saturday, october 25th, 2008

The roots of the Hungarian nation bend and twist through history to an ancient past. Their spindly fingers bare the scars of repression and struggle. Their contours trace the convoluted saga of foreign occupations, bitter compromises and uneasy alliances.

The Celts were the first to arrive on the scene nearly 2,500 years ago. The Romans followed, but it wasn’t until the Magyars settled in the fertile plains of this ancient nation that the foundations of the Hungarian people were laid, when the chieftain Árpád established the Kingdom of Hungary in 896.

The millennium that followed was dimmed by the fierce shadow of a Mongol invasion in the thirteenth century, and illuminated by the brilliance of the Renaissance in the fifteenth. The Ottomans arrived a century later, only to succumb to the pressure of the Hapsburg Empire in 1718.

It was during the rule of the Hapsburgs that a curiosity arrived on the scene. In 1790, József Zwack, the Hungarian Court Physician to the Hapsburg monarch Joseph II, presented the Kaiser with a drink he had concocted of 40 different herbs and spices. Legend has it that after his first taste, the monarch enthusiastically proclaimed, “Das Ist Ein Unikum” or, “That is a specialty!”

A national fixation was born of his exuberance. Unicum is a polarizing fixation to be sure, for the powerful herbal seems to delight and disgust in equal measure. Yet love it or hate it, no one would deny that Unicum is an integral part of the Hungarian national identity. Hungarians are mesmerized by the spirit’s beguiling sensibility. Now that the piquant herbal is exported to over 40 nations, it’s inevitable that its robust flavor will captivate an international audience in the same way it has bewitched Hungarians for the past 200 years.

It’s nearly impossible for a visitor to Budapest to avoid Unicum’s green bomb shaped bottles with the ominous white and red emergency crosses slashed across their rotund bellies. At some point during the visit they’ll inevitably be presented with its contents since Unicum is frequently presented as a complimentary digestif or apéritif in restaurants around the city. But tourists beware: Unicum is not for the faint of heart. The flavor of this cinnamon-hued spirit is bittersweet-much like the history of Hungary itself.
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