This is the script for my video posted on October 16, 2026. Watch it on TikTok.
The Hungarian language is more closely related to languages spoken in Western Siberia than to any other language in Europe, including its distant cousins Finnish and Estonian. Hungarians are culturally distinct too. But why is Hungary so different from its neighbors, and what impact does it have on geopolitics?
The story starts in the southern Ural Mountains of modern Russia, where the early Magyars, which is what Hungarians call themselves, lived as a semi-nomadic people on the grassy steppe. By the late 9th century, most of them had migrated southwest to a region north of the Black Sea called Etelköz, in modern Ukraine.
There, they had alliances and rivalries with neighboring groups like the Khazars and the Bulgarians. But around 894 CE the Turkic Pecheneg people had been pushed out of their own homelands by rival Turkic tribes.
Seeking new pasture, the Pechenegs migrated toward lands occupied by the Magyars, who were at war with the First Bulgarian Empire. The main Magyar army was away in Bulgaria fighting on behalf of the Byzantines, so the Bulgarian ruler Simeon allied with the Pechenegs, and together they took advantage of this to drive the Magyars out.
But for years leading up to this, Magyar horsemen had fought as mercenaries in distant lands, and they were familiar with a region of Central Europe called the Carpathian Basin. The basin was divided between Bulgaria, the Germanic Eastern Franks, and Great Moravia, and in many ways it mimicked the terrain of the steppe they came from.
Under the leadership of chieftains like Árpád, the Magyars crossed into the basin around 895 CE, knowing it was contested between different regional powers and that none of these held a firm grip.
The Magyar mounted archers used powerful recurve bows, and their stirrups allowed them to rise in the saddle and fire arrows even while riding away from an enemy. With their mercenary experience and false retreat tactics, the Magyars conquered the basin within a few years, and because the Carpathian Mountains ringed it to the north and east, they had some natural protection at their backs.
This is how the Magyars came to Central Europe. But interestingly, they weren’t the first steppe people to rule the basin, since the Huns and the Avars had both built empires there before them. There’s a reason though for why we don’t see a Hunnic or Avar state between Austria and Romania today, and why their languages aren’t spoken in the region today.
The Huns and the Avars had ran polities of their own, but these collapsed after wars with their neighbors, long before the Magyars arrived. Their associated ethnic groups began to meld with others and adopt other languages to assimilate. Meanwhile, the Magyars converted to Christianity, and the kingdom used Latin for writing and law while Hungarian remained the language of its ruling class and its heartland. That’s a big part of why Hungarian survived, even though the conquerors were outnumbered and their genes eventually blended into the local population.
Interestingly, though, ancient DNA studies published between 2022 and 2025 show that while the conquering Magyar elite really did trace much of their ancestry to the southern Urals, they were outnumbered by the people already living in the basin. Over the following centuries their genes were diluted until they made up less than a tenth of the modern Hungarian gene pool, but their language won out. So most Hungarians today are genetically Central European, yet they speak a language their ancestors’ rulers brought from the Urals.
The Hungarian kingdom ironically later absorbed other steppe groups like the Pechenegs who had originally forced them out of Etelköz. Geography didn’t keep Hungary safe, though. The Mongols poured through the mountain passes in 1241, and the Ottomans later occupied much of the country for about 150 years. Through all of it, Hungarians held onto their identity despite being surrounded by other languages and ethnic groups on all sides.
Hungary has an incredibly rich and complex history, and I’d be doing it a disservice to try to cover more of that history here. But these very old dynamics, and the way Hungarians remember them, still shape the country’s affairs today.
For one thing, Hungary has often considered itself singular and alone, and over the centuries it has faced invaders from nearly every direction. After being driven off the steppe, the Hungarians built a kingdom that ruled the entire Carpathian Basin for centuries. Then the Treaty of Trianon after World War One stripped it of nearly three-quarters of its territory. That left about a third of all ethnic Hungarians outside the country’s new borders.
This has led to a lot of camaraderie among ethnic Hungarians, including those in countries like Romania, Slovakia, Serbia, and Ukraine. It has also made the Hungarian government protective of Magyars in other parts of the world, leading to strong nationalist sentiments and, until recently when Viktor Orban left power, a dominating political belief that Hungary should look out for itself, even if that meant working against its own allies.
Not all Hungarians were happy with Viktor Orban’s disruptive nationalist stance. In April 2026, he was finally voted out after 16 straight years in power. He was replaced by Péter Magyar, a former insider in Orban’s own party who ran on a pro-European and anti-corruption platform. The Tisza Party won a two-thirds supermajority, and Hungary has quickly moved back toward the West diplomatically, though breaking its heavy dependence on Russian oil and gas will take much longer.
But Péter Magyar is still a conservative leader with a populist streak. In practice this means that he ultimately puts the interests of Hungary and Hungarians first. That’s why he only unblocked Ukraine’s EU membership talks once Ukraine strengthened the rights of its Hungarian minority. Most Hungarians are well aware of just how different they are from their neighbors, but this election suggests they believe that doesn’t mean they can’t work together toward a common good.
Keep reading
- Is Russia weaponizing Russians in the Baltics?
- How did the Basques beat Spain without leaving it?
- Why does Wales still speak Welsh when Ireland stopped speaking Irish?
I’m writing a book called Groundwork about the buried history beneath geopolitics. Join the waitlist to hear when it has a publisher, a cover, and a release date.