This frontier area between the Austrian Empire and a still powerful Ottoman Empire holding the Balkans filled with immigrants, becoming a melting pot of nationalities, and Greeks fleeing the Ottoman Empire formed part of this mélange. I had the great pleasure of living in Budapest for one semester in college, in the fall of 1990. As usual, I sought out Hellenism.

Greek immigration to Hungary in these years after the reconquest from the Turks was a part of a larger Orthodox outflow from the Balkans into the Hungarian plain. The largest element was the Serbian, natural given the Serbs’ proximity to Hungary, but Greeks, particularly merchants, made up a sizeable part of the Orthodox immigration. Also, at the time, it was not uncommon for Roman Catholics to refer to all Balkan Orthodox as Greeks, or Romioi (Byzantine), so the underlying ethnicity of the immigrants was often confused. Further, at the time, national identity was a fluid concept, and many Serbs or (especially) Bulgarians became Hellenized, or Greeks Serbianized. In Hungary, particularly the areas bordering Serbia, which now form Serbia’s Vojvodina province, the Greeks typically assimilated into the Serbian community.

Further north, Greek merchants and artisans established their communities, and prospered through the growth of trade. Greeks were particularly well represented in commerce with the Ottoman Empire, but also in the wine trade. There is speculation that vintners from Macedonia initially planted Hungary’s most famous wine, Tokaj. I found the wine quite similar to a sweet wine made by a Greek friend from the island of Evia. Who knows? Certainly the city of Tokaj had a large Greek population, and their mansions, wineries, and churches are tourist attractions to this day. In the late 1700s, the colloquial Hungarian term for merchant was Gorog (Greek).

In the twin cities of Buda and Pest, Greek merchants built a grand cathedral which still graces a side street off Budapest’s main shopping drag, Vaci Utca (Vaci Street). Here the officially titled “Eastern Orthodox Cathedral” expresses its past prestige and wealth, and its current, more down-at-heel status, in a fading splendor. One of its two bell towers is missing, a victim of street fighting at the end of World War Two. When I visited this church, as a student in Budapest, during the winter of 1990, I found it near empty. I spoke to the priest in Greek, and I found that his Greek was as elementary as my Hungarian. Speaking in a mixture of the two languages, his message was clear: “This was a Greek church, now it is Hungarian. We are Orthodox Hungarians.” That said, the Ecumenical Patriarch runs this and three other Orthodox churches as part of the Exarchate of Hungary.

Another town, just north of Budapest, presented a different picture, Szentendre (St. Andrew) founded by Greek, Serb, Romanian, and Bulgarian immigrants, remains self-consciously Orthodox and Balkan, though the architecture is thoroughly Austro-Hungarian. Several Orthodox churches operate, lovely baroque structures, and the museum boasts of the town’s eclectic Balkan heritage. A half hour from Budapest, Szentendre benefits greatly from the capital’s tourist boom, and the artsy atmosphere has turned it into a hip address. When I lived in Budapest, I knew it “before it was cool,” and when its Orthodox heritage was its biggest draw.

Hungarians are a lively, randy bunch, but in Szentendre the panache was of a type farther south, that of Serbia or Greece, a deeper café culture, a slightly oriental curvature to the streets and the figures-or so it seemed to a romantic 20 year old! In fact, the town very much reminds me of Sombor, the Serbian city where we currently live. Here too, this formerly Hungarian town has a delightful mixture of East and West, of Serb and Hungarian, with the Orthodox Serb, a relative of the Greek, in the cultural ascendant, in an architectural setting recalling the best of Vienna and Budapest. It is a delightful mix.

These Orthodox communities recalled an old immigration, where most of their descendents now called themselves Hungarians, but the Greek element in the country received an additional, recent, sedimentation after the Greek Civil War ended, in 1949. Tens of thousands of Greek Communist refugees, willing or unwilling, were scattered throughout Eastern Europe in the wake of the Communists’ defeat. Many ended up in Hungary, including the founders of the village of Beloiannisz, named after the Greek Communist hero Nikos Beloyiannis. The village’s Greek majority faded in the 1960s and 1970s, as the Greeks repatriated or moved to nearby Budapest. Little distinguishes this hamlet from others built in the Communist era, the same bad concrete, functional tastelessness predominates, in stark contrast to pre-Communist architecture, delightfully Austrian with rustic use of wood and stone. The only ethnic marker in the village is an Orthodox Church, built in the Byzantine style in the 1990s, largely financed by Greeks from Austria and Germany.

All of the Greek immigrants, including the recent Civil War era wave, have dissolved to one extent or another into the ethnic mélange of the Hungarian nation. The evidence is still there, for those interested in finding the Hellenic heritage that helped to build today’s Hungary. As a Greek-American student majoring in Balkan History, Hungary provided plenty of reminders of my heritage, and served as an introduction to Serbia, another child of Byzantium, where we currently live.