II. Roots, or the Never-Ending
Polemics about Origins
What naivete, that story of Álmos's mother! Of course, a bird cannot make a woman pregnant who is already pregnant. In other words, one may argue that myths are pointless fantasies. On the other hand, what can we call such colourful yet realistic tales as the one of the seven chieftains' blood treaty: myths or historical accounts? In the case of such mythological traditions as the Hungarian one, the dividing line between fantasy and fact is narrow indeed. Those interpreters of myths who state that there is historical veracity at the core of every supernatural tale could have drawn many references from the Hungarian tradition to corroborate their thesis.
While myths are useful tools to complement other evidence, they have to face explanations proposed by the social sciences, among them empirical ones, such as anthropology and archeology. It is amazing how different the conclusions of various social science disciplines are regarding the origins of the Hungarians. It is equally amazing how doggedly scores of scholars in different fields set out to satisfy the search for roots, this seemingly never-subsiding preoccupation of Hungarians. In the excerpts below, we will find the following approaches and methods put into the service of this quest: travelogue, linguistics, archeology, and ethnology. To these we may add, as one of the excerpts reminds us, biology, and the history of technology and of economics, as three auxiliaries.
In 1235, the Dominican friar Julian and two fellow brothers ventured far beyond the borders of their 250-year-old Christian country on a unusual royal mission. They headed east in order to find the cradle of the Hungarian nation. To their joy, they met various Hungarian-speaking groups along the trail of Árpád's ancestors. They got as far as the Caspian Sea. Eventually, they hurried back to Hungary with ominous news about the violent westbound thrust of the ferocious Khan Batu's Mongolian hordes. Before the country could get ready for their invasion, in 1241 the Asian marauders swamped and burnt it to the ground. While Hungary was rebuilt and re-populated, the Eastern Hungarians beyond the Carpathian borders were never heard of again - assumedly, they fell victim to the Mongolian invasion. But the dream of finding relatives, and with it clues to the origins of the Hungarians, survived.
Almost six hundred years later, a young Transylvanian scholar called Sándor Kőrösi Csoma set out to find these clues. While clinging to the well-entrenched thesis of Romanticism that the history of a nation and the history of its language were identical, Csoma was dissatisfied with previous explanations of the Hungarians' origins. All he knew was that he had to take the same direction as Brother Julian. Where would he come upon the great discovery? Perhaps in Asia Minor, the Russian prairies, or somewhere in the mountains between China and India? He could not tell. Yet, his "letter of intent," reproduced below, sums up the doubts of a scholar who had arrived at the conclusion that he could not rely on previous speculations - he had to do his own research. For him, personal experience gained by travel was the only answer to the dilemma.
Document 1. SÁNDOR KŐRÖSI CSOMA:
Letter to his sponsors in Nagyenyed
After I had completed my studies in my homeland's principal college at Nagyenyed, in order to acquire experience and broader knowledge, as was customary among the youths of noble origin, a few years ago I went to Germany too, and studied for more than two years at the university of Göttingen. Since my favourite preoccupation was the study of foreign languages and the history of various nations, I concentrated especially on these fields. It would be impossible to describe the pleasure I felt upon uncovering the ancient secrets of the aforementioned fields. Through this newly acquired knowledge I became completely convinced that I may be able to prove, God willing, what scholars of our nation have tried to demonstrate in order to fulfil the wish of the patrons of our culture. This is the demonstration of the exceptional uniqueness of our nation in terms of language, character, and clothing. In the scholarly world, a great deal of insecurity prevails about our ancient place of origin, about our migrations, myths, and the relationship of our language with other languages. Those foreigners who knew neither our language nor our characteristics and customs sufficiently tried to derive our national origins and myths exclusively on the basis of certain proper names. Our learned compatriots who, although pointing out correctly our linguistic relations, followed the foreign authors in their search of our origins, were also mistaken. Wishing to clear up this confusion, satisfy my ambitions, and demonstrate my gratitude and love towards my nation, I followed the light that my studies in Germany kindled and, defying fatigue and possible dangers, set out to find the origins of the Hungarians.[...]
Frustrated with his formidable task, fifteen years later Kőrösi Csoma wrote the following letter to Gábor Döbrentey, secretary of the Hungarian Academy:
As greatly as I was honoured by the generous financial support of the Hungarians.1 I was just as sorrowful to admit that so far I have not been able to gather any evidence to prove the ancient Asian origin of the Hungarians. Although I am happy that I was able to contribute to European scholarship during my long absence, I am especially sorry that I did nothing so far regarding our homeland. In order not to seem as if your expectation towards me was in vain, I find it best to reimburse you in the amount of two hundred gold pieces, because I am convinced that the Hungarian Scientific Society2 can put this money to better use, since I believe it is not necessary for me to obtain any more Sanskrit books. [...]
