Homeland Dictionary

  • Gardener of the Apocalypse

    Everyone has a homeland dictionary. Or almost everyone. The vast majority of humanity can anchor themselves in space and time. Nine out of ten know where they come from; the tenth might just not want to say. This book is about why we, Hungarians, are where we are. And about why we stay when it →

  • Aquarium

    My grandmother never had an aquarium. Then she didn’t need one after the radiant satellite broadcaster for Hungarians worldwide, Duna Television, appeared and my uncle bought her a used color TV set. Because on Duna Television, for a long time after broadcasting hours, they showed an aquarium – live. Just think about it: all over →

  • Awakening

    No sooner had the hundred years of Hungarian solitude ended than we were hit by an avalanche of boundless rights proliferation and the cancel culture that sees everything in black and white. The racially-based class struggle proclaimed against white Western Christian culture is a combination of two ideologies that individually both led to dictatorships. We →

  • Balaton

    I’m a mountain man, born at the foot of the Hargita, about a thousand meters above sea level. I say ‘about’ because if you move a muscle in the mountains, you immediately go above or below any kind of boundary, in the mountains it’s mostly up and down, so cycling wasn’t a simple amusement. Swimming →

  • Book

    As long as I can remember, I’ve lived among books. I read because I passionately love reading; for me, it’s a self-indulgent pleasure. That’s why, until 2008, I didn’t even care about the presentation of a book, neither the cover nor the typography mattered, the content conveyed by the letters was detached from the object →

  • Climate Change

    On Thursday this week, we opened our Madách exhibition. It was high time to pay tribute to our other two-hundred-year-old genius besides Petőfi at the Petőfi Literary Museum. All the more so because Madách’s Tragedy, besides its aesthetic values, is a visionary work. Exactly a hundred years ago, in 1923, Mihály Babits wrote in the →

  • 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, →

  • Empire

    There’s a scene in Monty Python’s “Life of Brian” that my progressive acquaintances often compete to post on social media. “What have the Romans ever done for us?” they quote the classic question. Behind their glee lies the assumption that Brussels gives Hungary something that this barbaric backwater doesn’t have (in the Life of Brian, →

  • Europe

    The red bull descended from the canvas. It felt quite miserable from the moment of its creation, and a not-particularly-talented iron worker played a big part in this. In the evenings, the not-particularly-talented iron worker indulged in his passion, copying with great zeal the few and poor quality, colorless reproductions from the party newspaper in →

  • EUtopia (A Parable)

    Next week will mark 20 years since we joined the European Union. On this occasion, I’d like to tell a parable. Once upon a time, the members of a prison colony built on an island were set free. The colony was founded after the Great War, this is how the victors, the free Europeans and →

  • Football

    The whole continent is burning with football fever, and if there’s one thing every Hungarian is good at, it’s football, so the mood is lively in the Carpathian Basin. In our family too, we have our own ritual: father, mother, child put on the national jersey when our team plays, we cuddle up in front →

  • Footnote

    A few years ago, the “Dead White Men” movement started in American universities, aiming to trash Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian culture just because the vast majority of its pillars were “dead white men”. For their comrades spitting red mist on the old continent, it’s a further aggravating circumstance that they were all European. We’re knee-deep in →

  • Genius

    According to an old Arab legend, when God distributed intelligence, He hid it in the head of the Greeks, in the hands of the Chinese, and in the tongue of the Arabs. We have eleven hundred years of proof that Hungarians got all three. Europe would be poorer without us, but this is not enough: →

  • Heart Circle

    We are living in perilous times. A war is raging just next door, the consequences of which affect the whole world: we are threatened by an energy crisis, economic crisis, and food shortages. The Hungarian government is trying to hold the fort with all its might; it would make and have decisions made based on →

  • Heritage

    We Hungarians established a state based on Christian culture eleven hundred years ago. It’s no coincidence that many of our kings and queens were canonized by the church. About two hundred years ago, we decided that, in opposition to Vienna’s Germanizing efforts, we would stake out a modern native language culture by joining the ranks →

