The first public celebrations of nationhood in Hungary occurred in the late 18th century in a feudal-dynastic context. In 1790, after the coronation of the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold II, the “Holy Crown” of Hungary was decreed to be moved to the Castle of Buda. The nobility of Hungary saw this act as an acknowledgement of Hungary’s constitutional autonomy within the Empire; the Crown was conveyed from Vienna to Buda in great baroque grandeur. The poet, translator, and language reformer Ferenc Kazinczy (1759–1831), present at its arrival in Buda as a member of its symbolic guards, saw the event as the birth of a “free nation” with “its own laws, language, and dress”.

Along with similar dynastic celebrations, early 19th-century festivals of national culture were also attached to feudal ceremonies. The Helicon Festivals, held in 1817-19 on the estate of Count György Festetics in Keszthely, were held on the king’s birthday during the exam period at the Georgikon, a college of agriculture founded by the count. They culminated in the dedication of memorial trees and awards given to Hungarian authors. The Marczibányi Prize, based on the fund that Count István Marczibányi had bequeathed to the county of Pest, was awarded from 1817 to reward scholarship in the fields of law, history, or philosophy improving the Hungarian language. The awards ceremony, which some contemporaries called the “celebration of the Hungarian language”, was held in the garden of the National Museum.

While these festivals signalled the increasing an increasing public cultural consciousness, they equally celebrated their sponsors. A new, Romantic type of literary festival arose in 1843 with the celebration, in Pest, of Sándor Kisfaludy (1772–1844) – a former officer in the Napoleonic Wars, author of a Petrarchan songbook (1801) and of a volume of historical ballads (Regék a magyar előidőből, “Sagas from old Hungarian history”, 1807). Since Kisfaludy himself was not present, his glorification, initiated by a handful of young Romantics, became a celebration of the general idea of national culture. By honouring the poet and the historical memories his works evoked, the Kisfaludy celebrations upheld literature as the emanation of a transcendental national spirit. In a similar fashion, the 1859 Kazinczy centenary, marked by parades and banquets across the country, was also modelled on the rhetoric and iconography of sacral cults – and in obvious competition with the Schiller commemorations held that same year.

A similar overlapping of religious, political, and cultural features can be witnessed in the 19th-century rise of national holidays, the most important of which was St Stephen’s Day, the 20th of August. The long-established religious observance of the death (1038) and the canonization (1083) of the first Hungarian king was turned into a semi-political festival by Maria Theresa in 1771, the year when St Stephen’s relic (his right hand) was moved to Buda and was ordered to be carried in procession on the saint’s feast day. In 1818, with Palatine Joseph’s support, the celebration of St Stephen’s Day was expanded from the capital to the whole kingdom; in the following decades, the religious ceremonies were increasingly accompanied by public festivities. By the 1840s it was already considered the premier “national holiday”, despite its Catholic nature and German elements. After 1849, however, due to its already established nationalistic connotations, only restricted celebrations were allowed to take place. Nevertheless, in 1860 it gave occasion to a symbolic political protest against the Habsburgs: thousands of people, mostly students and young workers, paraded under Hungarian flags, sang Vörösmarty’s Szózat, and cheered for Garibaldi. After 1867, St Stephen’s Day became legal again, with compulsory church services for every religion. In 1891 it was declared to be a work-free holiday, and – amid the protests of the rising non-Hungarian national movements – from 1895 the national flag was ordered to be flown from public buildings. During the 1920 and 1930s, St Stephen’s Day was utilized by the irredentist propaganda cult of “St Stephen’s empire”, that is, Greater Hungary before it was truncated by the 1919 peace treaties. After 1949 it was renamed as the day of the communist constitution, and only regained its religious and national components after 1989, when it was turned into the official holiday of the Hungarian Republic.

