Historical geographies in Hungary (2021–2025): Reflections on Greater Hungary and the Carpathian Basin

The paper examines contemporary Hungarian ‘történeti földrajz’ (historical geography) as a post-socialist and intellectually weighted field of research. Based on a publication corpus of 322 items produced between 2021 and 2025 and a questionnaire survey of active researchers, Hungarian historical geography appears as a small, predominantly Hungarian-language and Carpathian Basin-centred field. Its main thematic clusters include landscape and land use history; research on historical settlement and urban networks; ethnic, religious and demographic studies; historical geographic information systems (GIS) and quantitative analyses; military and geopolitical geography; as well as the geography of memory. Most practitioners position historical geography as an interdisciplinary research orientation located at the intersection of history and geography, and the field has begun to achieve institutional stabilisation. Among its practitioners, there is an increasing awareness of the geopolitical and identity-political implications of the concepts of the Carpathian Basin and Greater Hungary. At the same time, a moderate yet perceptible process of internationalisation has emerged, primarily in historical GIS, battlefield studies and the critical examination of borders. The paper argues that a more explicit and critical articulation of politically sensitive themes, combined with the strengthening quantitative and GIS-based directions, may transform Hungarian historical geography into an integrated and distinctive strand within European historical-geographical scholarship.