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 →

  • 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 →

  • 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 →

  • 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 →

  • 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 →

  • 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 →

  • 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 →

  • 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 →

  • 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 →

  • 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 →