Dear Hungary,
Tonight you’re celebrating your birthday; you’ve turned 1,026. Fireworks bloom over the Danube, bells ring out from St. Stephen’s Basilica, and families break the new bread. I can almost smell the warm crust of the bread; I can almost hear the crowd gathering on the riverbank, even though I’m on the other side of the world. I’m still trying to learn how to live with the two halves of my heart, which were torn apart on the day I left you.
This is no longer the kind of distance I can simply bridge with a car trip, as I used to. It’s not about “three months here, three months there,” the way I used to live. Oceans and time zones separate us—a separation that has completely transformed my life.
When I see the photos online, it’s still morning here, but Budapest is already bathed in the evening lights. You’re celebrating, while I’m watching you from yesterday.
I remember standing there as a child, holding my father’s hand, and feeling the ground tremble to the sound of the fireworks. Back then, I thought they were just colors in the sky. Now I know they’re so much more than that: the desperate screams of memory, togetherness, and longing; the cries of pain and stubborn hope.
The pain I feel because of you is everywhere. It’s there in the tears that follow our phone calls, when your voice isn’t enough anymore, and I’d give anything for a hug—but it never comes. It’s there in the guilt I feel for leaving, for abandoning you, for not being happy, for not living up to expectations I never agreed to, and even in that strange sense of guilt I feel because, despite the pain, I’m managing just fine.
Last year, when I originally wrote this article, I said that despite all the sadness, I was grateful to be here and not there. 365 days later, I have to admit there were three times when I didn’t feel that way: when Ellise, my little puppy, died; when I received worrying news about my dad’s health; and in April, when the country was celebrating the results of the parliamentary election in a frenzy of euphoria. With a heart torn in two—that’s how I’ve been living ever since I moved away.
You can take the girl out of Hungary, but you can't take Hungary out of the girl.
You’re there in every sarcastic roll of the eyes when someone says a forced “amaaaazing.” You’re there on that hour-long trip just to have a spritzer with friends who know what a building superintendent is.
You’re right there in that instant camaraderie, in that special Hungarian magic where complete strangers can become family in the blink of an eye. I’d entrust my whole life to them simply because we come from the same tiny place on the other side of the ocean. Because somehow we just know. We carry the same pain. The same homesickness. The same complicated pride. The same language that makes us feel at home even when home is thousands of miles away.
And there you are, in this brutal contradiction: the almost euphoric joy that dances with my soul, and the all-consuming void. Tonight, both live within me. Both are true. This is what it means to be an emigrant: to live in contradiction, to carry both euphoria and ruin in the same breath, to build a life in one country while never truly leaving another behind. That’s why I left, and that’s why I’ve stayed away.
I'm right in the middle of this desperate, stubborn attempt to build a new home without erasing the old one.
You are there in every thought and every decision I make. You are there in every scar that still bleeds. You are there in my clenched teeth, in that sheer determination with which I pull myself back up from the ground, no matter how many times life knocks me down.
You raised me to be this way. To be someone who never gives up. A fighter. You also taught me to feel deeply—perhaps too deeply—to be sensitive, and somehow, at the same time, to be damn tough.
Tonight, as you fill the sky with light, I, too, am celebrating—with tears in my eyes, a tenuous hope, and a heart so full it hurts.
Happy birthday, my home, my love, my past, my wound, my witness, my miracle, my mistake.
I may not be there with you today, but you’re still here with me, inside me—in every breath, every bite, every scar, every victory, every misunderstood, sugar-coated American phrase, every answer that’s too blunt, every curse word that still sounds better in Hungarian, every single curse I say with a smile so they won’t have a clue what I just told them. You’re there in every meal that never tastes quite like home, in every instinctive urge to say what I think instead of wrapping it in three layers of politeness, in every dark joke at the worst possible moment, in every stubborn I'll figure it out—every time I refuse to stay grounded, every time I miss a place I once desperately wanted to leave. You’re there every time I choose an outdoor table, even when everyone else wants the air-conditioned one, every time I take off my shoes the moment I walk through the door, every time I curse at an American window, because for God’s sake, how can you design a window so that you can’t open it from the inside?
