Timea Enyedi took her place by the blackboard in her second floor class room and asked her 14 year old pupils to open their textbooks.

On the wall behind her, a poster bore the coat of arms and the blue and yellow colours of Ukraine. But the books, the language of instruction, and the portraits of literary figures decorating the classroom, were all Hungarian.

A disconcerting linguistic agility is just one of the anomalies of life in this tiny Habsburg city on the far eastern edge of the Carpathian Basin.

Over the past century alone, the city of Berehove was incorporated into Czechoslovakia in 1920; reclaimed by Hungary during the Second World War; annexed by the Soviet Union in 1945; and finally became part of an independent Ukraine after the Soviet collapse in 1991.

Today, most people here are bi or even tri-lingual; five catholic, orthodox, and protestant denominations jostle for congregations; and two national flags - the Ukrainian and Hungarian - hang outside the town hall.