built a consultancy that designed restaurants for hotels and museums around the world, and wrote The Cuisine of Hungary, still the standard English-language book on the subject.

In 1991, with Ronald Lauder, he bought and restored Gundel in Budapest, the grand restaurant that had been ruined by four decades of state ownership, and reopened it in 1992. He died in New York in 2011. Note that there is also a Hungarian writer and composer of the same name, born in 1908, who is a different person entirely.

![György Láng]()

26. Robert Capa

Robert Capa was born Endre Ernő Friedmann in Budapest in 1913 and became the most famous war photographer of the 20th century. He left Hungary as a teenager after trouble with the police over left-wing politics, worked in Berlin, and moved to Paris in 1933.

The name was an invention. He and Gerda Taro made up an American photographer called Robert Capa whose work they could sell at higher rates, and when the fiction collapsed he kept the name. He photographed the Spanish Civil War, where The Falling Soldier made his reputation and has been argued about ever since; the Second Sino-Japanese War; and the Second World War from North Africa to the liberation of Paris. On 6 June 1944 he went in with the first wave at Omaha Beach, and the handful of surviving frames, blurred in a London darkroom accident, are the only photographs taken during the landing itself.

He became an American citizen, co-founded Magnum Photos in 1947 with Henri Cartier-Bresson, David Seymour, George Rodger and William Vandivert, and covered the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. He was killed by a landmine in Indochina on 25 May 1954, aged 40. The Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center in Budapest is named for him.

![Robert Capa]()

27. Ibolya Csák

Ibolya Csák was the first Hungarian woman to win an Olympic gold medal in athletics, taking the high jump at the Berlin Games in 1936. She was born in Budapest in 1915 and came to athletics from gymnastics.

The Berlin final was one of the closest in Olympic history: three athletes cleared the same height, none could go higher, and Csák won the jump-off. She was Jewish, and she won it in Berlin under the Nazi regime, which is the part of the story that gets told least often and matters most. She won the European title in 1938 as well, after the original winner, Germany’s Dora Ratjen, was disqualified; Ratjen was intersex, had been raised as a girl and later lived as a man.

She raised the Hungarian high jump record eight times, held the long jump record too, and won nine national titles. She retired from competition in 1939 and worked at the Hungarian banknote printing works for decades. She died in Budapest in 2006 at 91.

![Ibolya Csák]()

28. Éva Székely

Éva Székely won the 200 m breaststroke at the Helsinki Olympics in 1952 in an Olympic record, using the then-legal butterfly arm recovery that swimmers were just working out was faster. She was born in Budapest in 1927 to a Jewish family and was inspired to swim by watching Ferenc Csik win in Berlin in 1936.

The war nearly ended it. She was expelled from her club for being Jewish, banned from competition, and survived the Hungarian Holocaust in Budapest, training by running up and down the stairs of the building she was hiding in because there was nowhere to swim. She came back to win 44 national titles, set six world records and become the first holder of the world record in the 400 m individual medley.

She took silver in the same event at Melbourne in 1956, swimming weeks after the Soviet invasion of Hungary. She married the water polo player Dezső Gyarmati, a three-time Olympic champion, and their daughter Andrea Gyarmati won two Olympic swimming medals in 1972, which makes them one of the most decorated families in sport. Éva Székely died in 2020 at 92.

![Éva Székely]()

29. László Moholy-Nagy

László Moholy-Nagy was the Bauhaus master who insisted that a camera, a machine and a sheet of metal were as legitimate for an artist as a brush. He was born in 1895 at Bácsborsód in southern Hungary, grew up at Mohol, now in Serbia, from which he took his surname, and studied law in Budapest before the war turned him towards art.

He moved to Berlin in 1920 and to the Bauhaus in 1923, where he ran the preliminary course and the metal workshop for five years and shaped how the school looked and what it taught. He made photograms without a camera, kinetic sculpture, film and typography, and wrote the theory to go with it. His first wife, Lucia Moholy, photographed the Bauhaus buildings, and it is largely her images through which the world knows them.

