Hungarian Civilization

The thousand-year history of historians has expanded into the 2000-year-old Hungarian past of archaeologists and folklorists, through excavations and the collection of folk songs. This culture was the shared creation of the Uralic and Caucasian peoples, brought with us from Scythia. We are the heirs of peoples that have been crushed, swallowed, and extinguished. We are the only memory of the empire-building nomadic peoples.

The heart of the country, the Great Plain, closely resembles the earlier homelands of the Hungarians. This plain, a soft body part, is protected by a hard shell, the Carpathians. The Hungarian people have always aligned their actions with this border, never crossing it lightly, never imperialistically with all their hearts, but they could not reconcile the fact that this armor should be incomplete. The Hungarian nation has never regarded its homeland as a mere living space, but as a country divinely designated.

At the time of the Hungarian conquest, the nation had a state organization that naturally developed the cavalry and military technology which defeated the scattered peoples living in the Danube basin and undertook unparalleled adventures in Europe. The Hungarian people made a decision when they adopted Christianity, which determined their entire future. With this decision, they embraced a bloodier future, a more sacrificial fate. On the crossroads of Rome and Byzantium, they aligned with Western Christianity. The consequences of this decision had to be faced centuries later. When Byzantine power, which had submitted to the Turks, chose heroic resistance instead of following the Orthodox peoples of the East, they fought against the Muslim world power for a century and a half, until their blood was exhausted.

Hungarian Christian culture gradually adapted to European cultural trends. Until the defeat at Mohács, our culture towered above our northern, eastern, and southern neighbors. In three directions, we were the givers, the generous intermediaries. The Ottoman occupation deprived us of this role for a century and a half, and it was only in the era of Széchenyi that Hungarian creativity fully recovered.

The western part of Hungary, Pannonia, was a Roman province for nearly half a millennium, and the eastern part, Dacia, was a Roman province for a good century and a half. After them, the Huns were the greatest rulers here, followed by the Avars fortifying themselves in the area. The terrible genocidal campaign of Charlemagne's Franks silenced this region for a long time. Only scattered remnants of people, Old Slavic tribes, lived here, with whom the state-building Hungarians coexisted. Then Flemish, Rhenish, Italian, and Walloon settlers arrived, and later three nomadic kindred tribes from the East were welcomed. In the 13th century, the shepherds from the Balkans, the ancestors of the Transylvanian Romanians, appeared in the eastern mountains, and the Rusyns, who had broken off from the Belarusian mass, appeared in the northern mountains. However, until the Battle of Mohács, the Hungarian population always accounted for 80%. This devastating majority was worn down by the long Turkish wars. The proportion of Hungarians diminished, and only the long peace of the 18th century raised the population from biological depths. By the middle of the 19th century, the absolute majority of the population was Hungarian, with the largest minority not exceeding 18%. Within today's borders, 71% of the population is Hungarian. The Hungarian state is a nation-state, but not in the impatient, assimilating sense of the word.

The Hungarian people have always instinctively believed only in voluntary assimilation, considering this the true gain of the Hungarian soul and spirit. The most impatient compatriots, the so-called Magyarizers, were not true Hungarians but recent immigrants or assimilated individuals who, with their good intentions and impatience, sought to gain more trust. True Hungarians, as the first kings' sacred heritage, recognize the rights of nationalities and respect their cultural development. This patience was reciprocated by the nationalities for centuries, who proudly considered themselves Hungarians. The best intentions of the multilingual Hungarians were unknowingly disrupted by Herder. His romantic ideas distorted into impatient nationalist agitation between 1848 and 1918. Meanwhile, our nationalities gradually embraced Hungarian influence in literature, arts, sciences, and military virtues. Our suffering, misfortune, and hardships won over the best of non-Hungarians, who willingly shared our pain and contributed to our creative efforts. The difficult heroic life has its charm for pure souls. The ancient fire of the Hungarian genius is fed by new sacrificial wines. Therefore, we love as kin those great ones who, with foreign names and broken Hungarian, proudly declared themselves Hungarian and gave their immense strength to the nation with an unfavorable fate. This nation with an unfavorable fate has always surprised the world, always recreated itself with its persistent sense of mission. It was not alone in this. Europe is the common homeland of small nations, the only continent where ambitious small nations live. The fact that a small nation can play a major role and be a nobler part of a continent than a larger nation is characteristic only of Europe. A small nation can be the heart of a continent.

Cs. Szabó László "Kárpát kebelében" Könyves Kálmán kiadó, 1994