Hungarian Anniversaries: Facing Both Ways

Paul Dukes explores some of Hungary’s turbulent history and culture dating back to the thirteenth century.

Down the Danube from Vienna 150 miles or so, you arrive in Hungary's capital Budapest (Buda on the left bank, Pest on the right, formally united in1873). The Iron Curtain here is paper thin: citizens of Austria and Finland may visit without a visa, and Western tourists can acquire one easily enough, even on arrival. Hungary is landlocked by its immediate neighbours: her frontiers, have varied enormously over the centuries – a circumstance not easy for those long accustomed to unchanging boundaries at home to grasp.

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