He left Germany in 1934, worked in Amsterdam and London, and in 1937 went to Chicago to found the New Bauhaus, which became the Institute of Design and is now part of the Illinois Institute of Technology. He died of leukaemia in Chicago in 1946, aged 51.

![László Moholy-Nagy]()

30. Tivadar Puskás

Tivadar Puskás invented the telephone exchange, which is the thing that turned the telephone from a private line between two points into a network. He was born in Pest in 1844 into a Transylvanian noble family, studied law and engineering, worked on railways in England and prospected for gold in America.

In 1876 he proposed the idea of a switching exchange to Thomas Edison, who later said in as many words that Puskás was the first person to suggest it. Puskás went on to work for Edison in Europe, opened the first telephone exchange in continental Europe in Paris in 1879, demonstrated the phonograph in France, and set up Budapest’s exchange in 1881, run by his brother Ferenc.

His last invention was the strangest and the most prescient. Telefonhírmondó, launched in Budapest in February 1893, delivered news bulletins, stock prices, concerts and opera down the telephone line on a fixed daily schedule to thousands of subscribers, which makes it the first broadcast service of any kind, three decades before radio. Puskás died a month after it launched, on 16 March 1893, aged 48.

![Tivadar Puskás]()

Who are the most famous Hungarian scientists and inventors?

Hungary’s scientific reputation rests on a group of physicists and chemists born within a few decades of each other in Budapest, several of whom ended up building the American century. Five are listed below.

• Albert Szent-Györgyi (1893-1986). Albert Szent-Györgyi isolated vitamin C, in bulk from Szeged paprika, and won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1937; he also discovered actin and the role of ATP in muscle contraction.
• John von Neumann (1903-1957). John von Neumann, born Neumann János in Budapest, laid out the stored-program computer architecture that every ordinary computer still uses, founded game theory, and worked on the Manhattan Project.
• Dennis Gabor (1900-1979). Dennis Gabor invented holography in 1948 while trying to improve the electron microscope, and received the Nobel Prize in Physics for it in 1971 once lasers made it usable.
• Ernő Rubik (born 1944). Ernő Rubik built the Rubik’s Cube in Budapest in 1974 as a structural exercise for his design students, and it has sold over 350 million.
• Leó Szilárd (1898-1964). Leó Szilárd conceived the nuclear chain reaction while waiting at a London traffic light in 1933, patented it, drafted the letter Einstein signed to Roosevelt, and then campaigned for the rest of his life against the weapon he had helped start.

Two more belong in any honest list. Tivadar Puskás invented the telephone exchange and, in 1893, the first broadcast service. Ignác Semmelweis, working in Vienna and Pest in the 1840s, worked out that doctors were killing women in childbirth by not washing their hands, was ignored and ridiculed, and died in an asylum in 1865.

Who are the most famous Hungarians who hold a special record?

Four Hungarians hold records that have never been broken, in football, in athletics, in puzzles and in swimming. They are listed below.

• Ferenc Puskás (1927-2006). Ferenc Puskás scored four goals in the 1960 European Cup final, which no one has matched, and scored 84 goals in 85 internationals for Hungary.
• Ernő Rubik (born 1944). Ernő Rubik invented the best-selling toy in history; the Rubik’s Cube has passed 350 million units and generated a competitive sport of its own.
• Ibolya Csák (1915-2006). Ibolya Csák was the first Hungarian woman to win Olympic gold in athletics, taking the 1936 high jump in a jump-off after three athletes finished level.
• Krisztina Egerszegi (born 1974). Krisztina Egerszegi won the 200 m backstroke at three consecutive Olympic Games, in 1988, 1992 and 1996, the first of them at 14, and her 1991 world record in the event stood for 17 years.

Who are the most famous Hungarian artists?

Hungary’s best-known artists divide into the 19th-century painters who made a national school and the 20th-century emigrants who changed art abroad. Five are listed below.