I keep running into you here on the other side of the world. Every time I secretly turn off the AC for a few minutes of relief before someone walks into the room and I have to go back to freezing. Every time I order my drink without ice, and they look at me as if I’d asked for something completely unreasonable. Every time I sniff a bottle of mineral water before taking my first sip. Every time I instinctively convert dollars to forints, then immediately regret it. Every time I complain that American bread isn’t really bread at all. Every time I see a loaf of bread labeled “European-style” and eye it suspiciously. Every time I think that walking for twenty minutes is perfectly normal, while someone else is already suggesting an Uber. Every time someone asks, “How are you?” and I have to remind myself that maybe they don’t actually want to know. Every time I answer a question honestly, when I clearly should have just said something superficial. Every time I say to myself, Enjoy your meal, because it still somehow feels wrong to eat without wishing everyone a good appetite. Every time paprika is treated as some kind of exotic spice instead of a staple food group. Every time I hear a Hungarian word somewhere in New York, and my head turns toward it before my brain even realizes why. Every time a Hungarian curse word slips out of my mouth because the English language simply lacks the necessary emotional range.
You keep popping up in the tiniest, silliest things—habits that I didn’t even realize were Hungarian until I left Hungary.
I find you in everything I encounter and in everyone. The other day, I saw a mother checking her little girl’s temperature on the street. For several minutes, she gently explained to her how the Withings thermometer would touch her forehead, that it would feel cool and might beep, but that everything was fine and there was nothing to be afraid of. I couldn’t help but think of how my own mother had tossed the mercury thermometer onto the bed and told me to take my temperature, but to be careful not to break it—because if I did, we’d all die.
Thank you, Hungary. Thank you for instilling in me this strength, this strength and tenacity that keeps me afloat even when this wild, bloody city does everything in its power to drown me. But it can’t. How could it, when it’s just Withings versus mercury?
HISTORY CLASS
Every nation has a day that is like a heartbeat. For Hungary, that day is August 20.
Today, my social media feeds are full of red, white, and green. The Parliament shining over the Danube. The fireworks reflecting on the water. With loaves of fresh bread, flags hanging from windows, and families gathering along the riverbank.
August 20 is often considered Hungary’s birthday, but Hungary didn’t just suddenly come into existence in the year 1000. Our history is older, more complex, stranger, and, in my opinion, much more beautiful than that. Before the Kingdom of Hungary, there were the Hungarians.
Before we built a country, we were looking for a home
Around 895–896, the Hungarian tribes—according to tradition, led by Grand Prince Árpád—moved into the Carpathian Basin and settled there. We Hungarians consider this The Conquest of the Homeland let's call it that. In English, it is often the Hungarian conquest of the Carpathian Basin, that is, it is translated as “the Hungarian conquest of the Carpathian Basin,” but the Hungarian word carries a meaning that the English translation cannot quite convey.
A home It means home, it means homeland. A reservation It means: to occupy, to take possession of, to claim as one's own. Taking possession of a homeland. The conquest of the Carpathian Basin did not mark the beginning of the Hungarian state; the state was founded about a century later.
First, we found a place we could call home; only later did we build a nation there. And like so many things in Hungarian history, the story of how we came to be there begins somewhere between history and legend. It begins with a deer.
The Deer We Never Caught
One of the oldest legends in Hungarian mythology is the Miracle Deer The story. In the legend, Hunor and Magor encounter a special stag and give chase.
The animal escapes from them time and time again, so they follow it farther and farther through unfamiliar landscapes, deeper and deeper into the unknown, constantly pursuing something they can see but can never quite reach. Although they never catch the deer, the chase leads them to a new homeland, and in the mythology surrounding the story, it marks the beginning of a people’s origins.
I've always felt there was something deeply Hungarian about this. I imagine that every Hungarian has a “Miracle Horn,” something mysterious just beyond the horizon that we're convinced we must follow.
