Culture

The collection of interactive figures provides up-to-date information on the latest domestic and international socio-economic trends. The decisive part of the figures included in HCSO Monitor are downloadable in both image and data formats (PNG, SVG and CSV). Feel free to browse the data in HCSO Monitor, updated many times a week!

About 16 thousand works (books and brochures) have been published in 2023, the number of issues came close to 37 million. Every third volume was written by a foreign author. In case of cinemas, the number of those with one auditorium decreased, the larger ones and open-air cinema numbers grew in five years. The number of seats tend to concentrate in the 8 or more auditorium multiplexes; these represented 34% in 2019 and by 2023 gave 41% of the total capacity of cinemas in Hungary.

On the initiative of violinist Yehudi Menuhin UNESCO declared 1 October the International Music Day in 1975. Wherever we may live on the Earth, music is part of our everyday life. Concerts and festivals attract crowds, accessing music content, however, underwent a significant change compared to the turn of the millennium. Digital options, the internet, replacing vinyl records and tape cassettes in a great extent, transformed the music industry; the AI appearance in turn is going to generate further significant shifts.

Discover Hungary’s Olympic medallist athletes with our mapping application. On the interactive interface you can learn about all Hungarian Olympic athletes who won medals between 1896 and 2024. With the 2024 Paris Games finished, a total of 740 Hungarian athletes obtained Olympic medals at Summer Olympics. Browse by athlete, branch of sport and birthplace, and find out more about their successes. Olympic athletes born not in the area of today’s Hungary were assigned to the settlement where their club is/was located. You can make queries and charts, customised according to your sphere of interest.

The Literacy Day, initiated by UNESCO, is celebrated since every year on 8 September, in order to draw attention to the importance of reading and writing skills. In Hungary 44% of the adult population was reading on a regular basis or occasionally in 2023. The number of bookstores is decreasing year after year, the similar turnover trend at libraries – following the setback caused by the Covid pandemic – reversed and started to grow in 2022 and 2023, still, it did not reach the 2019 level.

The yearbook provides an overview of Hungary's demographic, social and economic processes, environmental characteristics and their changes over time, with the help of tens of thousands of data of 500 tables, graphs and maps. Innovatively, the Tourism, catering chapter in the volume includes the gross receipts of tourist accommodation establishments by type of accommodation. Another change is that this year the Regional data chapter already presents territorial data by tourism area, giving greater emphasis to tourist destinations.

In 1896, the first modern Olympic Games attracted 241 athletes, mostly Greeks. The number of Olympians increased steadily, only falling back from the previous competition when the tournament was held outside Europe. The number of athletes passed the 10 thousand mark in 1996 and, in the interests of sustainability, the International Olympic Committee is limiting the number of athletes from 2020.

In the first Olympics, the male athletes of the host countries still competed mainly. From the 1920s onwards, the Olympics became a truly international sporting event: the number of athletes grew to thousands, and the proportion of athletes from the host countries mostly barely reached 10 per cent. The number of Olympians exceeded 10 thousand in 1996, but only a third of them were women. The number of competitors has risen minimally over the past three decades, but in the 2020s, half of the participants were women.

It was in 1958 that the Union of European Football Associations launched the continent championship, bearing the name European Nations’ Cup in the beginning, and matches of the four-team final phase were organised in France in 1960. The number of participants in the tournament renamed European Championship in 1968 was raised time after time, first to 8, after that to 16 and then to the present-day 24 teams. 33 national teams have qualified at least once for the 16 tournaments organised so far, and 10 teams have won the cup, the Germans and the Spaniards doing so most often (both 3 times).

The tables and graphs in the latest edition of the Statistical Pocketbook of Hungary provide a comprehensive insight into the evolution of social and economic trends in Hungary in 2023. Its international chapter allows for comparisons of major data primarily on member states of the European Union. The publication amasses, starting this year, commercial, private and other accommodation establishments in one unit.

Hungarian motion picture and filmmakers are celebrated on 30 April since 2018. The first Hungarian motion picture shots were released on 30 April 1901 at the Urania Hungarian Scientific Theatre. Béla Zsitkovszky’s work, A táncz (The Dance) was an illustration for a history of dance presentation. Shots featured the most popular actors of the time. The two-hour long production was a great success, running for more than ten years. Although those recordings have been lost, photos taken during the shooting still exist.

Datasets from the Dissemination Database regarding settlements and Budapest’s districts have been updated with 2022 data, as such settlement and district related data for 2022 are available since 31 August, concerning, among others, data on cinemas.