Hungary

Hungary is the landlocked country of the Carpathian Basin in Central Europe, ringed by Slovakia, Ukraine, Romania, Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia and Austria, great lowland plains draining to the Danube, nine and a half million Magyar-speaking people round the capital Budapest. Celts, Romans, Huns, Avars and Slavs passed before the Magyar principality of the late ninth century turned Christian kingdom under Stephen I in 1000. The Ottoman victory at Mohács in 1526 tore the realm in three for a hundred and fifty years until the Habsburgs reunited it, and after revolts the Compromise of 1867 raised Austria-Hungary to great-power rank. Defeat in the First World War brought Trianon in 1920, which stripped seventy-one percent of historic Hungary and marooned a third of its people beyond the new posts. The Horthy regency steered the rump through interwar turmoil into the Axis camp, ruin followed, and Soviet occupation delivered the People's Republic of 1949 into the Warsaw Pact. The failed rising of 1956 kept the name of Budapest before the world.