You can see immediately why bestselling author and conservative blogger Rod Dreher likes his adopted city of Budapest: it’s right there on the beer bottles!

I arrived in Budapest in the late afternoon as I usually arrive in cities – that is, hot and tired and in a cranky mood from non-existent airline food. The 100E bus from the airport, like most airline transports, takes you along the least scenic route to the city centre.

Then again, it only costs US$3 instead of $40 for a taxi. In Budapest’s case, however, public transport means driving past mile upon mile of dilapidated Commie tenements now falling into even more disrepair, covered with pseudo-Gantsa graffiti.

By the time the bus let me off near the apartment I rented, at Kálvin Square near the Hungarian National Museum, I was almost falling over from the heat. It’s early September and the temperatures are in the mid-90s Fahrenheit. I can’t help but think: Good God, what have I done? I could be visiting Zurich where it’s cool and there’s a lake!

I stumbled the few blocks to my apartment building, entered the main door digital keycode I had received, and dropped off my bags. I then went in search of a cold beer and something to eat.

And that’s when I saw it: right there on the beer bottle I ordered was Rod’s name in bright white letters: “Dreher.” It’s the Coors of Hungary, one of the most popular of Hungarian beers (brewed since 1854!).

I, too, might be warmly disposed to a country that named its national beer after me – even though I do have a nice island in Florida and a Kansas town named in my honour.

The magical city on the Danube

Rod Dreher, of course, is perhaps the most famous of Budapest boosters… but there are many others. I’ve been regaled by family and friends for years about what a magical place this venerable city on the Danube actually is.

Famous for its stunning architecture and beautiful women, Budapest has been a symbol of Central European elegance and sophistication for as long as I can remember. My daughter visited during a Model United Nations field trip her senior year in high school and announced that I just “had” to visit Budapest (although, truth be told, she liked Vienna even better).

The real reason people talk about Budapest, however, is due to Hungary’s determination to preserve its capital city’s best qualities from all the cultural “enrichment” EU leaders seem determined to inflict on the rest of Europe – mass migration of young men from the Middle East and Africa, an epidemic of violent crime, drug addiction, entire villages of homeless living on the streets, and a general sense of cultural decline and desperation.

Budapest, it is said, has been spared much of this.

It is a city where young women in tight mini-dresses walk safely late at night, strolling from ruin bar to ruin bar in the Jewish Quarter, and not worry about being raped by gangs of Muslim men.

Very few young Hungarians appear to sport tattoos, and those that do limit themselves to a few discreet “tramp stamps.”

The stench of cannabis is virtually non-existent, and while I do occasionally see people sleeping on park benches, the streets and parks are free of tents and other signs of permanent homeless encampments.

Because I’m staying for only ten days, I’m walking all over the city and am using the tram lines regularly. As is my custom, I’m also staying in an inexpensive apartment in a “working class” district near the Danube, and there is nowhere I feel uneasy walking late at night.

This is in dramatic contrast to, say, America’s capital city of Washington DC, with one of the highest murder rates in the world, where on a recent visit I had to avoid three-quarters of the city after dark if I didn’t want to get mugged.

A modern city lacking in diversity

Much of this is due to Budapest’s lack of diversity and resistance to multiculturalism. This gives Budapest a definite “old world” vibe – that, and the stunning neo-Gothic architecture.

When I was younger, say 40 years ago, when you visited a European city you expected to meet, well, Europeans, and you did. When I visited Paris when I was 19, virtually everyone I met spoke French and was French. That was the reason you visited France!

The same was true of my youthful visits to Munich, Copenhagen, Rome, Malaga, and so on. When I visited Munich, I interacted exclusively with Germans, ate German food, tried to speak German, learned about German culture, and so on.

Today, throughout western Europe, that is often not the case.

Many European cities, like many cities in North America, enjoy the cultural enrichment of diversity.

They resemble the polyglot Los Angeles of the Ridley Scott dystopian film Blade Runner, a multicultural food court in which thousands of Koreans, Nigerians, Chinese, Ethiopians, Somalis, Russians, Italians, Mexicans, Bangladeshis, Indians, and Filipinos all crowd together speaking hundreds of different languages and with whom few have anything in common with their neighbours.

This United Nations phantasmagoria can be fun for a day or two, but on a daily basis – as a place to live – it’s exhausting. Anyone who has moved to London recently knows this. When half the women on your street wear bourkas, it’s difficult for a Westerner to feel at home.

This is not Budapest.

Budapest, for all its faults, is Hungarian through and through.

It’s a large, bustling, crowded, energetic, very modern European city full of Hungarians. (Unlike London, where the population is now only about 36 percent native British.)

The mystery of the Hungarian people

I know all this because I can’t understand a single word anyone is saying. Not one. This means they’re speaking Hungarian, perhaps the most incomprehensible language on earth to non-native speakers. More about that in a moment.

The only foreigners you run into are tourists (Israelis in the Jewish quarter, Chinese tourists taking pictures) and Thai women asking if you want a massage. The ratio of tourists to residents seems incredibly low. I am regularly approached by people on the street, asking for directions in Hungarian, so that means people assume that those they meet are likely residents, not tourists.

