The first thing you need to know about is, is that we hate sad jokes. Like, ‘OMG, are you from Hungary? I am soooo hungry...’ That’s a sad one. We don’t like it. We don’t find it amusing, not one bit. However, say something magyarul, and we will be excited and overjoyed and immediately think of you as our friend.
Now. Hungarians have a language that is considered very difficult to learn. I don’t know about this – I grew up with it. I can assure you, that with our alphabet, that consists of 42 letters - as opposed to the English abc that has 26 – we have wonderful words that are not only ancient hungarian words, but also words that stayed with us after the numerous foreign occupation, such as russian, german and turkish, and of course from other modern languages like english or french. Since I speak english quite fluently I understand a lot more fancy hungarian words, too!
The Hungarian language is apparently the language brother of the Finnish language (suomi). I haven’t a clue about this because we do not understand each other at all. It must be something to do with the structure of the sentences, or similarities in grammar but apart from one word, postbox (postaláda in hungarian and postaládika in suomi) I have not come across any other similarities. I am sure there are professors who’d disagree with me on this.
We, Hungarians are really, really proud of the fact that we speak a language that is spoken by no-one else and, I think secretly we are proud that we don’t understand anyone else around us, either.
You see, Europe is built up by language groups. There are similarities in portuguese and spanish, french and italian (or italian/spanish), english and flemmish, german and flemmish. The most exciting bit is that Austrians and Germans speak the same language (with great accent differences), the Czech, Slovaks and Polish will understand each other, the same goes for the slavic countries (Croatia, Serbia, Albania, etc), then there are the bulgarians, ukranians and russians (I’ve heard that romanians find italian a really easy to learn as it is a similar language to their own), but what about us, Magyars?
According to my ancient studies, the Hungarians originate from North East Asia. Or China. Well, Kazakhstan for sure. Actually, it’s got to be somewhere around Mongolia. It’s quite hard to figure out where our ancestors started off from over one thousand years ago, but one thing is certain: Attila, the Hun was Hungarian. I think. Well, I was thought that he was Hungarian and he is considered as one of the greatest leaders of the huns. I mean, Hungarians.
Only when I came to the UK I met with the expression, Attila, the Hun, The fearsome Mongolian. Eh? In the picture he even had mongolian features. Hungarians did travel all across Asia, and they were infamous for their feisty (so to speak) attitude (extensive usage of arrows and other weapons against anyone). The huns were also great horse riders, they knew that if they put raw meat under the saddle, not only they’ll have meat to eat any time, but they can also preserve food.
So there they were, the Hungarians migrating from Asia towards Europe. Some say that for a while we’ve traveled with the finnish, so I guess that’s where language similarities might come from (but were there any postboxes in 850?). So the Finnish set off to conquer the North of Europe, whilst Hungarians set camp in the Carpathian Basin. Despite their efforts to be ‘self contained’ they still had ‘adventure rounds’ to the neighbours. The aim was to secure protection for themselves but whilst there, they stole food, animals and pretty much everything they took fancy of. As you can guess, the Hungarians quickly became so popular, that every nation around them wanted their blood.
Peace came around when Hungarians got boundaries. The superior worked really hard to establish a country and after his death, his son, István rose to power. He didn’t have an easy ride, he had to deal with internal issues such as the guy who was supposed to be the new leader. István wasn’t faint hearted. He took Koppany’s body and chopped up into four. The body parts were then pinned up on castle gates to warn others not to mess with him. In 1000 he crowned himself and therefore the Hungarian Kingdom was born.
His residence was at Székesfehérvár and his wife got her own castle, in Veszprém. Veszprém happens to be my hometown.
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| Székesfehérvár |
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| Veszprém |
