Hungary [antikvár]

Almost eleven centuries ago, in 896 l A.D. or thereabouts, the Magyar tribes advanced into this region along one of the finger lines pointing northeastwards. They arrived as part of the last wave of the Great Migrations after a journey lasting several centuries. Their long migration began somewhere toward the west of the Ural Mountains, and touched the Caspian Sea, the northern shores of the Black Sea and the steppes of southern Russia. On the way they encountered foreign peoples, acquiring new words and new genes in the process. Some tribes remained behind, breaking away to wander in other directions, until finally the mounted people comprising the seven conquering Magyar tribes was formed. This people, who kept herds of animals during their long wanderings, combined Turkish and Iranian words with the language of their Uralic Finno-Ugrian ancestors. Today it is mainly the National Museum in Budapest that preserves the items recovered from the burial sites of these people uncovered along the banks of the river Tisza: sabres curved in Oriental style, arrowheads and gold drinking vessels, together with silver-and-gold disks finely engraved with Indo-Persian4motifs that embellished the sabretaches of warriors buried together with their horses.From the Conquest to the collapse of the common Austro-Hungarian state, Hungary comprised the whole of the basin enclosed by the Carpathian Mountains. The enormous, domed, neo-Gothic palace of the Parliament on the Danube embankment in Budapest was built as the political centre of an empire. In 1918, however, at the end of the First World War, Hungary's non-Hungarian peoples, together with territories largely populated by them, either formed new states or joined neighbouring states. Hungary shrank to one-third of its former size, and at the same time one-third of the ethnicHungarian population acquired minority status as members of other national groups.Today, Hungary is a small country. With its ten million inhabitants, it has almost the same population as the state of Indiana in the United States. But it lies in a place where peoples and cultures have met trough time and