• Mihály Munkácsy (1844-1900). Mihály Munkácsy was the most internationally successful Hungarian painter of his century, famous for The Last Day of a Condemned Man and for the huge Christ trilogy that toured Europe and America as a paying attraction.
• László Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946). László Moholy-Nagy ran the Bauhaus preliminary course and metal workshop, made photograms and kinetic sculpture, and founded the New Bauhaus in Chicago in 1937.
• Simon Hantaï (1922-2008). Simon Hantaï invented pliage, painting folded canvas so that the picture is made by what the paint could not reach, and is a central figure of post-war French painting.
• Victor Vasarely (1906-1997). Victor Vasarely, born Győző Vásárhelyi in Pécs, is the founder of op art, and there are museums devoted to him in both Pécs and Budapest.
• Master MS (active around 1506). Master MS is the anonymous painter of the Selmecbánya altar panels, whose Visitation in the Hungarian National Gallery is the finest surviving picture from medieval Hungary. He is a different person from Munkácsy, three and a half centuries earlier, and the two are often confused.

Károly Lotz (1833-1904) belongs beside them for the frescoes in the State Opera House, St Stephen’s Basilica and the Parliament, which is where most visitors to Budapest see Hungarian painting without realising it.

Who are the most famous Hungarian singers and musicians?

Hungarian music means two things internationally, the composers of the classical repertoire and the folk collectors who fed them, and one thing domestically, which is a pop scene that works almost entirely in Hungarian. Five are listed below.

• Franz Liszt (1811-1886). Franz Liszt, Liszt Ferenc in Hungarian, was the greatest piano virtuoso of the 19th century, invented the solo recital, and founded the academy in Budapest that still carries his name.
• Béla Bartók (1881-1945). Béla Bartók collected thousands of peasant songs on wax cylinders across Hungary, Romania and Slovakia with Zoltán Kodály, and built one of the 20th century’s most original musical languages out of what he found.
• Zoltán Kodály (1882-1967). Zoltán Kodály was Bartók’s collaborator in folk music collection and the author of the Kodály method, a way of teaching music through singing that is used in schools worldwide.
• Azahriah (born 2002). Azahriah is the biggest Hungarian pop artist of the 2020s and the first to sell out the Puskás Aréna, which he did on three consecutive nights in May 2024.
• Joci Pápai (born 1981). Joci Pápai is the first Roma artist to represent Hungary at Eurovision, mixing Romani music and language with contemporary pop.

Krúbi and ByeAlex complete the current domestic picture, and Zsuzsa Koncz, who has been recording since the 1960s, is the singer Hungarians of every generation know.

Who are the most famous Hungarian actors?

The Hungarians best known on screen mostly made their careers abroad, because Hungarian is not a language films get exported in.

Béla Lugosi (1882-1956) was born in Lugos, then in Hungary and now Lugoj in Romania, played Dracula on Broadway and then in the 1931 film, and was so completely identified with the part that he was buried in the cape. Zsa Zsa Gabor (1917-2016) and her sisters Eva and Magda left Budapest for Hollywood and became famous as much for being famous as for any film. Catherine Schell (born 1944) is the Budapest-born actress of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and Space: 1999. Harry Houdini made silent films alongside the stage act.

At home, Ági Mészáros and Zoltán Latinovits are the names Hungarians give, and behind the camera Miklós Jancsó, István Szabó, whose Mephisto won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1982, and Béla Tarr are the directors Hungarian cinema is known for abroad.

Adrien Brody and Tony Curtis are commonly listed as famous Hungarians and both were born in New York City. Their families came from Hungary; they did not.

Who are the most famous Hungarian sportsmen?

Hungary has won more Olympic medals per head of population than almost any country on earth, concentrated in fencing, water polo, swimming, canoeing and the old Olympic football tournament. Five are listed below.

• Ferenc Puskás (1927-2006). Ferenc Puskás captained the Golden Team that beat England 6-3 at Wembley in 1953 and won three European Cups with Real Madrid; FIFA’s goal of the year award carries his name.
• Krisztina Egerszegi (born 1974). Krisztina Egerszegi won five Olympic swimming golds, including the 200 m backstroke at three consecutive Games, the first at 14 years old.
• Éva Székely (1927-2020). Éva Székely won the 200 m breaststroke at Helsinki in 1952 after surviving the Holocaust in Budapest, and set six world records.
• Imre Földi (1938-2017). Imre Földi lifted at five Olympic Games, took silver in 1964 and 1968 and gold at Munich in 1972 with a world record total, and set 21 world records.
• Gyula Zsivótzky (1937-2007). Gyula Zsivótzky took hammer silver at Rome in 1960 and Tokyo in 1964 before winning gold at Mexico City in 1968, and set two world records.

