Alföld (Nagyalföld) The Great (Hungarian) Plain; the wide expanse of lowlands which stretches from the Danube (->Duna) at the point where it turns south at ->Esztergom to the mountains of Transylvania (->Erdély) to the east and south-east; it is further divided by the river ->Tisza; since ->Petőfi, who was born here, this "boundless", grassy prairie is considered a romantic terrain, the symbolic abode of "unfettered liberty" galloping on horseback, which the landscape painters of the 19th century turned, once and for all, into the quintessence of the Hungarian landscape, thereby making the galloping herds of the ->Hortobágy, the whip-cracking wrangler (->csikós) and the incessantly "bobbing" shadoof or pole-well an in- dispensable prop of the landscape; this is how the sparsely populated lowlands (->puszta) and the small, isolated homestead—not to mention the storks nestling atop the chimneys—became the pictorial stereotype of all of Hungary which, the more outrageously outdated it became with time, was imbued with that much more sentimentalism, until it became confined to the realm of tourist publicity and the maudlin lyrics of Hungarian songs (->magyar nóta). Still, the people of the Alföld's open spaces (less densely populated than Transdanubia), though they may not be more "Magyar" than the rest of the country's populace, really are different in many ways, not only because of their history but, first and foremost, because urbanization has not yet wreaked havoc with their lives.

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Bécs Vienna; for centuries, the conventional first stop for Hungarians headed for the West (->Nyugat), an all too familiar, admired, envied and despised city, seen as arrogant and supercilious, but also the tempting source of all things luxurious and aristocratic, the embodiment of the world "outside", barely a day's carriage ride on a dusty highway, yet a distant and unreachable ideal for Hungarians outside the gates in the confines of their penurious existence, but (for centuries) also the burial ground of the country's hopes. When with the Dual Monarchy (->Monarchia), Budapest became the distant co-capital of the proud Imperial City (1867), Vienna suddenly went from an ideal to a rival, a sister city and the nearby home of relatives, where one would "go up" for a short weekend visit; later, the Iron Curtain turned it into the hopelessly distant city of one's dreams, where only a lucky few could go who (provided that a miracle happened) and they did not defect but came back with incredible stories of a cornucopia of riches, elegance and modern technology. To this day ->Budapest still continues to compare itself to Vienna (believing that it is much more lively and interesting, and intellectually more stimulating than its neighbour, which has become too staid, petit bourgeois and provincial due to the good life, not to mention annoyingly conceited); still, while Vienna is no longer the yardstick of real success, but New York, when they hanker after something special, Hungarians still go to Vienna to shop.

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Erdély Transylvania; during the Middle Ages a domain "beyond the woods" (hence its name), and in Antiquity much of it the Roman province of Dacia (for a short time), it was a distant and isolated province of the Hungarian kingdom alternatively ruled by crown princes and vajdas (a vajda being something like a marquis), until the Turks (->törökök) occupied the central parts of the country, as a result of which the unoccupied eastern counties of the Great Plain (->Alföld) and Transylvania proper organized themselves into an independent principality, electing a prince (but not a king!) to rule over them, who appeased as best he could the two great warring empires, the ->Habsburgs (i.e., the legitimate kings of Hungary) and the Turkish Sultan (to whom they paid taxes); in this way, for a hundred and fifty years Transylvania became the "lesser Hungary", until, with the defeat of the Turks, the Habsburgs inherited it, but without uniting it with the mother country, and it continued as a separate principality until the Compromise of 1867 (->Kiegyezés); the 1920 Peace Treaty of Versailles (->Trianon) annexed not only the counties predominantly inhabited by Romanians, but also ->Székelyföld, which to this day is almost exclusively Hungarian-speaking—not to mention the western part of the principality (also predominantly Hungarian-speaking at the time)—to Romania (which together are greater in area than present-day Hungary), as a result of which, even after hundreds of thousands fled Transylvania, two million Hungarians found themselves Romanian citizens, while Transylvania itself became a kind of mythical Atlantis of the "mainland" Hungarians.

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temetés funeral; the dead are usually laid in state (in a closed coffin) either in the cemetery chapel (if there is one), or else in a building of the cemetery set aside for this purpose; this is where friends and relatives can take their farewell from the deceased, and this is where (official) speeches are made, and possibly where the first half of religious rites are held, which continue at the graveside after someone (such as a close friend) says a farewell speech as the mourners stand around the open grave; the mourners may even sing, but not necessarily a religious song; it can be anything deemed worthy of the deceased, even the National Anthem (->Himnusz), if they feel it suits the occasion; for small funerals, the officiating clergyman may do most of this alone, with two or three members of the church choir helping the mourners through the hymns. Strange as it may seem, during the past hundred years of Hungarian history, many a funeral became a political rite of symbolic significance (e.g.: the poet ->Vörösmarty's funeral of 1855 was also the first silent protest in wake of the defeat in the War of Independence, or ->Szabadságharc), as well as being a part of some major political change; the 1896 funeral of ->Lajos Kossuth, who died in exile, was the occasion for the defiant show of strength by groups protesting against the Dual Monarchy (->Osztrák-Magyar Monarchia); in 1903, the return of the ashes of the 18th century Transylvanian (->Erdély) rebel prince ->Rákóczi, and others exiled with him, followed by his burial in Kassa (now KosŠice, Slovakia), was the last great pageant of historic Hungary (->történelmi Magyarország); the 1919 funeral of ->Endre Ady, who brought Hungarian poetry into the 20th century, turned into a premature celebration of the new republic; the revolution of 1956 (->forradalom, 1956) had as a prelude the reactions of the crowd gathered for the reburial of ->László Rajk, who had been sentenced to death at an infamous show trial, and others who shared his fate; the 1989 reburial of Imre Nagy, the Prime Minister of the ->Revolution (1956), and the others executed along with him was held on the anniversary of the day of their execution, and signalled the forthcoming demise of the regime (->rendszerváltás) and offering the first, communal taste of political freedom to the huge crowd filling Budapest's Heroes' Square on that day.