A house for Scandinavia in Budapest

"The idea was to create a meeting place for the Scandinavian people who live in Budapest, and for Hungarian fans of Scandinavian language and culture," founder Veronika Varga explains in the recent Swedish country focus of Diplomacy & Trade.

As a private initiative of a small but enthusiastic group of Hungarians who attended classes at the Scandinavian Department of the Eötvös Lóránd University (ELTE) in Budapest, and their Scandinavian friends, the foundation began its activities in the autumn of 2006. Since then, the Scandinavian House has been serving as a central hub for Nordic language education for the general public.

“For 2015, we announced Danish, Swedish, Norwegian and Icelandic courses, and every beginner class has been filled,” Varga says, adding that Swedish has always been the most popular among the courses on offer.

“In addition to teaching language, which is our core project, we organize cultural activities and promote the development of cultural relations between Hungary and the Nordic countries by acting as an initiator, organizer and connecting link. I’m proud to say that we are often asked for help when it comes to organizing anything Nordic-related. We contribute tomany different festivals in Budapest, in the fields of film, dance, theater, literature and children’s activities. The former Swedish ambassador Karin Olofsdotter (who left Budapest last summer) prized our promoting activities by saying that we are ‘the 4th Scandinavian Embassy’. We were present at the annual Midsummer’s night’s Cultural Picnic at the Skanzen (north of Budapest), held lecture series about Iceland and we closed the year with a terrific concert and Scandinavian Santa competition in December. Last year, we organized a Scandinavian day in the cultural center ‘Erõmûvház’ in the downtown area, language clubs, children’s programs, while organizing conferences, film screenings, clubs, workshops, festivals, Nordic cooking demonstrations and weekend programs is also on our agenda,” she adds.

Although, the Scandinavian House has a residence in downtown Budapest, most of their programs are not in-house projects. “We always find a nice place that best suits our activities. We are especially fond of book stores, considering that we organize a great number of book presentations and lectures. Books are important for us: whenever a book comes out that has something to do with Nordic countries, we hunt it down. We also sell books, and our goal is to build up a great library that would be able to provide comprehensive information on the countries we admire so much,” Veronika Varga concludes.