  • Human Material

    Look beyond the political fairy tales. The Russian-Ukrainian war is about people who don’t want to go to the front and don’t want to kill their fellow humans, dying. The essence of every war is that people die who could have lived longer. War is about orphans, about widows, about the pain of a mother →

  • Hungarians

    To dispute the existence of Hungarians is just rude. According to common consensus, they are in the world to be at home in it. They’ve been telling themselves this for quite some time, but somehow they don’t want to believe it. Hungarians indeed live all over the world, though many understand the world to mean →

  • Indian

    The Indian is a child of the boundless, therefore he doesn’t understand the concept of borders. He not only fails to understand the physical ones, but he doesn’t live with borders in his mind, soul, or genres. At the same time, the Indian doesn’t wander aimlessly; he goes where he has business, and if he →

  • In Minority

    In 1937, the greatest debate of the Hungarian minority in Transylvania erupted. Sándor Makkai, the bishop of the Transylvanian Reformed Church District and one of the leading figures of Transylvanism, packed up and moved to Hungary because, as he stated in his article “It Is Not Possible”: “…I cannot imagine any arrangement of minority life →

  • Like-man

    Around the turn of the millennium, as a promising final-year philosophy student, I was asked by the journal Korunk to write an essay. I don’t remember the specific topic, but I do remember the circumstances of writing it. What does a promising final-year philosophy student do? Drinks like a fish. At least in Cluj-Napoca, we →

  • Men of the Moment

    Allow me to deliver Endre Ady’s speech as museum director. Since we live in a continuous present. The entertainment industry and consumer idiocy compel us day after day to try new things, buy them, then throw them in the trash. Every morning, we wake up as if starting with a clean slate, forgetting what happened →

  • Migration

    During the outbreak of Willkommenskultur, when Angela Merkel was still determining which way was forward for Europe, I toyed with the idea of what would happen if the Szeklers decided to up and leave. Disclaimer: any resemblance to reality can only be down to coincidence! So it happened once, when everyone could still roam freely →

  • Mission

    From July 1, 2024, Hungary will take over the presidency of the European Union, and the Hungarian National Museum Public Collection Center will also be officially established. According to our basic stance, this is not a chance encounter of parallel worlds, but can be a fate-shaping alignment – if we make it so. The mission →

  • Mother Tongue

    n 2011, the Parliament declared November 13th as the Day of the Hungarian Language, because on this day in 1844, the law that made Hungarian the official state language in our country was adopted. Since then, we have officially lived as a nation in our own language. The posture required for this: we must look →

  • Multiculti

    “The creed of multiculturalism – that ‘We are now living side by side, and how good this is for us’ – has failed,” Angela Merkel declared more than ten years ago. Well, they should have asked the Hungarians who ended up in the successor states after the Trianon border modification, we could have told them →

  • National

    For some reason, it became newsworthy that I got another five-year sentence at the helm of the Petőfi Literary Museum. On this occasion, I would like to reaffirm what I consider to be national culture. Modern Hungarian culture is national culture. We’ve been learning this from Petőfi and his contemporaries for two centuries, but we →

  • Patriot

    Based on the lessons of the bloody and turbulent 20th century, human rights in themselves are worthless if there isn’t a strong political community to guarantee them. We know several types of political communities. Among these, the concept of a citizen is value-neutral. That of a patriot is not. The former lives in a continuous →

  • Petőfi Time

    This year we celebrated the bicentennial of the National Anthem, as well as the 200th anniversary of the birth of two of our geniuses, Sándor Petőfi and Imre Madách. Éva Bonczidai, the editor-in-chief of the Hungarian Culture magazine, suggested the idea of placing a time capsule in the Hungarian National Bank at the end of →

  • Poem Homeland

    Let’s start by slightly adjusting a thought from one of my favorite philosophers, Ludwig Wittgenstein: “The mystery is not what Hungarian culture is like, but that it exists at all.” Indeed, even the most rabid neo-Marxist or liberarian doesn’t dare deny the existence of Hungarian culture. It exists to such an extent that we’ve even →