As it happened, Kőrösi Csoma got mired in Ladakh, a province of British-controlled India, west of Tibet, where he pursued language studies for decades. He contributed extensively to our knowledge to Tibet, but next to nothing to that of Hungarian prehistory. Yet, his example, to take risks and advance new explanations, was neither unprecedented nor futile. The cradle of Hungarian culture was obviously outside the newly settled Carpathian Basin - only travellers could tackle the puzzle of its exact location.
In earlier centuries, the Hungarian language was compared to various others. Both the chroniclers and a popular view based on the proximity of the names "Hunnish" and "Hungarian" supported a spontaneous assumption that the two peoples were related. The Huns were a nomadic Central Asian multi-ethnic conglomerate that spoke either a Turkish or Mongolian language. Both of these belong to the Altaic language family. The relationship between the Uralic family (to which Finno-Ugric languages belong) and the Altaic family has been long professed, and the hypothesis is not yet fully discredited, although the majority of linguists doubt it.
Another relative that eager scholars found for the Hungarian language before the 18th century was Hebrew, the language of the Old Testament, which was especially revered by Protestants. A distinguished ancestry it was, first proclaimed by the Protestant bishop István Geleji Katona in his Hungarian grammar of 1645, later also adopted by other scholars.
Finally, there were early suggestions that Hungarian was related to the languages of the peoples of the North. In the late 18th century, a Jesuit friar named János Sajnovics was sent on an astronomical expedition to Europe's far north to observe a rare celestial occurrence. While in Lap-land, Sajnovics was surprised by similarities between the language of the nomadic Lapps and that of the Hungarians. As it happened, he was wrong in most comparisons that he made between the vocabulary of the two languages, yet he was right assuming an essential relationship. As modern comparative linguistics states, in terms of number of speakers, Hungarian is the largest member of the so-called Finno-Ugric language family to which the Lappish language also belongs.
You can find a sketch of various languages of this family in the notes to the following text. It is not the purpose of this reader to enter into the enumeration of the complicated linguistic criteria that make various languages related to one another. Comparative linguistics is the field that answers such questions. The accepted linguistic explanation for their origins did not satisfy many Hungarians. Why was Finnish so unfamiliar to the Hungarian ear, they wondered. How is it possible that the trappers and fishers of the vast Russian forests were relatives while the nomadic warriors of the east were not? It would take many pages to answer these and many other questions.
Yet, even science can assume mythological dimensions. Consider the irritated reaction of Darwinist scientists whenever the evolutionary theory is challenged, however cautiously. Hungarian linguists have developed a similar intolerance towards the many challenges that anthropology and archeology have posed about the Finno-Ugric theory. For the past century, a Hungarian version of comparative Finno-Ugric linguistics has maintained that it had developed a foolproof timetable of the wanderings of the Hungarians over thousands of years. It is doubtful that linguists of other cultures would have ventured to reach such conclusion.
Mythologizing Hungarian prehistory took other, popularizing dimensions as well. Gyula Illyés, himself a late romantic believer in some undefinable collective soul of peoples, described his encounter with Hungary's linguistic relatives in a colourful, yet exalted piece, titled no less than Who is a Hungarian? However, the sense of isolation is real: the feeling that Hungarians have had about their existence in an ocean of hundreds of millions of Europeans all belonging to the vast Indo-European language family. While historians try to be impartial, the blatantly subjective Illyés, himself a man of imagination, conveys more of a typical Hungarian state of mind and attitude to existential questions than history, linguistics, or the social sciences can.
Document 2. GYULA ILLYÉS: Who is a Hungarian?
A good many years ago, one December night, pacing the platform of Berlin's Friedrichstrasse Station, I was arguing loudly with a Hungarian friend of mine. It was close to midnight and dreadfully cold; around us the people waiting for the train looked as if they stood on burning coals, that's how they stamped their feet. The chill covered the eyebrows and beards with frost. [...] Suddenly, two strange young men stepped up to us.
"Excuse me, are you Hungarians?" asked one of them in German, with a hesitating, apologetic smile on his face. He was a well-built, blond young man. I was just in the middle of the sentence, I didn't really want to answer; besides, my German was atrocious.
