A history of pain and grudges.
Happy St Nicholas Day, Santa Klaus, Mikulás – in Hungary – or Nikulden to my friends in Bulgaria. I know it’s abrupt, and I know I’ve been away for a long time, and I will update you on the personal side of things but not before I get this story out. My friends, in vast areas across Hungary there is no Benzin, or regular petrol fuel. Both opposition and government news was initially rather hush-hush about this, but the situation has become so dire that each has reported their own diagnosis of the situation.
But before we get to all of that you simply have to understand the history of this place, and of the torn and rather gloomy people, that are my brothers and sisters. The Magyars were a wild horseback people with their origins in the Ural mountains, far in the East. They came here on horseback, wielding curved scimitar-like swords ( since revised to be nice and European ), and high-powered bows, drinking kumiss ( mare’s milk ), and doing all that “raiding” entails. They were so Eastern in fact, that after chief Árpád settled us here in the Carpathian valley and died, his two sons – in good Hungarian tradition – took up arms against each other, one wearing the Cross of Rome, and the other the double-cross of the Eastern Orthodoxy of Byzantium. The younger sibling won a thousand and twenty two years ago, chopping his elder brother in four and was henceforth known as King / Saint Stephen, or István, founding the Kingdom of Hungary.
There is no changing this, but the fact of the matter is that the love of Gentle Jesus came here on the edges of hired German knights’ swords, spilling Magyar blood, because immediately upon arrival they found themselves on the borderlands of opposing empires. A place in which the locals of this blessed or cursed land – depending on the onlooker – they would find themselves in again, again, and again. There is one important aspect to the Magyars that showed early on that deserves mentioning. Árpád and his father Álmos were direct descendants of the great Hun leader, Attila, and like him they didn’t have a people, or settled culture, not in any real sense of the word. They had an army, which was – as was pretty standard at the time – made of many different ethnicities, by different means of “recruitment” to put it gentler than it really was.
It was because of this historic mixture, and non-enforcement of a single culture that the horde, and later the country was so large, it was the original melting pot almost eight hundred years before the United States. As settled agriculture took the place of raids and hunts however, over the centuries distinct cultures arose and lived rather respectfully together, at least in times of relative ease, of peace. The reason I say them, and not us, is because my name is Tóth – meaning Slav – meaning my ancestors probably came here under King Svätopluk I, rather than following Árpád.
But over the centuries these people mingled, intermarried and shaped one another. I could probably fill a good three pages of of Hungarian words of Slavic origin, so let’s just name a few, that will ring familiar to all our slavic brothers : kocsma, abrosz, barát, beszéd, kolbász, konyha, pálinka, kupica, ebéd, nadrág, macska, palack, duda and of course kurva! In a few hundred years, during another clash of civilisations we inherited some pretty good Türkic words too, like kazán, kefe, bicska, dohány, lábas, joghurt, zsivány, papucs or csizma. Finally, just to illustrate the nature of the exchange, here are a few words you may have heard wich have Magyar origin : itsy-bitsy ( icipici ), coach ( from Kocsi a type of wagon invented in the village Kocs ) hajduk ( mostly central european for bandit from hajdúk ) houssar ( from huszár ), tsako ( from csákó, a peaked cap ), czardas / friska ( from csárdás, a type of dance ), lots of dog breeds and finally Biro, the ball-point pen named after László Bíró.
Hell, even out of the 13 Blood-witnesses ( a word I prefer to simple “martyrs” ) of Arad, who are considered champions and forefathers of modern Hungary, five were German ( Aulich, Lahner, Pöltenberg, Leniningen-Westerburg and Schweidel ), Damyanich was Serbian, Knezić was Croatian, Lázár was Armenian, and out of the remaining five, only one was born on the contemporary territory of Hungary, and he was called Török, or Turkish. You see even in the 18th Century, primitive and feudal Hungary was still a relatively peaceful gathering place with many distinct cultures and peoples, but Capitalism was already born, conquering the world and Eastern Europe in parallel, soon to grow thirsty for new lands and resources to conquer, never shy of turning people against one another.