  • Poetic

    On the occasion of the Day of Poetry, I invite the dear listener on an adventure. Let’s imagine what Attila József’s birthday might be like in the tavern of the afterlife. Let’s let loose a philosopher and poet there, whose philosophy is spoiled poetry and whose poetry is spoiled philosophy, let him be an annoying →

  • Progression

    I would like to talk about the difference between free love and mandatory free love, in other words, about human freedom. To do this, let’s recall the era of the “three Ts”, “tolerated, forbidden, supported”. The three Ts precisely marked a lack of freedom, the space where a person is not free. Comrade Aczél was →

  • Rebirth

    We live in times when instead of a Messiah, we get lowercase judases, instead of the Way of the Cross, we get Covid. A human, not divine, new beginning. The coronavirus forced us to keep our distance. We stepped back a couple of paces, at least one and a half meters. Space opened up for →

  • Rule of Law

    Let’s perhaps start with this: why doesn’t the European Union have a constitution? Do we still remember the squabble? The European Union doesn’t have a constitution because we, European Union citizens, couldn’t agree on the minimum that would allow such a foundational document to come into existence. It almost succeeded, in 2004 it looked very →

  • Sacrifice

    Let’s talk about the Memorial Day for the Victims of Communist Dictatorships. I often say that I am a child of the dictatorship. I was born in 1976 in Romania, in Szeklerland. I lived the first 14 years of my life in a shortage economy as a target person of a godless and inhumane regime →

  • Salvation History

    Many have often referenced, refuted, or even confirmed Hegel’s idea of “the cunning of reason,” let’s quote it in perhaps its most understandable formulation: “In world history, the actions of men produce something beyond what they aim at and achieve, beyond what they directly know and desire. They fulfill their own interests; but something further →

  • Sustainable

    Let’s start with trivialities, perhaps we’ll get closer to understanding what’s happening to us, what’s happening to the world. One such problem, now flattened into a cliché, is the question of sustainable development, which many consider to be the cause of our greatest difficulties. I won’t delve into the conundrum of how development is possible →

  • Tolerance

    The meaning of tolerance: forbearance, patience. The Latin ‘tolero’ means endure, bear. It’s also translated as long-suffering. We endure so that there may be peace. I haven’t yet encountered an interpretation of tolerance – that can be taken seriously – which would translate it as “approval”. If I tolerate something, it doesn’t mean I approve →

  • Trans-tale

    Once upon a time, this side of the Oscars but beyond the Grammys, it happened that a rainbow appeared over Csíksomlyó. But it was such a rainbow-y rainbow that the world gathered to marvel at it. TV crews circled in all sorts of helicopters, filming it from the right, filming it from the left, some →

  • Trianon Trauma

    About the fact that it’s not enough to acquire a territory, you also need to know what to do with it, we Hungarians could tell you a lot. On December 1, 1918, 1,228 Romanian delegates in Gyulafehérvár voted for a resolution declaring the union of Transylvania with the then Kingdom of Romania. MÁV (Hungarian State →

  • Union

    Nicolás Gómez Dávila, a Colombian – despite this, or perhaps because of it – critical Western thinker, wrote in the last century: “Traveling to Europe is like visiting a house where the servants show us the empty rooms in which brilliant parties once took place.” Many, agreeing with Dávila, think that Europe: was, we think: →

  • Vates

    Just as January is Ferenc Kölcsey, or April is Attila József, for me, February is Sándor Csoóri. And now I should say something beautiful about Sándor Csoóri, I who don’t even reach up to his little finger, and precisely because I don’t even reach up to his little finger, I miss him very much. It →

  • Victimhood

    Basic thesis: we are all victims – except for white, Christian, heterosexual men. They aren’t because, if I understand correctly, white, heterosexual, Christian men in “white Western civilization” 1. are in the majority, 2. have had and still have power, which they abuse. The key statement of the apologists for the culture of victimhood: “the →

  • War

    Let’s start (again) from where we began when the Russian-Ukrainian war broke out: all wars are meaningless, every human life is unique, unrepeatable, and irreplaceable – from a Christian perspective, sacred. This is what we thought and still think on a Christian basis. And, when it still mattered what the West thought, The Universal Declaration →