Culture of Hungary


Hungarian culture, also known as Magyar culture, is characterized by its distinctive cuisine, folk traditions, poetry, theatre, religious customs, music and traditional embroidered garments. Hungarian folklore traditions include tales, music, dance, decorated pottery, carvings and embroidery. Historically, Hungarian music has largely consisted of folk music and classical pieces. Whilst the Hungarian language is classified as Ugric, Hungarian culture exhibits enduring Turkic elements, stemming not only from being under Ottoman rule, but also from earlier interactions and affiliations with Turkic peoples. Noted Hungarian authors include Sándor Márai, Imre Kertész, Péter Esterházy, Magda Szabó and János Kodolányi. Imre Kertész is particularly noteworthy for having won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2002.

Architecture

Hungary is home to:
Hungarian folk music is a prominent part of the national identity and continues to play a major part in the country’s music. It often features a strong dactylic rhythm due to the Hungarian language consistently putting stress on the first syllable of each word. It also exhibits an enduring Turkic influence.
Prominent Hungarian classical music composers include Franz Liszt, Franz Schmidt, Leó Weiner, Ernő Dohnányi, Béla Bartók, Zoltán Kodály, György Ligeti, Miklós Rózsa. Hungary also has a number of renowned composers of contemporary classical music including György Kurtág, Péter Eötvös and Zoltán Jeney, among others.
Franz Liszt spoke no Hungarian until 1870, when he started to learn the language, but clearly identified himself as Hungarian and founded the Academy of Music. Béla Bartók was also born in the former Kingdom of Hungary. György Ligeti was born in Transylvania, after the region was transferred to Romania. Both György Ligeti and Béla Bartók studied at the Liszt Academy before moving abroad, where a large portion of their work was written.
Broughton claims that Hungary's "infectious sound has been surprisingly influential on neighbouring countries and it's not uncommon to hear Hungarian-sounding tunes in Romania, and Slovakia. The Busójárás carnival in Mohács is a major Hungarian folk music event, formerly featuring the long-established and well-regarded Bogyiszló orchestra.
Hungarian classical music has long been an "experiment, made from Hungarian antedecents and on Hungarian soil, to create a conscious musical culture musical world of the folk song". Although the Hungarian upper class has long had cultural and political connections with the rest of Europe, leading to an influx of European musical ideas, the rural peasants maintained their own traditions, so that by the end of the 19th century Hungarian composers could draw on rural peasant music to create a Hungarian classical style. For example, Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály, two of Hungary's most famous composers, are known for using folk themes in their music. Bartók collected folk songs from across Central Europe, including Romania and Slovakia, whilst Kodály was more interested in creating a distinctively Hungarian musical style.
During the era of Communist rule in Hungary, a Song Committee examined and censored popular music for traces of subversion and ideological impurity. Since then, however, the Hungarian music industry has begun to recover, producing successful performers in the fields of jazz such as trumpeter Rudolf Tomsits, pianist-composer Károly Binder, and in a modernized form of Hungarian folk, Ferenc Sebő and Márta Sebestyén. Hungary has had several popular rock bands such as Illés, Metró, or Omega.

Literature

In earliest times, the Hungarian language was written in a runic-like script derived from the Old Turkic Script. The country switched to the Latin alphabet after being Christianized under the reign of Stephen I of Hungary. There are no surviving documents from before the 11th century.
The oldest written record in Hungarian is a fragment in the Establishing charter of the abbey of Tihany which, while mostly written in Latin, contains several Hungarian terms, among them the words feheruuaru rea meneh hodu utu rea, "up the military road to Fehérvár". The oldest complete text is the Funeral Sermon and Prayer ', a translation of a Latin sermon. The oldest poem is the Old Hungarian Laments of Mary ', also a translation from Latin, albeit a flawed one, from the 13th century. It is also the oldest surviving Uralic poem.
Among the first chronicles of Hungarian history were Gesta Hungarorum by the unknown author usually called Anonymus, and Gesta Hunnorum et Hungarorum by Simon Kézai, both written in Latin. These chronicles are a blend of history and legends, so they are not always historically accurate. Another chronicle is the Képes krónika, which was written for Louis the Great.
Renaissance literature flourished under the reign of king Matthias Corvinus. Janus Pannonius—even though he wrote in Latin—is considered one of the most important writers in Hungarian literature; he was also the only significant Hungarian Humanist poet of the period. The first printing house was founded during Matthias' reign by András Hess in Buda. The first book printed in Hungary was the Chronica Hungarorum.
Matthias Corvinus' library, the Bibliotheca Corviniana, was among Europe's greatest collections of secular historical chronicles and philosophical and scientific works in the 15th century. In 1489, Bartolomeo della Fonte of Florence wrote that Lorenzo de Medici had founded his own Greek-Latin library after being inspired by the example of the Hungarian king. Matthias Corvinus' library is now part of UNESCO World Heritage. Two other important figures of the Hungarian Renaissance are poets Bálint Balassi and Sebestyén Tinódi Lantos.
The most important poets of the period following the reign of King Matthias were Bálint Balassi and Miklós Zrínyi. Balassi's poetry, reflecting medieval influences, can be divided into three groups: love poems, war poems, and religious poems. Zrínyi's most significant work, the epic Szigeti veszedelem is written in a fashion similar to the Iliad. In the poem Zrínyi recounts the heroic Battle of Szigetvár where his great-grandfather died while defending the castle of Szigetvár. Among religious works, the most important is the Bible translation by Gáspár Károli, the Protestant pastor of Gönc, which was completed in 1590. This translation is called the Bible of Vizsoly after the town where it was first published.
The Hungarian enlightenment followed about fifty years after the Western European enlightenment, reaching Hungary through Vienna. The first writers of the Hungarian enlightenment were, among others, Maria Theresa's bodyguards György Bessenyei and János Batsányi. The greatest poets of this period were Mihály Csokonai Vitéz and Dániel Berzsenyi. The enlightenment prompted a reform of the Hungarian language. The greatest figure in this reform was Ferenc Kazinczy. Beginning at that time, Hungarian became useful for scientific writing, and many words were coined to name new inventions.
Hungarian literature has recently gained renown outside the borders of Hungary, mostly through German, French and English translations. Some modern Hungarian authors have become popular in Germany and Italy, especially Sándor Márai, Péter Esterházy, Péter Nádas, and Imre Kertész. Kertész is a contemporary Jewish writer and Holocaust survivor who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2002.
The classics of Hungarian literature have remained largely unknown outside Hungary. János Arany, a famous 19th-century poet, is still much loved in Hungary, especially his collection of ballads. Arany is among several other "true classics" including Sándor Petőfi, the poet of the Revolution of 1848, Endre Ady, Mihály Babits, Dezső Kosztolányi, Attila József, and János Pilinszky. Other Hungarian authors are Ferenc Móra, Géza Gárdonyi, Zsigmond Móricz, Gyula Illyés, Albert Wass, and Magda Szabó. Vilmos Kondor has created a new trend in recent years, and is mentioned as the creator of Hungarian noir.

