Relations between Hungary and Turkey may currently be cordial, but the two countries history has not always been so friendly, and Hungary was occupied by the Ottoman empire for a century and a half between 1541 and 1699.
Nowadays, Erdoğan professes nostalgia for the Ottoman empire, while Orbáns government promotes so-called turanist theories, hotly disputed by historians and linguists, that see Turkish and Finno-Ugric languages, including Hungarian, as sharing a common origin.
On a visit to Kyrgyzstan in September, Orbán lauded Hungarian as a strange and unique language related to Turkish languages.
Tamas Szigetvari argues that such theories enable Orbán to portray Hungary as a sort of distant cousin to countries in Asia that Budapest is wooing for economic reasons.
Some fringe linguists think Hungarian and Korean are linked.