Conquest

I first visited Brussels in 2008. It could be called symbolic that as an associate of Bishop László Tőkés, a Member of the European Parliament, my colleague and I took materials for an international Bible exhibition to the European Parliament. We transported the Bible in all official and unofficial languages of Europe in a van, even the incunabula fit in. On the occasion of our Brussels Bible exhibition, it turned out that in those parts, they write the Book with a lowercase “b” and that the European representatives who happened to wander by nostalgically recognized that they had seen the Holy Scripture in their grandparents’ rooms.

One evening, we ended up in a cult pub called Delirium; we heard that you could get all the world’s worthwhile beers there. That night walking – ahem – towards our accommodation, we managed to get lost and wander into a neighborhood in the capital of Europe where, apart from us, not only no white person but no one born in Europe could be found at that hour. Back then, no one was talking about migrants yet, so we couldn’t articulate to ourselves what was strange, but it was very — I can’t find a better word for it – familiarly foreign.

This experience lingered in my mind in 2015 when the migrant crisis broke out. That Transylvanian Hungarians knew exactly what would follow. The “onion-domed conquest” unfolded similarly. In Transylvanian – once Hungarian – cities, it was at least as foreign  to us that from an Orthodox church built in a jiffy on a handkerchief-sized area between apartment blocks, the Romanian-language service moved into our homes on Sundays, amplified through speakers, as the voice of the muezzin might be foreign in the – once Christian – European cities. The bad news is that you can resign yourself to it. One closes the window, puts on headphones, or leaves home for that time. The even worse news is that you hear the “foreign” service better when you don’t hear it. Even years later, hundreds of kilometers away, in a native language environment, it still echoes.

The analogy falters here, my challengers claim, because Romanian Orthodox believers are also Christians. We at least have a common premise with them. And they’re right about this, or rather, they’ve become right today.

We all made one mistake. This is not just a religious issue. Let’s go to any – once Hungarian – Transylvanian, Upper Hungarian, Vojvodinian, or Subcarpathian city that the current majority nation has inhabited. Let’s take a walk in the historical centers. Looking at the buildings, one could feel at home anywhere in the Carpathian Basin. Let’s listen in on the conversations of the people living there. And if we don’t know Serbian, Slovakian, Romanian, or Ukrainian, then the feeling of foreignness overtakes us again. Someone else is inhabiting our built heritage. But if we speak their language, it’s even worse. Because we understand that they, in turn, already feel at home in it.

This is what’s happening now to our West. This is not multiculturalism. But a new conquest. And Europe, that Europe we longed to return to when locked behind the Iron Curtain, that Europe we Hungarians built and defended for 1100 years, that Europe is losing.

Notes:

László Tőkés: A prominent Hungarian Reformed Church bishop and politician from Transylvania, Romania. He played a significant role in the 1989 Romanian Revolution and later became a Member of the European Parliament.

“Onion-domed conquest” (hagymakupolás honfoglalás): This phrase refers to the spread of Orthodox churches (characterized by their onion-shaped domes) in traditionally non-Orthodox areas. It’s used metaphorically to describe cultural and demographic changes.

Historical context: The text makes references to historical Hungarian territories that are now part of neighboring countries (Transylvania, Upper Hungary/Slovakia, Vojvodina/Serbia, Subcarpathia/Ukraine). These changes resulted from the Treaty of Trianon after World War I, a sensitive topic in Hungarian national consciousness.

“Multiculti”: Short for multiculturalism, used here in a somewhat dismissive context.

Iron Curtain: The ideological and physical boundary dividing Europe into Western and Soviet-influenced blocs during the Cold War. Hungary was on the Soviet side until 1989.

1100 years: Refers to the traditional dating of Hungarian settlement in the Carpathian Basin (895-896 AD) and the subsequent history of Hungary as a Christian kingdom in Europe.

European migration crisis: The text refers to the 2015 European migrant crisis, drawing parallels between this recent event and historical demographic changes in formerly Hungarian-majority areas.