As for the Hungarians themselves, they look for all the world like a group of fit midwestern Americans or Bavarian Germans at a picnic in the park: in fact, it’s eerie how much they resemble ordinary Americans or Germans. They’re a good-looking bunch, the young men tan and flexing their biceps, the women flashing cleavage. They’d be at home at any mall in Los Angeles or Frankfurt.

Except for one thing: it appears the Hungarians are actually from another planet.

They speak a language that is utterly unlike any language on earth (except for Finnish) and totally distinct from the languages of all their neighbours.

The best historians can determine, the world’s 15 million Hungarians are the descendants of nomadic tribes originally from one side or the other of the Ural Mountains in Siberia, in the far north of what is now Russia. Sometime in the first millennium, these ancient tribesmen, who called themselves the Magyars, left their homelands and gradually headed south towards central Europe and the Carpathian basin.

They spoke an early version of Hungarian known as Proto-Uralic – a non-Indo-European language. One group of these people broke off and headed north, eventually settling in what we now call Finland. But their languages developed independently so that Finnish and Hungarian today, although sharing many similarities, are no longer mutually intelligible. (To my untutored ear, however, Hungarian has many of the same tonal qualities I hear in the Finnish detective TV series I compulsively watch at home.)

In other words, this unique tribe of nomads spoke a language unlike any of the other peoples then in the area – not the Latin of the Romans, or the Celtic languages of the Celts, or the early German of the Germans, or the Basque language of the Basques. It’s utterly unique.

By the early Middle Ages, the Magyar tribes were raiding settlements across central Europe. However, around 800 AD, these raiding peoples cast their eyes on the lush meadows of the Carpathian Basin, a vast lowland tucked between the Carpathian Mountains to the north and the Alps to the west. A pagan prince settled his people in the area, driving out other groups, and, as legend has it, the pope agreed that they could settle in and take possession of the Carpathian Basin if they agreed to convert to Christianity – and that is precisely what they did.

An ancient Catholic country

The warlord known as King St Stephen I, born to baptized Christian parents, committed his people to the Christian religion and was crowned the first king of Hungary on Christmas Day in the year 1000 AD, with a crown perhaps sent to him by Pope Sylvester II. They still have the crown, the oldest royal crown in continuous use.

The basilica in the centre of Budapest, St Stephen’s Basilica, was built in the king’s honour and contains a macabre relic of the man himself – his mummified but still recognizable right hand – triumphantly and creepily on display in the glass case at a side altar.

Thus, Hungary was a kingdom that lasted for roughly 900 years, despite invasions by the Ottoman Turks and rule by the Austria-Hungarian Empire (with the emperor taking on the title of King of Hungary).

All this came to a screeching halt with the “brother wars” of World War I and World War II.

After World War I, the victorious allies divvied up roughly 40 percent of Hungarian territory to various real and invented states (Hungary’s neighbours). That’s why Hungary today is “surrounded by Hungarians” in Serbia, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and so on.

This is also why Hungary reluctantly sided with the Axis Powers in World War II.

The catastrophe of Europe’s civil wars

Hitler promised Hungary’s leaders that they could regain the lands taken from them after World War I and that he would help Hungary resist Soviet communism. At the time, Hungary had one of the largest Jewish populations of Europe, roughly ten percent of the population.

To appease Hitler, Hungary’s leaders adopted harsh anti-Jewish employment measures but refused to deport or harm Hungarian Jews. As the Holocaust memorial organization Yad Vashem puts it, “most of the Jews of Hungary lived in relative safety for much of the war.”

However, by the end of the war, the Hungarian government was secretly making peace overtures to the Allies and the Nazis responded by invading Hungary in March 1944.

This is why the catastrophe that befell Hungary’s large Jewish population happened all at once in one brief period beginning in May 1944, when 434,000 Hungarian Jews were deported to Nazi death camps, primarily Auschwitz, and gassed.

In October, 1944, just months before the end of the war, Hitler removed Hungarian Regent Miklós Horthy from power, installed a pro-Nazi puppet as prime minister, and proceeded to wipe out the remaining Jewish population of Budapest.

Nearly 80,000 Jews were lined up on the banks of the Danube River, told to remove their shoes, and shot at point-blank range, their bodies simply thrown into the river. That is why there are now 60 pairs of iron shoes lining the banks of the Danube near the Hungarian parliament, a memorial to those who lost their lives.

It was one of the great tragedies of World War II, the last-minute mass murder of Hungarian Jews, organized by the notorious Adolf Eichmann, right at the end of World War II.

It is also why the Soviet Union had the excuse to “liberate” Hungary from the Germans and then impose its flat-earth Communist ideology for the next 45 years – despite the Hungarians rebelling outright in a heroic but doomed uprising in 1956.

What all this means is that the Hungarians are a very ancient people who have lived in the same basic area in Central Europe -- preserving their linguistic and cultural identity despite multiple conquests – for at least a thousand years and probably longer.