[4][6]: 96  It belongs to the group of Podolic cattle[7]: 27 [8]: 49  and is characterised by long lyre-shaped horns and a pale grey coat.

It was formerly accepted that it had arrived in the ninth century with the Magyars who came from the east, took the Carpathian Basin and settled there; this theory is not consistent with the archaeological record.

[8]: 50 From the Middle Ages until the eighteenth century great numbers of grey cattle were raised extensively on the plains of Hungary.

Many were driven on the hoof by hajduk for hundreds of kilometres westward to the markets of cities in western Europe to be slaughtered for beef.

[7]: 11 [12]: 718  The trade was gravely disrupted by the Ottoman invasions, and for some time was also limited by a monopoly granted by the Imperial court to the Landverleger-Compagnia of Vienna in 1622.

[13]: 198  Another sixteenth-century document refers specifically to magnus cornuotes boves Hungaricos or 'long-horned Hungarian cattle'.

[14]: 1786 In the eighteenth century changing market conditions led to a substantial decline in this trade, and the cattle came to be used principally as draught animals, a purpose to which they were well suited.

[19] The Hungarian Grey shares with indicine cattle some genetic characteristics relating to milk proteins including casein, and to amplified fragment length polymorphism marker haplotypes.