"We are," said my friend after a little while and a bit defiantly.
The stranger then put down his travel bag; on his face a happy grin replaced the hesitant smile. He held out his hand to us, then sometimes stalling, sometimes with the speed of a fast train, he began saying something. He said it in German: I didn't understand a word. The next second he embraced me, I think he also kissed me. In any case, his eyes battled with tears. In his embrace, I threw a surprised, questioning glance towards my friend.
"He says that they are Finnish," explained my friend.
At this, I too was overcome with emotion. I also embraced the young man, my Finnish brother. Actually, the same sort of feeling swelled in me as once before when, after four years of absence, I was reunited with my only elder brother. I knew that quite a few thousand years ago we separated from our Finnish brothers, somewhere between the Ural mountains and the Volga River. Thus, it is understandable that we remained embraced like this, all the while patting each other's back.
Unfortunately, we couldn't communicate; over the thousands of years we had both forgotten much of our shared mother tongue of yore. But this was not such a great obstacle. Immediately we left the platform, postponed our travel, and sat down in a restaurant. As I said, I scarcely understood their German, therefore my friend had to interpret.
The Finns spoke enthusiastically about Hungary, the sunlit southern plains where, by the way, they had never been. And they spoke even more enthusiastically about the glorious Hungarian people, their mighty brothers of whom we were the first they had ever met. With glowing cheeks, they mentioned the names of Árpád, Hunyadi,3 and Petőfi.4 My chest began to swell; I felt a sort of bond with these remarkable men; it was the first time that I felt like a son of a powerful nation. The Finns were overwhelmed in their praise of our heroism, our love of freedom, our culture that we developed so soon after we had dismounted from our small Asiatic horses.5 I nodded in approval. Why should I deny it, I felt brave, freedom loving, and, conveniently forgetting that I didn't know German, I even felt terribly learned. The Finns looked up to us. They were both students, linguists. I also studied linguistics. Thus, we understood many words of each other's language, those too which donned a disguise over the past few thousand years. We sought out these as well.
For a joke, in the restaurant we ordered only those foods whose names existed in both our languages, which therefore even our common ancestors may have consumed in their Asiatic feasts. We ordered fish [hal]6 because in Finnish they call it kala, then butter [vaj], respectively voi, according to the Finns. We also asked for deer [szarvas], which the Finns call sarvi. Unfortunately, we didn't get any. Since the Finns, too, know it as vesi, we drank only water [víz] with everything, yet ice cold in view of ice [jég] being jää in Finnish. This is how we rejoiced that we had occasion, not so much for the food, but rather to swallow [nyelni] the words, namely niellä, as the Finns say it. In our youthful good spirits, we almost ate with our hands [kéz], because in Finnish hand is käsi. Finally, nonetheless, we prepared to leave [elmenni], which they express as mennä.
This was my first meeting with the relatives. Afterwards, for a good while I only searched for them in books. I became familiar with Finnish history, with their Supreme Commander, the amazing Kalevala's7 cunning and charming Ukko - and this acquaintance was no less moving than the meeting in Berlin. Then through the dense and not easily penetrable thickets of comparative dictionaries and linguistic publications, I became well acquainted with other relatives too. After the rich Finns and Estonians, with the Ugrian Ostyaks and especially the Voguls, who are the poorest relatives but linguistically the closest to us: not only do we have common words and sentence structures, but with some searching, such whole sentences can be put together from their words that, with a little attention, every Hungarian can understand them. [...]
We could learn the Vogul language very easily. In any case, much more easily than, for instance, German or Russian. The Ostyak language, too, shares this type of structural similarity with Hungarian: Pegte lau lasinen menl tou silna [Fekete ló lassan megy a tó szélén]. Meaning: A black horse goes slowly along the edge of the lake.
I would have liked even better to meet these people. God, how few are we! Altogether five thousand Voguls live up there, near the Arctic region where they drifted from Russian tyranny after hopeless but bloody wars, still preserving their unconquerable love of freedom. There are twenty thousand Ostyaks. The whole Finno-Ugrian family [...] barely counts more than twenty million souls.8 Of these, twelve and a half million are Hungarians. Of the world's two billion people, therefore, barely one percent can be called relatives of the Hungarians.
Finally, I could personally meet one or two of the distant, poorer relatives as well. A few years ago, I had the opportunity to travel to Russia. A large part of these relatives live there: most of them on this side of the Ural Mounains, which is still in Europe, but some of them who are, however, closest to us linguistically, beyond the Urals, in Northern Siberia. I would have gone to the end of the world for their sake; I would go today too.
