Hungary

Hungary is a landlocked country in Central Europe, filling much of the Carpathian Basin along the Danube. It borders Slovakia, Ukraine, Romania, Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia and Austria, and most of its land is lowland plain. Budapest is the capital, and Hungarian, a Uralic language distantly related to Finnish and Estonian, is the official language.

Celts, Romans, Huns, Avars and Slavs lived here before the Hungarian tribes arrived in the late 9th century. Stephen I was crowned the first Christian king in 1000. After defeat by the Ottomans at Mohács in 1526 the kingdom was split into three parts for more than 150 years, until Habsburg rule united it again. The Compromise of 1867 created and the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary. The Treaty of Trianon of 1920 took away 71% of the old kingdom's territory. After World War II Hungary became a Soviet satellite in 1949, and a peaceful change to democracy came in 1989. Hungary joined NATO, the European Union in 2004 and the Schengen Area in 2007.

The parliamentary republic elects a single-chamber National Assembly every four years. Its export-oriented economy has many car-industry suppliers, and MOL, OTP Bank and the drug maker Gedeon Richter are leading companies. Budapest is the financial and business center, with a stock exchange whose BUX index tracks the main firms, and Danube ports operate at Budapest, Dunaújváros and Baja. The country keeps its own currency, the forint, and in 1980 Bertalan Farkas became the first Hungarian in space.

Lake Balaton is the largest lake in Central Europe, and Lake Hévíz is the largest thermal lake in the world. Tokaji Aszú and Egri Bikavér are the classic wines, and goulash and paprika, ground from a local pepper, mark the national cooking. Franz Liszt and Béla Bartók are the leading composers, and Ernő Rubik invented the Rubik's Cube. Line 1 of the Budapest Metro, opened in 1896, is the second-oldest underground railway in the world, and the football team of the 1950s helped shape modern tactics.