Culture in Hungary

Seminar paper from the year 2007 in the subject Cultural Studies - East European Studies, grade: A, The Emirates Academy (The Emirates Academy), course: Cult 201, language: English, abstract: Even though Hungary is often described as an Eastern European country, in fact, it is situated inthe Carpathian Basin in Central Europe. Its capital is Budapest. The Republic of Hungary, as it iscalled officially, borders Austria, Slovenia, Romania, Ukraine, Serbia, Croatia, and Slovakia. The national language is Hungarian (Magyar), a tongue, which is unique in the whole world. Although it is part of the Finno-Ugric family of languages, Finnish or Estonians and Magyars arenot able to understand each other. Until today it s not clear where these people originally camefrom. It can be assumed that they arrived somewhere from Asia. In history Hungary has survivedseveral invasions, emerging empires and devastation of the Turks, the Tartars, the Habsburgs andthe Russian. During those periods, the country went through various forms of governments, fromKingdom between 1000 and approximately 1900 to Communistic nation, beginning with the endof World War II until 1989, when the Iron Curtain fell on the border to Austria and the EasternBloc collapsed. Today s governmental form is a Parliamentary Republic. Hungarian people havea very strong bound towards their religious beliefs. 68 % of those who declare religiousaffiliation are Roman Catholic, 21 % Reformed (Calvinist) Protestants and 6 % LutheranProtestants. Jewish now form a very small part of the Hungarian population, resulting frompersecution during the Third Reich. There also exist a small number of Greek Catholic andOrthodox believers as well as Muslims. Like in other countries, Catholic culture in Hungarytends toward particularistic ethics in terms of absolute values. Geert Hofstede, a Dutch researcher, carried out a study of how values in the work place areaffected by culture in order to evaluate their attitude and for avoiding misunderstandings in termsof business making and intercultural collaboration.