In every Hungarian there is something of Kőrösi Csoma's enthusiasm, of the love of adventure combined with a thirst for knowledge, of the restlessness of the boy drifting through the world and driving himself through libraries and jungles to come across a trace of his lost parents. Whose heart was not touched and who was not stimulated a little to follow the zeal of all those explorers, from Brother Julian to Vámbéry9 who, like Stanley, Africa's explorer, or like Champollion, decoder of the Egyptian writings, set out to find the ancient, large family? A people without relatives in Europe, are we not perhaps the most prone to search for relatives?
Our ancestors! The mysteriously surviving words from the tents on the shore of the Ob River which would also ring familiar in the Big Calvinist Church of Debrecen. The calls transferring the Volga and Konda swamps which, on the parting day, the small troop of mounted men starting west shouted back to those who stayed, and which still resound after thousands of years.10 When my Moscow journey was confirmed, I immediately obtained an Ostyak grammar book. I rekindled my school memories. I smiled when I found that in my excitement for travel there was again a small part that, surprisingly, resembled my childhood excitement when we visited brother-in-laws and uncles in the neighbouring county. I am not going into the complete unknown - these were the emotions I was harbouring. I knew that in Russia today there are still many such village names in which Hungarian words are concealed. As they were transported in Russia, Hungarian prisoners of World War I stopped in wonder at a village or river when they heard the name. In the Orlov district, there is a village simply called Madjar. In the Caucasus there is a Madzhara river. In the province of Yenisey there is a Madzhar lake. Along the Kuma [river], wherever you travel you find Hungarian names in one form or another.
Right after my arrival in Moscow, I inquired about my "relatives." By lucky coincidence, I soon met up with a woman reporter whose mother was Zyrian, and she also understood the language. I asked her immediately about the relatives.
Unfortunately, I couldn't meet any Ostyaks: they lived twice as far away as I had travelled already. But they consoled me that the Votyaks were nearby, between the Volga River and the Ural Mountains, by train barely a two days' ride. I could see the Maris too, who, incidentally, resent that the world continues to call them by their Russian nickname, Cheremis, unlike the Zyrians who finally achieved that they are called by their original name, Komis. They dwell nearby, barely four hundred kilometres from Nizhny Novgorod. But I was told that I can meet Mordvins, who are as distant cousins as the Finns, right in Moscow. They have an entire district: according to reports, more than four thousand live in one of the suburbs, where they even have their own associations and clubs....
As we shall see from another reading in the next chapter, Illyés also tackled the objection raised by many: that Hungarian society before the conquest consisted of herders and warriors rather than hunters and fishermen, which virtually all other Finno-Ugric peoples were. Trying to please everybody, Illyés invented the return of the Altaic nomads who invigorated the peaceful Ugors. While this tale did not catch on, a few years later a colourful, iconoclastic modern-day historian, Gyula László, mounted the most intelligent challenge to the Finno-Ugric hypothesis of Hungarian prehistory. Vindicating the early chroniclers and questioning the Romantic thesis that language and culture must be the same, László asks questions that will be debated for a long time. (The following excerpts are a representative montage from two separate works by László.)
Many people believe that our prehistory is a mapped-out issue, and debates can only revolve around questions such as when and where the Uralic, Finno-Ugric, Ugric, and Hungarian periods of development took place. Alas, our prehistory is not at all clear - on the contrary, it is full of unsolved problems, of which some are basic ones. What you find below is intended to spell out the questions, some of which we are unable to answer as yet. [...] In the absence of sufficient archeological evidence, previously linguistics raised issues whose solution does not rest with it, such as the problem of the ancestral homelands, etymology, questions of cultural changes as reflected by loanwords, and so on. Nonetheless, I would not go too far in separating these fields of study from each other. History, social life and their various events are always encapsulated in language: historiography and archeology cannot ignore linguistic evidence.[...]
In recent decades archeology, anthropology, biology, ethnography, and other disciplines have contributed to the research on prehistory. Thus, the exclusive domination of linguistics has ceased to exist, although the study of language will always remain an excellent source of information and guidance. Clearly, the belief that the old history of our language is identical with the old history of our people is also disappearing. It is also unlikely that the Hungarian people has remained unchanged since ancient times.
