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 →

  • 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, →

  • 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 →

  • 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 →

  • 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 →

  • 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 →

  • 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 →

  • 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 →