Hungarian is a way of life

Hungarians have never built pyramids, ruled slave empires, and conquered new worlds. They are a proud, strange and lonely people.

Hungarians live in the Carpathian basin and just about everywhere else, engaged in all possible (and some impossible) occupations.

No two Hungarians are alike, and yet the magnetism of their diversity seems to bring them together: Hungarians seem to be united by their differences.

When they meet, Hungarians greet each other like long lost brothers, laugh, dream and sing together for a while, then discover some of the innumerable, specially Hungarian differences and go their own, lonely ways, working and dreaming (they are very good at both): fourteen million Don Quihotes in search of new windmills to fight.

Hungarians are all different and each one claims to be more different than the others are.

Hungarians deny having common characteristics – yet they all present the same attitude towards life and things beyond. – One is inclined to believe the American saying: “Hungarian is not a nationality, it is a way of life.”

Faith - They believe in God. They also believe in miracles, in beautifully useless ideals, but first of all they have unlimited faith in themselves.

Hungarians love women, music, poetry, romantic history (their own), pure mathematics, applied humor, sumptuous dresses, dignified or fiery dances, melancholic music – but most of all their unique language, a flowery relic of bygone ages with its strange mixture of oriental color and nordic majesty.

Hungarians have survived at the crossroads of history where more numerous nations had perished. Strangers came by the millions to join them and to die for them, attracted by that strange magic which is Hungary. They have survived and with them have survived a unique, complex culture, the synthesis of ancient Euro-Asian humanism and modem, western Christianity.

- by ZOLTÁN BODOLAI Dip.Ed., Ph.D. (Budapest)
tutor of hungarian History and Culture, University of Sidney