Hungarians have been living in the center of Europe, the Carpathian Basin, for over a thousand years. Their ancestors formed the Kingdom of Hungary here, adapting its boundaries to the natural and geographical environment: the surrounding mountains and rivers. The Carpathian Basin – extending from the Danube’s Dévény Strait close to Vienna, to the Lower Danube strait – is encircled by the Carpathian Mountain’s nearly 1,500 kilometer long chain of ranges. To the west the region is bordered by the Alps, while the Sava River borders it to the south. During the country’s one-thousand years of statehood its frontiers often changed. There were times when the Kingdom of Hungary stretched far beyond the Carpathian Basin; during the era of Ottoman rule the nation was divided into three parts; due to the resolutions of the Trianon Peace Treaty of 1920 two-thirds of its area was annexed by neighboring countries. The Hungarian nation – together with other peoples living within the structure of the Hungarian state spanning the whole of the Carpathian Basin – has inhabited this region for a thousand years. The Hungarian homeland, therefore, is the 330,000 sq. km area of the Carpathian Basin, the central part of which, 93,000 sq. km, is present day Hungary. Hungary has a population of 10 million Hungarians, representing two-thirds of the whole of the Hungarian nation of 15 million. More than half a million compatriots of the Hungarians belonging to other ethnic groups live within the present-day borders of the country (German, Slovakian, Croatian, Serbian, Rumanian, Roma, Slovene etc.) while 3.5 million Hungarians inhabit the regions once belonging to their ancestors but which now fall outside the borders of Hungary (Austria, Slovakia, the Ukraine, Rumania, Serbia-Montenegro, Croatia, Slovenia), for ever since the Treaty of Versailles/Trianon all of Hungary’s neighbors possess a greater or smaller area of the one-time Kingdom of Hungary. The number of Hungarians who fled or emigrated from the Carpathian Basin because of various historical turning-points living throughout the world today, is approx. 2 million. In the chapter on geography we will be discussing the ancestral Hungarian homeland, the Carpathian Basin, and within that emphasizing regions primarily inhabited by Hungarians.