The Hungarian government declared in March last year that Good Friday will become a national holiday, and today marks the second Good Friday observed as a holiday.
Minister Zoltán Balog said that making Good Friday a public holiday reinforces Christian roots and the deeper meaning of the holiday is that “there is no success without sacrifice and no resurrection without death, and that there can be no Easter without Good Friday."
The holiday was made public after Parliament voted on the issue in a session in March last year - 163 votes were cast in favor with two abstentions, accepting the government’s proposal to make the day a national holiday.
This year's Easter holidays in Hungary will take place over a four-day weekend, from March 30th to April 1st, and put Hungary in the company of 14 EU countries that observe Good Friday as a national holiday.