Film

Many Hungarians have contributed to film art and its technology, but, due to political reasons, many of them found it was easier to find success abroad. As of 2018, Hungarians working in Hollywood and some in Hungary had received more than 150 Academy Award nominations and about 46 Academy Awards. Already in the 1930s there were 17 Hungarian nominations, but the peak was in the decade of the 1940s when about 51 nominations and 13 to 15 Academy Awards were given to exiled Hungarians. The best year was 1944 with 9 to 10 nominations and four Academy Awards.
The first Hungarian to be nominated was Lajos Bíró and the first to win the award was William S. Darling. Art Direction might be the most successful category concerning wins/nominations: Paul Groesse 3/11, William S. Darling 3/7, Joseph Kish 1/5, Vincent Korda 1/4, Alexandre Trauner 1/2 and Marcel Vertès 1/1.
The number of nominees and awards in all categories, exceeds all other nations, counted per capita.
Hungarians emigrated in large numbers after several disasters following the First World War when neighbouring countries—Romania, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia—occupied parts of the former Kingdom of Hungary, which lost two-thirds of its territory in a 1920 treaty. There was a brief communist takeover accompanied by a so-called ″red terror″ and then a reaction against it called the ″white terror″, which disrupted the economy. At that time Hungarian filmmakers tried their fortunes abroad, first, as did Géza von Bolváry, in the German-speaking world and later in the English-speaking world. Film with sound was invented in Germany by Dénes Mihály. Béla Gáspár invented, 1932, the first full color one-strip film: Gasparcolor patented in 1933. With the advent of racial laws in 1939, Jewish citizens were forced to leave the country to find work. It is ironic that some of the most successful propaganda films during the Second World War for both sides were directed by Hungarians: Münchhausen by Josef von Báky and "Pimpernel" Smith by Leslie Howard. With another, longer-lasting, communist takeover in 1948, more Hungarians left. After the crushed 1956 revolution, more important filmmakers left, including Vilmos Zsigmond, László Kovács, Jean Badal and Peter Medak. Following the amnesty of 1960, the cultural climate eased somewhat.
Nevertheless, despite the hardships of staying at home, some Hungarians received Academy Award nominations and in some cases the actual Award, István Szabó, Zsuzsa Böszörményi and co-winners Jászberényi, Perlaki and Priskin, and co-winners Imre Major and Csaba Kőhegyi in 2014. The first Hungarian to be nominated from Hungary was Tamás Czigány, for best short documentary in 1967.
The best-known Hungarian film to date is Mephisto, by István Szabó. It won an Academy Award in the category Best Foreign Language film. The year before, in 1980, The Fly, an animation by Rofusz, became the very first Hungarian film to receive an Academy Award. The Foreign Student Academy Award went to Zsuzsa Böszörményi. In 2010 the trio Márk Jászberényi, Tamás Perlaki and Gyula Priskin obtained the scientific and engineering award for Lustre, a software program to color-correct intermediates in real time, first used on The Lord of the Rings. In 2014, the same prize went to three Hungarians, Tibor Madjar, Imre Major and Csaba Kőhegyi. Up to 2018, ten films have been nominated in the category Best Foreign Language Film: four nominations to István Szabó, two to Zoltán Fábri and one each to Imre Gyöngyössy, Barna Kabay and Károly Makk, and On Body and Soul. Three films have been nominated for Best Short Animation. Cinematographer Lajos Koltai has been nominated for best cinematography in 2000. In 2016, Son of Saul won the second Best Foreign Language Film AA for Hungary. In 2017 Hungary won the best short feature category with Mindenki. In 2018, Hungary got its 10th nomination in the category Best Foreign Language Film for On Body and Soul by Ildikó Enyedi. The most successful film around 2019 is Eternal Winter by Atilla Szász. Those Who Remained was shortlisted for Best Foreign film 2020.