The ancient Magyars had a flourishing Eastern pagan culture trend that showed in his stories, art and popular music. After conversion to Christianity in the tenth century culture and Western social forms displaced the pagan and Eastern cultural items, and Latin became the official language and literature. From the fifteenth to the twentieth century Hungary has often been considered the bastion of Western civilization protector, because, unlike the cultures outside its eastern boundary, had absorbed many Western influences. During the fifteenth century many artists who were influenced by Italian Renaissance humanist allowed to enter the country and in the sixteenth century during the Reformation, the vernacular replaced Latin.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth Hungary absorbed the French Enlightenment and Western European liberalism. Hungarian literature enjoyed high self-development. The so-called ’school in the west’ which favored the mixture of Hungarian cultural elements and modern Western culture were dominant in the twentieth century. After WWII, the communist regime tried to overlay the Soviet cultural forms in the country.
Hungary has over 5,000 public libraries, the largest of which is the National Library Széchényi in Budapest, founded in 1802, contains 2.4 million books and 4.2 million other documents. Other important libraries, all in Budapest, is the National Archives, the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and the Library of Parliament.
In addition to regional and municipal public libraries, Hungary has libraries and scientific unions.
Major museums in Hungary are the Hungarian National History Museum, which contains collections that run through the history of society and culture since the ninth century Hungarians, the Hungarian Museum of Fine Arts and the Hungarian National Museum of Natural History. All are located in Budapest. In the rest of the country there are over 100 public museums.
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