Before presenting the achievements of the latest decades, let us point out a fundamental problem whose solution will obviously require significant efforts from future research. This, in short, is the following: our national and regal tradition teaches one thing about the Hungarian people's history, while modern linguistics and historiography teaches another. The former opens up the perspectives of Scythia and the Biblical world, the latter leads us to the Finno-Ugric inhabitants of the forest region. Actually, most of these contradictions arose from the attempt to reconcile these two - let's just call them Turkish tradition and Finno-Ugric scholarship. It is this author's conviction that the reconciliation did not succeed because both theses are true, except not for one and the same people, but for two, maybe more peoples. Thus, we don't have to force various theories, but should rather accept the facts as they are. This is why most contradictions can be reconciled by the assumption of a "dual conquest."11
An earlier assumption was that the Hungarians were primitive hunters and fishermen when they wound up under Turkish cultural influence. This idea arose when scholars tried to relate our basic civilization before the conquest to the truly primitive culture of our language relatives, using cognates as evidence. The evolving Hungarian people, however, divorced itself from the Ob-Ugors already about 2,500 years before the conquest. This separation probably took place in the Bronze Age. Thanks to the archeological work of our Soviet colleagues, we are quite familiar with the civilizations of the forest region in the Bronze Age and later. These civilizations were a hundred times richer already in the Bronze Age than Ob-Ugor civilization was just a hundred years ago! Not one Bronze Age culture can be labelled as a "primitive hunting-fishing society": such formations lived in these areas only during the prehistoric age, and maybe as late as the newer Stone Age. [...]
If we classify the peoples of Eurasia according to their languages, or by focusing on the everchanging state borders, we find an unparalleled diversity. On the other hand, if we classify them by anthropological criteria, we can use the characteristics of not more than eight or ten racial types in order to describe any people, even any individual. The dividing lines of these types may be blurred; yet, like circles in the water, they cover our whole continent. The geography of racial characteristics does not coincide with the linguistic or political borders at all, although certain characteristics dominate certain areas. We find the same large perspectives when we consider folk belief and tales: language barriers cease to exist and we recognize ourselves everywhere. Language divides us, while our human essence and our beliefs unite us. [...]
The Finno-Ugric peoples along the Volga belong to a different anthropological group than our language relatives along the river Ob. We Hungarians belong to the Volga-European group, while in the Ob-Ugrians the Mongolian character dominates. Thus, our anthropological ties with our nearest language relatives are weaker than our ties with other peoples. Consequently, we have to assume that the Ob-Ugrians took their present language from the Hungarians. [...]
As can be seen, the historical questions crystallize around the concepts "nomadic," "half-no-madic," and "agricultural"; therefore, we will briefly return to these questions. We can safely infer back to the time of the conquest - with appropriate caution - from conditions existing a couple of centuries thereafter. For instance, in the eleventh century our laws already refer to settled Hungarians who lived in villages. This contradicts the equestrian nomad theory, and in my opinion, this contradiction can only be solved if we don't force the reconciliation, according to which the descendants of the shepherds settled in villages within a century. We must accept both facts: that according to the Mohammedan writers, and Western and domestic sources, we were a ferocious nomadic people.12
In a hundred years, a nomadic society couldn't produce of itself so many servants - and our servants' names were all Hungarian. Thus, two Hungarian societies stand before us, and there is no other choice but to accept the fact that there were indeed two. To deduce one from the other looks impossible. [...]
Not only have today's Hungarians become a typically East Central European people with at least one thousand years of national history, but already among Árpád's warriors, the first settlers, there were Europeans. We can see this from the fact that members of the confederation of the seven or ten conquering tribes13 may have had different traditions and, if so, also different ancestries. In our very mixed race, one can find all dominant characteristics of both Europe and Asia, albeit not in equal proportions. If we want to write the prehistory of the Hungarians, which track should we follow? [...]
The question is further complicated by the circumstance that even in our earliest anthropological finds there is a varying degree of "foreign" element, which means that they represent mixed races.
The history of language is simpler, anthropology more complicated - we have to combine them when we study our prehistory.
We are now far removed indeed from the linear prehistory established by historical linguistics. Not to mention that anthropology also proves developments that contradict linguistics. [...]
With regard to our ancestors, we have not yet discussed one source: our chronicles. As I see it, that "Eurasian" interpretation which we just described will reconcile the controversy which has been growing between our historical scholarship and our chronicles since the past century. Our entire academic community spoke up against the prehistoric tradition described by the chronicles, and labelled these writings as fiction, because they didn't direct us to the Finno-Ugric interpretation of our ancient history. In an approach that includes anthropology, archeology, folk belief and folk songs, such bias will eliminate itself. Instead, we will ask: how do our chronicles reflect national tradition, and what is fiction, or even narrative tradition in them? Obviously, both are present in our chronicles, but to discard them just because they contradict another biased view would be a mistake.
