Hungary is a country located in Central Europe, northwest of Romania. Other countries bordering Hungary are Ukraine, Slovakia, Austria, Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, and Romania. It has a total land area of 93,030 square kilometers, and is about the size of the state of Indiana.
The government is a parliamentary democracy, having a president, a prime minister, and a Council of Ministers who serve as a Cabinet. There is also a unicameral National Assembly and a Constitutional Court.
The population of Hungary is 9,956,108 (estimated as of July 2007). Hungarians are the largest ethnic group (92 percent), followed by Roma (1.9 percent), and other nationalities (5.8 percent, as of the 2001 census).
Hungarian is spoken by 93.6 percent of the population, and other languages are spoken by 6.4 percent (2001 census). There are a number of religious traditions represented, with Roman Catholic being the largest (51.9 percent), Calvinist (15.9 percent), Lutheran (3 percent), Greek Catholic (2.6 percent), and the remainder various other religious traditions. This distribution reflects the history of Hungary, which was an independent Christian kingdom as of 1000 AD, and which fought against the incursion of the Ottoman Empire into Europe for centuries thereafter.
Hungary became part of the Hapsburg in the 16th century. After the Second World War, it was a Communist-dominated country called the Hungarian People’s Republic, which was established in 1949. After an attempted revolt in 1956, which was quashed by the Soviet Union, it remained under Communist influence until it established democratic reforms and amended its constitution in October 1989. These reforms culminated in the first multiparty elections in 1990. It joined NATO in 1999 and the European Union in 2004.
Hungary is famous for its rich cuisine and wines, and for the cowboy tradition, a feature of its mostly flat countryside.
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