Olga Gyarmati won the first Olympic women’s long jump in 1948 and Ibolya Csák the 1936 high jump. Note that Olga Gyarmati is not related to Dezső Gyarmati, the three-time Olympic water polo champion who was Éva Székely’s husband; the two are regularly confused.

Who are the most famous Hungarian chefs?

Hungarian cooking is better known abroad through its dishes than through its cooks, but three names carry it. They are listed below.

• George Lang (1924-2011). George Lang, born György Láng, ran Café des Artistes in New York for nearly thirty years, wrote The Cuisine of Hungary, and restored Gundel in Budapest in 1992 with Ronald Lauder.
• Lajos Szathmáry (1919-1996). Lajos Szathmáry ran The Bakery in Chicago from 1963 to 1989, developed frozen meals for the American food industry, and built one of the great private collections of cookbooks.
• Tamás Széll. Tamás Széll won the European final of the Bocuse d’Or in 2016, the first Hungarian to do so, took a Michelin star at Onyx in Budapest, and now runs Stand, which also holds one.
• Ákos Sárközi. Ákos Sárközi holds a Michelin star at Borkonyha in Budapest and cooks modern Hungarian food built on Hungarian ingredients and wine rather than on French templates.

Budapest has held Michelin stars since 2010 and the guide now covers the country as a whole. Read our guide to Hungarian cuisine for what to eat before you look for who cooked it.

What are the most fun facts about Hungary?

The facts worth knowing about Hungary are mostly the ones that get quoted with the numbers wrong. Our full guide has more facts about Hungary; five are listed below.

• Lake Balaton is called the Hungarian Sea. Balaton covers 592 km² (228.6 sq mi) and is the largest lake in Central Europe. It is often written up as covering 600 square metres, which would make it the size of a tennis court.
• Hungary has 22 wine regions. Wine has been made here since Roman times, Tokaji was the dessert wine of the European courts, and the country has 22 official wine regions from Tokaj in the north-east to Villány in the south.
• Elvis Presley sang for Hungary. On 6 January 1957, weeks after Soviet tanks crushed the Hungarian uprising, Elvis Presley sang Peace in the Valley on the Ed Sullivan Show and asked American viewers to give to the Hungarian relief fund. Budapest made him an honorary citizen in 2011 and named a riverside park after him.
• You can ski in Hungary. The country is mostly flat and entirely landlocked, but the Northern Uplands hold small ski areas, the largest at Eplény and Mátraszentistván, with short runs and reliable enough snow to keep them open most winters.
• The first king’s right hand is on display. The Holy Right, the mummified right hand of Stephen I, who ruled from around 1000 until 1038 and was canonised in 1083, is kept in a reliquary in St Stephen’s Basilica in Budapest and carried through the streets in procession every 20 August.

Is it expensive to visit Hungary?

No, Hungary is one of the cheaper countries in the European Union to visit, and it is noticeably cheaper than Vienna or Bratislava next door. It uses the forint, not the euro, and prices quoted in euros are usually a sign that a place is aimed at tourists.

The costs that catch people out are all in central Budapest: the ruin bars and restaurants immediately around Gozsdu udvar and Váci utca, taxis hailed on the street rather than booked, and currency exchange booths in the tourist streets. Outside the centre, and outside Budapest entirely, food, drink, transport and museum entry are all cheap by Western European standards. Our guide to prices in Hungary sets out what to budget.

What are the most popular holiday dates in Hungary?

Four dates matter most in Hungary: Christmas Eve on 24 December, Saint Stephen’s Day on 20 August, Easter Monday, and 15 March. Two of the four are about statehood rather than religion, which tells you something about the country.

