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 →

  • 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 →

  • 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 →

  • 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 →

  • 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 →

  • 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 →