A dream, a person, an opportunity, a place, a future, a life that doesn’t yet exist. Something that makes no sense to those who stand safely behind us, but to us, it makes just enough sense to pack up and set out.
Then we just keep going—through uncertainty, loss, and boundaries, through fire and water if we must—until we find it. Or, more precisely: until the search itself takes us somewhere where perhaps we were meant to be all along. This restless pursuit has always been part of who we are.
The people whom Europe has come to fear
After the Hungarians settled in the Carpathian Basin, their armies ventured far beyond its borders in the 10th century. Their cavalry tactics, speed, and archery skills earned them a fearsome reputation throughout Europe. There is a famous Latin phrase that generations of Hungarians have proudly repeated:
Deliver us, O Lord, from the Arrow of the Hungarians.
“Lord, save us from the arrows of the Hungarians.”
The phrase is generally considered to be a medieval European prayer that arose out of fear of Hungarian attacks. Although its exact origin is disputed, and there is no actual monastic prayer book to prove that Europeans begged God day after day to “save us from ourselves,” the legend has endured for good reason. By the 10th century, the presence of Hungarian armies in Europe was undeniable; Europe knew we had arrived.
However, for Europe to survive, something else was needed over time in addition to arrows: transformation.
895, not 1,000
This is where he enters the story Stephen I. Around 1000–1001, Stephen was crowned the first king of Hungary, and this is precisely the distinction that is often lost when we simply refer to August 20 as Hungary’s birthday: The conquest of the homeland gave the Hungarians a homeland. Stephen laid the foundations of the state for this homeland. He realized something that was perhaps uncomfortable, but brutally pragmatic: If the Hungarians wanted to survive in Christian Europe, we could not remain outsiders forever.
The arrows announced our arrival, but they could not guarantee our future.
By the turn of the millennium, Christianity meant much more than a matter of personal faith. It had become intertwined with legitimacy, diplomacy, alliances, law, and one’s place within the political order of medieval Europe. A pagan state, surrounded by increasingly consolidated Christian powers, found itself in a precarious position. Stephen chose integration; Hungary became a Christian kingdom. Whether the Hungarians were successfully transformed into enthusiastic European Christians overnight—well, that is quite another question.
The Hungarians arrived with their own beliefs, rituals, sacred traditions, and their own interpretation of the world. These did not simply vanish just because a king was crowned and ordered the construction of churches. Conversion to Christianity was a gradual, contentious, and, at times, unfortunately very violent process. Resistance continued, and Stephen took a hard line against challenges to the new order.
Culture has a peculiar characteristic: it refuses to disappear on command. Old beliefs have persisted alongside new ones, while customs have changed in name and meaning. Elements of earlier traditions became intertwined with Christian practices and, later, with Hungarian folklore. People are officially capable of changing their religion much more quickly than they are of changing their worldview.
I can't help but see something painfully Hungarian in this. We learned to say that very early on:
Okay. We understand the task.
We can learn the rules, wear the right clothes, go to church every Sunday, figure out what everyone expects us to say, we can smile politely enough to be invited back next time, and we might even be really good at fitting in—while somewhere deep inside, there will still be our incredibly specific, incredibly firm, and almost certainly unsolicited opinion on practically everything.
Of course, it would be unfair to simply call early Hungarian Christianity a sham. Conversion became a reality; Christianity took deep root and ultimately became inseparable from Hungarian history and identity. However, this transformation did not happen overnight; it was a process of adaptation, and adaptation is not the same as eradication.
Our first king understood that survival sometimes requires us to learn the language of the world around us without completely forgetting our own. More than a thousand years later, living in America, I understand this compromise surprisingly well. I know how to say that “That’s amazing!”, but at the same time, I know exactly what I think of it in Hungarian.
Stephen On August 15, 1038 died. Forty-five years later, In 1083 He was canonized. August 20 was linked to the feast day of St. Stephen, and centuries later, it grew into something even greater: the national holiday of Hungary itself.