The decades after the Austrian-Hungarian Compromise in 1867 were characterized by an ambivalence regarding national holidays, involving both Habsburg Reichspatriotismus and a Hungarian-nationalist element. Dynastic celebrations regained their momentum: in 1867 Franz Joseph took the coronation oath as king of Hungary in supreme feudal grandeur showing both enthusiastic national pride and the will of reconciliation; the 25th anniversary of his coronation was also celebrated by nationwide religious services, torchlight parades, and fireworks, attracting hundreds of thousands of people. This renewed cult of the Habsburg dynasty was accompanied by the rising cult of 1848, which idolized national heroism against the Habsburgs. The day of the revolution, 15th of March, was already celebrated (by a church service, military parade, and ox-grilling) on its first anniversary in 1849 (if only in Debrecen, the revolutionary government’s provisional capital). The significance of the 15th of March was further reinforced when its (illegal) commemoration in 1860 turned into a demonstration resulting in the death of a law student, whose funeral gave occasion to further protests. By the 1880s, commemorations were officially allowed, but in 1898 the revolution’s 50th anniversary was celebrated, as a concession to Franz Joseph, on 11th of April (the day when in 1848 his predecessor, Ferdinand V, had agreed to the Hungarian constitutional demands). The 15th of March was raised to the status of an official national holiday only in 1927. After the communist takeover, it soon reverted to a normal working day again but remained the most widely shared element in the collective historical memory, and as such it continued to give occasion for oppositional protests during the 1970s-80s. In 1991 it regained its status as national holiday.

A salient feature of Hungarian Romantic Nationalism was that from the 1850s onwards, national commemorations were increasingly linked to the funerals of public figures. As the counterpart of national celebrations, political activism found an equivalent form of expression in public mourning. The death of Mihály Vörösmarty in 1855 (only six years after the failure of the revolution, which had left the poet with a shattered mind) gave occasion to nationwide activism: a public subscription was announced for his orphaned children, whose guardian was none other than Ferenc Deák, the informal Hungarian political leader of the period. In 1860 the funeral of Count István Széchenyi (a liberal reformer of the 1830-40s and the founder of the Hungarian Academy, who committed suicide in a lunatic asylum near Vienna) also aroused a commemorative national grief; so did the funeral of his great opponent, Lajos Kossuth, the 1848-49 leader, whose remains, following his death in exile in 1894, were buried in Budapest with enormous grandeur. Even though Franz Joseph refused to declare it a state occasion, official mourning was ordered by the municipality of Budapest. Kossuth was buried in the Kerepesi Cemetery in Outer Pest, which had been designated a National Graveyard in 1885. Further examples of the obsession with national funerals range from the pompous ceremony after the death of the painter Mihály Munkácsy in 1900 to the reburial of Prince Ferenc Rákóczi, the leader of the anti-Habsburg uprising of 1703-11, whose remains were brought home from his exile grave in Turkey in 1906 and festively reinterred in Kassa Cathedral (now Košice, Slovakia). The national cult of death chimed with an essentially tragic view of Hungarian history that became dominant in the 19th century and was emblematized in the cult of the lost Battle of Mohács (1526). The battlefield was eventually turned into a national memorial site in 1976.

Conversely, national self-celebration culminated in the Millennial Celebrations in 1896, commemorating the 9th-century arrival of the Magyar tribes in the Carpathian Basin – a conquest later seen as the political foundation of a Hungarian realm. The Millennial Celebrations were archaic and modern at the same time, being both an economic and cultural self-representation in the manner of the late-19th-century world exhibitions and a fancifully historicist re-grounding of national self-esteem. Aiming to pompously demonstrate historical continuity and a belief in ongoing progress, the spectacles and the programme, which attracted nearly 6 million visitors, were opened by Franz Joseph wearing a hussar uniform and included a ceremonial thunder of cannons, a long procession of regiments from the ancient Hungarian lands in historical uniforms, captive balloons, electric illuminations, panoramas, and the first Hungarian movie newsreel. Alongside the many exhibitions of art and industry, numerous landmarks were left on the cityscape: historical buildings (like the Mátyás Church in Buda) were restored or constructed in replica (e.g. an entire late medieval Transylvanian castle on the shores of the City Park lake). The event was emblematized in the Millennial Monument raised on Heroes’ Square.