The Thirteen were rebel generals who were executed in Arad, a town in contemporary Romania in 1949, legend says : to the cheer and clinking of beers of Austrian soldiers, hence one of the great folk-vows of the Magyars – not to clink with beer for 150 years – was born. They fought against Habsburg Austria in what has been labeled the Revolution – seeking a bourgeois parliament, instead of the feudal estate system – and War of Freedom / Liberation – seeking old territory – that began in 1848, in the absolutely tiny minority of urban intellectuals and artisans, not the majority of working people, or even the vast amounts of serfs, doomed to fail. So at the same time, the great Hungarian tradition of failing and holding grudges for long spans of time had also begun, and the beginning of said Revolution ( 15 March ) remains celebrated as one of Hungary’s three national holidays.
What followed were tumultuous times. First an 18-year military dictatorship under Austria, followed by the “Compromise” ( Kiegyezés or Ausgeleich ) with the enemy, establishing Austro-Hungary, the odd couple of the colonial world. While Austria was still an Empire in the Colonial sense, the re-established Kingdom of Hungary was not, and was not a subject to the other, living in the weirdest dual monarchy ever seen. While they shared an interest to explore the Arctic, in a hilarious Expedition of the Counts ( count Zichy and Wilczek discovering Franz Josef Land ), neither were invited to the Berlin Conference to carve up Africa, and the Austrian ambition to buy Rio de Oro after the Spanish-American war was blocked by the Hungarian House of Magnates – rich land-owning bastards.
This uneasy bed-fellowship and and the bitterness of the past gave rise to very ugly enthno-nationalist tendencies – familiar to all Central and Eastern European people, especially in the Balkans – resulting in the shameful so-called “joint-administration” of then Bosnia-Herzegovina, shackling both people with bitterness for centuries to come. But empires’ ambitions know no bounds, not today, not back then. It was the result of an unending thirst for territory and resources, bound-up in different, mutually exclusive defence alliances, or imperial blocs that first lit the world on fire. Confrontation came far before the death of Franz Ferdinand, and made Total War unavoidable.
What came next – in the Magyar psyché – was another huge loss, followed by another long grudge, but with a crucial difference : The peoples within Austria-Hungary wanted their own independence, and in case after case they only agreed to join the war effort because they were guaranteed it. Over a million dead boys later, Austria-Hungary was no more, independence – however imperfectly drawn – was granted to a host of nations at the Treaty of Trianon, and the Soviet Union was almost born, still fighting for its infant life. In every Hungarian’s mind this event was cultivated as yet another, if not the worst loss in our history. They have been taught – between wars and during the last 30 years – that a pure, ethnic Hungary lost two thirds of its territory, and they dream of a return to this glorious past, to greatness. It is true that many Magyars woke up one day as citizens of neighbouring countries, but they will never acknowledge that the ugly ideology of ethno-nationalism had ripped people apart far before the Entente powers ever did.
Nonetheless there was new pain, and a new grudge. It is called the first Balkanization natively, eighty years before NATO bombed Beograd, and I’m sure Serbian people’s feelings are similar to the general Hungarian one. In so many ways, we have a shared fate with the entire peninsula. The contradictions between empires were not solved though, and my people were destined to repeat the past, this time because the Painter who united Europe wanted the subjugation of every Slav in the Soviet Union, her lands and massive resources exploited by the Reich’s death-machine.
Our internal contradictions also remained, and during the dark inter-war years nothing changed for the vast majority of working people. It was a dark history of continued feudal serfdom for the many, but some splendid fortunes for the magnates and priests, in what was still a Kingdom. Count Festetics’s manors and lands were only matched by the massive estates of the Cardinals, who since the country’s founding have placed the crown on the head of every king. Even Admiral-without-sea – and personal friend of Adolfo – Horthy was technically a regent, a caretaker to the throne, and in the final days of the next great darkness, Szálasi would slaughter 10,000-15,000 people of Jewish faith while another million Magyars would die following our German masters Eastward.
This dark and dense cloud in our history would not be our final destination though, and in 1945 light would finally pierce its’ canopy. But that is for our contemporary part of the story – to follow tomorrow – leading up to our current crisis.
Peace, Land and Bread
From Facebook Archives : 6 December 2022