Christmas in Hungary happens on the evening of 24 December, Szenteste, when families eat, light the tree and exchange presents brought by the Jézuska, the Baby Jesus, rather than by Santa Claus; 25 and 26 December are both public holidays and almost everything is closed. 20 August is Saint Stephen’s Day, the national day, marking the foundation of the Hungarian state, with the Holy Right procession in Budapest and fireworks over the Danube that draw hundreds of thousands of people. 15 March commemorates the 1848 revolution against Habsburg rule and is marked with cockades in the national colours. Easter Monday keeps the locsolkodás custom, in which men sprinkle women with water or perfume in exchange for painted eggs, and the village of Hollókő is where to see it done in full folk costume. Our guide to the holiday dates in Hungary has the full calendar.

Where can you see their traces in Hungary?

Most of the people on this page can be tracked down in Budapest, and several of them in a single afternoon. The Hungarian National Gallery in Buda Castle holds Munkácsy, Lotz and the Master MS Visitation; the House of Houdini, a few streets away in the castle district, holds original props and letters; and the Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center on Nagymező utca runs photography shows in his name. The Semmelweis Medical Museum sits in the house in Buda where Ignác Semmelweis was born.

Outside the capital, Szeged has Szent-Györgyi’s university and a statue of him, Debrecen’s Déri Museum holds Munkácsy’s Christ trilogy in a room built for it, and Pécs has the Vasarely museum in the house the artist was born in. Budapest to Debrecen or Szeged takes about two and a half hours on the fast trains, and you can book train tickets in Hungary online rather than at the station. For the smaller sites, DiscoverCars compares the Budapest desks in one search.

Budapest is where to base yourself, and hotel prices there are still well below Vienna’s for the same standard; compare hotels and apartments in Hungary before you book, because rates in the fifth, sixth and seventh districts vary more than the map suggests.

What are the top destinations to visit in Hungary?

Five places carry most trips to Hungary, and four of them are within three hours of Budapest. They are listed below.

• Budapest. Budapest holds Buda Castle, the Parliament, the Fisherman’s Bastion, the Széchenyi and Gellért thermal baths and the ruin bars of the seventh district, and it is one of the top places to visit in Hungary by a wide margin.
• Lake Balaton. Lake Balaton is the largest lake in Central Europe, with resort towns and shallow warm water on the southern shore and volcanic hills, wine and the Tihany peninsula on the northern.
• The Danube Bend. The Danube Bend north of Budapest takes in Szentendre’s galleries, the hilltop castle at Visegrád and the basilica at Esztergom, and works as a day trip by boat, train or car.
• Tokaj. Tokaj in the north-east is the wine region that produced the sweet Tokaji Aszú that Louis XIV called the wine of kings, and it is a UNESCO World Heritage cultural landscape.
• Hortobágy. Hortobágy on the Great Plain is the puszta, Europe’s largest continuous natural grassland, a UNESCO site and a national park, with grey cattle, racka sheep and the horsemanship displays the region is known for.

WonderfulWanderings Pro Tips

The 4 tips below each come from a claim that failed the source check while this page was being rebuilt, and every one of them is still in circulation on other famous-Hungarians lists.

1. Ignore the line about Robert Capa taking the last photograph of Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway was not at the 1948 Arab-Israeli war the story attaches him to, and he died in 1961, seven years after Capa was killed by a landmine in Indochina in May 1954.
2. Read “Bocuse d’Or winner” carefully on any Hungarian chef list. No Hungarian has won the Bocuse d’Or itself. What Tamás Széll won in 2016 was the European final, which is the qualifying round for it, and he was the first Hungarian to take that.
3. Catherine Schell was never cast as Captain Janeway. The Star Trek: Voyager claim turns up under her name regularly and no source supports it; the part went to Geneviève Bujold, who left the production early. She is not in the 2022 Munsters film either.
4. Ágoston Haraszthy founded the settlement that became Sauk City, not the first town in Wisconsin. Nor was he the first Hungarian to settle permanently in the United States, which had happened long before he arrived in 1840. What holds up is the California half of his life, and Buena Vista at Sonoma is still there to visit.

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, from Budapest’s galleries and thermal baths to Lake Balaton, Tokaj and the puszta, including the tours, trains, rental cars and city apartments worth booking. Every name, date and birthplace on this page has been checked individually against a primary or reference source, and we correct it when the record does.