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 →

  • 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 →

  • 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 →

  • 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 →

  • 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 →

  • 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 →

  • 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 →

  • 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 →

  • 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: →