Culture

The world is going to watch, between 26–30 August 2025 the 64th Pentathlon World Championship held in Kaunas, Lithuania. The semi-finals and finals qualifying competition days for men and women are going to take place between 26 and 29 August, finals will be held on 30 August in the Zalgiris Arena. The competition is an opportunity, beside the world champion title, for obtaining Olympic ranking points, too. Hungary will be represented by Blanka Guzi, Blanka Bauer, Emma Mészáros, Noémi Eszes and Rita Erdős in women’s sports and by Mihály Koleszár, András Gáll, Balázs Szép, Botond Tamás and Bőhm Csaba in men’s.
We wish every success for the athletes and good cheer!

The 2024 movie attendance reached 10.7 million in Hungary.
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A stage performance is not only entertainment but also the guardian and mediator of the cultural values and identity of a community, region or nation. In Hungary, the overall attendance at the 240 national theatres rose to 6.9 million in 2023 (by 10%). Similar to the previous year, 1.6 million people attended the performances of the 11 nationally accredited theatre arts organisations, with the National Circus Arts Centre, the Hungarian State Opera House and the Budapest Operetta Theatre attracting the highest attendance (together almost 900,000 visitors).

15 March is not only the holiday of the 1848 Revolution but has also been Hungarian Press Day since 1990. The first free Hungarian printed matter was printed then in 1848. In Hungary, the number of copies of printed daily papers peaked before the change of regime, approximating 1 billion in annual totals. Due to digitalisation and to changes in the customs of obtaining information, the total number of copies of printed daily papers was only 150 million in 2023, and the place of formerly leading broadsheet newspapers was taken by tabloids.

The first movie screening took place about 130 years ago in Hungary, and it may be said that movie going is still very popular in the country. According to the latest, 2023 data, there were 152 movie theatres in Hungary, 128 indoor and 24 outdoor cinemas. The number of outdoor movies grew since 2019 by seven. The so-called multiplexes offered a total of 29 thousand seats, 41% of the total capacity.

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.

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.