Thus, the new possibility of researching the evolution of Hungarian identity - our so-called ethnogenesis - has opened up before us. "Productive uncertainty" has taken the place of what was regarded as certainty and firm knowledge. [...]
László has upset not only ardent pro-Finno-Ugric linguists but also historians. Maybe he did not provide an answer - yet, he showed new directions for future investigations. Such vistas and sane methods are badly needed. Mostly in reaction to the Finno-Ugric theory, numerous other ethnic "relatives" were believed to have been found for Hungarians: Indo-Europeans, Japanese, and who else but the long-extinct Sumerians. The most absurd speculations include two books published between the world wars: one finding analogies between the Hungarian and Old English language (Anglo-Saxon = Engwer-Saecel); the other, between Hungarian and a Polynesian language (Magyar = Maori). What next?
Would it not be desirable to acquire deeper and more accurate knowledge of the culture for whose roots one is searching? And, a more thorough consideration of interrelations with other cultures that also have to be studied in depth? The great folklorist and historian Ottó Herman added some concluding remarks to his work on the Hungarian people's character. These remarks are not only worth minding now, a century later, but also bring the goals of our collection of readings into clearer perspective.
Certainly, what this book contains is not complete. It can be enhanced in every aspect, and it is also indisputable that it cannot escape modification.[...]
It was a typical and insightful statement by Vámbéry when, finding my lacunae in the process of cultural comparisons, he stated that many unknown facts could be discovered if we were thoroughly familiar with the customs not only of the Hungarians but also of the related peoples. Indeed, if we intend to compare the typical customs and the consequent evolution of the disposition of the Hungarians with those of our relatives, we get stuck already at the first step.
With linguistics much can be achieved and substantial knowledge gained, but linguistics is not everything. The same is true of that assessment of spiritual phenomena which is called folklore. There are, however, rather typical and profound characteristics in lifestyle, such as the manifestations of a nomadic spirit pointed out in our book, which should be studied thoroughly, lest the image gained about any given people remain incomplete. One cannot neglect these characteristics, because they are rather essential accessories of anthropology, inasmuch as they affect physical appearance. [...] Yet, all of us who study the problem of [the origins and relations of] the Hungarians have to admit that we do not know sufficiently well the private life, customs, and evolution of our people. This is a great shortcoming which must be remedied. But, by whom?
We, the elderly generation, cannot volunteer to undertake this task any more. We [...] always held the view that the precondition for the sufficient, or at least acceptable, solution of the Hungarian question is to become thoroughly acquainted with the Hungarian people and analyze their social conditions in their present homeland. Those who set out to do research among Asia's immense masses of peoples without possessing this precondition may have had respectable and rich scholarly capabilities. If you venture into the unknown, however, you are paralyzed without an essential accessory which is needed to set your course. That sensitive little instrument which helps you to orient, the compass, was missing. For those whose chosen task is to find traces of a certain nation in a distant region of the world, amidst the colourful melange of peoples and their customs, this compass is the thorough knowledge of the nation for whose tracks we are searching.
I admit that this view can be contested. One may say that the main thing is to gather much material and, having returned home, pick out what is related in view of national phenomena. [...] In my support, however, the most powerful argument gives irrefutable evidence: that even the most typical characteristics of a nation are rapidly changing. Time has run out for us to wrangle over the method. The point of the matter is to save whatever can be saved, if it is not too late already - because it may already be so.
As we can see, the final word on the origins of the Hungarians has not been uttered yet. The question is, whether it ever will be. Is it not symptomatic if a culture is this obsessed with its ancestry? The peoples of prosperous European nations hardly seem to care where they came from and when. Perhaps the peripheral status and the outsiders' fate that Hungarians attribute to themselves is the clue to the question. Once they will take their deserved place in a united, post-communist Europe's structure of interests, defense, economic and political cooperation, they may turn their energy in some other direction.
The search for roots notwithstanding, historical awareness is a more or less emphasized preoccupation of any nation. Hungary is no exception. Historical interest has been traditionally high, although mythologizing of facts did also play a significant role. The following readings are not intended to provide a summary of Hungarian history. Instead, they highlight dilemmas and principles that underlie the thousand year old historical experience of this nation.