So, while the homeland is older, the state that Stephen helped establish is now more than a thousand years old. And when you consider what has happened over the course of those thousand years, August 20 takes on a whole new significance.
Because founding Hungary was one thing, But keeping it is a whole different story.
History has tried time and time again to break us
Hungarian history is no gentle tale. In 1241–1242 The Mongol invasion ravaged the Kingdom of Hungary.
In 1526, Hungary suffered a catastrophic defeat at the Battle of Mohács. King Louis II died, leading to the collapse of the medieval Hungarian kingdom and the subsequent Ottoman conquest, as a result of which Hungarian territories were divided among rival powers. For approximately 150 years, a significant portion of Central Hungary remained under Ottoman rule. This was followed by centuries of Habsburg rule, marked by ongoing conflicts over Hungarian autonomy and independence.
In 1848 The Hungarians rose up again. The The Revolution and War of Independence of 1848–49 It was ultimately crushed by Russian military intervention, but the idea survived.
Then came the twentieth century, bringing with it World War I and the Treaty of Trianon on June 4, 1920. This peace treaty drastically redrew Hungary’s borders, and the country lost approximately two-thirds of its pre-war territory. As a result, millions of Hungarians found themselves outside the new borders; many woke up one day to find themselves in a different country without having taken a single step.
Then came another world war—the Holocaust—during which hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews were murdered, and Budapest lay in ruins.
The next era was marked by the Soviet occupation and communist rule. In October 1956, the Hungarians rose up once again. For a brief moment, it seemed that victory was within reach, but Soviet tanks soon arrived. The uprising claimed the lives of thousands of people, and even more were imprisoned or persecuted. Approximately 200,000 Hungarians fled abroad—another generation crossed the borders, leaving their homeland behind and carrying the memory of Hungary with them to other places.
In 1989 The communist regime finally came to an end, and Hungary once again became a republic.
Parts of the country were occupied, partitioned, reclaimed, lost, renamed, and rebuilt; revolutions have failed, empires have collapsed around us, people have passed away, and yet, somehow, despite all this, this small Central European country still exists. It still speaks this strange, beautiful language, which bears little resemblance to the languages spoken around it.
We still have our food, our songs, our stories, our complicated last names, our dark humor, our paprika, our researchers, our stubbornness, and our talent for complaining about everything—all while immediately getting defensive whenever a foreigner criticizes Hungary.
A particularly difficult chapter in this thousand-year history came much later. After centuries of fearing enemies who arrived on horseback, crossed our borders, or marched into Budapest in tanks, Hungary had to face an even harsher reality: a nation’s greatest threat does not always come from outside, but grows from within.
Viktor Orbán previously served as prime minister from 1998 to 2002, then returned to power in 2010. This time, he has remained in office for sixteen consecutive years. Sixteen years is long enough for a child to be born and grow up knowing only one leader of his or her country—as my own son has experienced.
Long enough for abnormal things to start seeming normal. Orbán and Fidesz, which initially held a two-thirds majority in parliament, rewrote Hungary’s constitution, amended the electoral rules and the institutional framework, and created what Orbán himself called an “illiberal democracy.”
Over time, both domestic and international critics reported a weakening of institutional checks and balances, judicial independence, media pluralism, and democratic principles. An extensive pro-government media network has emerged. Hungary has become embroiled in increasingly serious disputes with the European Union over the rule of law and corruption, leading to the freezing of several billion euros in EU funds.
Orbán and his supporters, on the other hand, told a completely different story: they portrayed Orbán as a defender of Hungarian sovereignty, Christianity, families, and national identity against Brussels, migration, and liberal cultural influence. They consistently rejected claims that Hungary was corrupt or undemocratic.
This division has become a defining part of what these years have done to us. Families have argued, friends have avoided conversations about politics, and people have learned which topics are safe to bring up at the dinner table. A country that had fought external enemies for centuries had grown weary of internal conflict. It is difficult to describe these sixteen years in purely political terms; rather, it felt as if the nation were reliving its traumas. In a country that for centuries had been told time and again whom to fear, new enemies were once again being pointed out.
