Homeland Dictionary

  • 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, →

  • 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 →

  • 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 →

  • 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 →

  • 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 →

  • 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: →