Scenes from Budapest: Hungary's Heroes

Lots of triumphal architecture celebrating great military victories and devastating losses. This gigantic square does both in recognizing 12 heroes in Hungarian history.

The Magyar tribes (Hungarians) arrived in the Carpathian Basin from the east, perhaps east of the Ural Mountains or through areas of Turkey, sometime around 830 AD. Their language is related to Finnish and Estonian, but none would recognize any cognates in the other language. There are 13 million Hungarian speakers, with 10 million in Hungary and the rest in neighboring countries. It's a landlocked country, ringed by mountains, so they have been limited in their reach. But by other measures, they have also been astonishing in their reach.