Brussels. Migrants. Liberals. NGOs. George Soros. LGBTQ people accused of waiting outside kindergartens to persuade children to undergo gender transition. Anyone who could conveniently be linked to the other side. They. We. Fear is an extremely effective political tool in a nation with deep-rooted historical fears, and Hungary has paid a heavy price for this.
The impact goes beyond financial, economic, or institutional consequences—it also has psychological implications. Trust has been eroded, and our relations with our European partners have deteriorated.
Independent institutions were weakened, while people watched as wealth rapidly concentrated in the hands of figures linked to political circles, even as hospitals, schools, and public services struggled with ongoing difficulties. Over the years, many Hungarians became convinced that change was impossible; this sense of helplessness has perhaps become the most dangerous legacy we have carried with us.
Fortunately, in April 2026, we proved once again that we are capable of taking decisive action when enough of us say, “Enough is enough.” Voter turnout was unprecedented. Péter Magyar’s Tisza Party won a landslide victory, securing 141 of the 199 seats in parliament—exceeding the two-thirds majority required for significant constitutional changes. After sixteen years in power, Viktor Orbán was finally ousted. He conceded defeat, and Hungary changed course.
I watched from New York, and I don’t think I’ll ever forget how it felt. The very same people who had been told for years that resistance was futile went out to vote and proved that it wasn’t. It would be hard to imagine a more fitting continuation of our history than this. We rise up, we’re crushed, we mourn, we complain—my God, we complain so much—we come to the conclusion that everything is hopeless, and then, almost exactly at the moment when history tempts us to give up for good, we get back on our feet. Since the elections, Hungary has been engaged in the less spectacular work of rebuilding.
Rebuilding a democracy takes a long time.
The new government inherited an institutional system shaped during sixteen years of Fidesz rule, an economy that had been stagnating for years, deteriorated relations with our European partners that needed to be repaired, EU funds totaling several billion euros tied to reforms related to the rule of law, and the enormous task of investigating how public funds and government contracts were used. The previous government’s contracts are still under investigation, while the new administration promises anti-corruption measures, greater judicial independence, the restoration of media freedom, and a return to European standards. Mistakes and controversies are to be expected, because there is one thing that no Hungarian government will ever be able to eliminate: our nation’s unwaveringly strong opinions on practically everything.
No single election can heal a country on its own, but Hungary doesn’t need magic. We’ve been through enough to know that recovery is rarely a miracle—it’s more often the result of hard work.
It means that we will honestly confront what has happened, save what can still be saved, rebuild our institutions and relationships, and learn to trust again. Over time, we will reestablish our place among our European neighbors—not by sacrificing our Hungarian identity, but by understanding that solidarity and sovereignty can coexist peacefully and are not destined to be at odds with one another.
István understood this more than a thousand years ago.
Hungary does not thrive through isolation, but by knowing who it is and finding its place in the world. This year’s celebration of August 20 feels particularly significant because, in 2026, the founding of the Hungarian state will be more than just a simple chapter in ancient history. For the first time in a long while, it feels as though we are once again asking ourselves the question:
What kind of country do we want to build?
More than a thousand years after Stephen, the Hungarians were once again given the opportunity to respond.
And that truly gives me a sense of strength and hope.
After all that history has done to us—and after all that we have, at times, done to ourselves—We continue to chase our own "Miracle Deer," and time and again we decide to build our home, no matter the cost.
About me
Hi, I’m Nóra Árvai, a clinical health psychologist, health communication specialist, and PhD researcher in the field of medical foresight. I’ve been working with women living with chronic illnesses for over 16 years, particularly those affected by endometriosis and infertility. Through more than 28,000 consultation hours, I’ve learned one thing for sure: reliable knowledge, the right support, and a strong community can truly change lives.
Over the past few years, I have written 14 books and published thousands of articles, and I have made it my mission to present the latest scientific findings in an accessible way to women who want to take back control of their own health.
I currently live in New York so I can do research, but my heart still beats for my Hungarian patients.
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