You can read the previous part of the essay here.
Lajos Prohászka’s philosophy of history is summarized by the prelude borrowed from Friedrich Schlegel at the beginning of The Wanderer and the Hider (A vándor és a bujdosó): behind the multiplicity of surface phenomena, there lies a ‘gentle voice’ (leiser Ton). This voice is none other than the Essence, the Wesen of German Romanticism. Just as in historical noise, there is a constant, quiet, but all-pervading supra-historical Form-structure that ensures the permanence of the national character amidst changes.
Prohászka’s Philosophical Method
According to Prohászka, a people is not simply an aggregate, but a spiritual totality in itself. Biology merely provides the material for this, but the boundaries are drawn by a factor of a metaphysical character: the Spirit manifesting in history. The destiny of a people is how it realizes its own essence. The Hungarian destiny, therefore, is not Trianon or Mohács, but the manner in which the ‘spiritual form’ of the Hungarians reacted to these tragedies of fate. A ‘peculiarly new’ quality of a people thus means that its existence cannot be derived purely from the physical sociology of families or classes.
The most important question for him in this regard is the same as in the case of the empirical ‘impermanence’ of the world’s material form: if the physical reality of a people is constantly changing, being born, and dying, what gives it its solid self-identity? Why does a people exist? What is that specific ‘folk nature’ or ‘Hungarian consciousness’ that undoubtedly permeates the nation?
‘What is that specific “folk nature” or “Hungarian consciousness” that undoubtedly permeates the nation?’
Prohászka’s answer: the biological substratum merely provides the material, but the solid and unequivocal boundaries are drawn by a metaphysical factor—the Spirit revealing itself in history. Prohászka emphasizes: the Hungarian people are not Hungarian because they are genetically homogeneous (since they are not), but because a highly specific historical spirit, characteristic only of them, forged this multi-rooted biological material into a unity.
1Let us note: the validity of Prohászka’s philosophical intuition—that the people or the nation is not a biological, but above all a spiritual reality—is paradoxically supported by the results of modern population genetics precisely through its refutation of biological determinism. Genetic homogeneity is an exceptional rarity in history; we can speak of it at most in the case of isolated island nations (Iceland, Japan). In contrast, the Central European and Eurasian peoples possessing a characterful national consciousness—the Germans, the Hungarians, or even the Turks—are genetically distinctly heterogeneous. In the case of these peoples, it is obvious that the coherence of identity is not ensured by the uniformity of material components (the blood substratum), but by a ‘non-manifest’ organizing force transcending biological contingencies: the Spirit crystallized into a historical form.
‘Marchland Spirit’, Hungaria Abscondita, and the Corpus Sacri Doloris
Prohászka emphasizes that the Hungarian is an ‘abandoned, and even reluctantly tolerated newcomer’ in the family of European nations: general misunderstanding is one of the constant motifs of the Hungarian fate, haunting the nation since the Conquest. For centuries, the Hungarian turned towards the West with ‘touching effort’, trying to be the ‘good child of Europe’, conforming to the norms of the Latin–Germanic cultural sphere. This effort, however, was never rewarded by the West with full acceptance: the Hungarians were ‘elbowed aside’, viewed as semi-barbarians, or, what is even more painful, misunderstood. Hungarian self-perception, therefore, constantly fluctuated between ‘submissive humility’ (shame in the face of Western culture, a feeling of ‘immaturity’) and ‘defiant vertigo’ (denial of facts, wounded pride): this is why a ‘reflected self-knowledge’ could not develop.2
Prohászka’s finitism does not simply mean narrow-mindedness, but a striving to close and bound existence. While the essence of the German ‘daemonic drive’ is boundlessness, the desire soaring towards the infinite, perpetual change, and ‘Faustian’ dynamism, the foundational experience of the Hungarian soul is closedness. ‘The soul with a finitist inclination is oriented towards the immediate, spatial delimitation, and settling in the secure.’ The Hungarian soul is averse to everything that is problematic, unresolved, or ‘prompts waiting’. The Hungarian does not like open questions or processes with uncertain outcomes. Instead, he ‘resolutely gravitates towards the certain, the permanent’. This attitude stems from a kind of ‘naive self-confidence’ and ‘satisfaction in his own existence’. The Hungarian does not want to expand his existence to cosmic proportions, nor does he want to shape the world in his own image (like the French or the English), but is content with what is, provided he can know it is secure.
At the same time, the deepest metaphysical layer of Prohászka’s concept is not even finitism, but the interpretation of Hungarian history as a Passion narrative. According to the idea of Hungaria abscondita—that is, ‘Hidden Hungary’—the true values of the Hungarian spirit do not live on the surface, in official state representation, but in the depths, ‘underground’. In the stormy history of Hungary, which was incessantly exposed to the expansionist ambitions of kindred Eastern tribes and empires on the one hand, and to foreign Western feudal and conquest attempts on the other, the ever-present inclination to build external and internal marchlands (gyepű) manifested itself ever more strongly. While the conquering Mongols—and occasionally the Germans—could at best only pass through the earlier marchlands without achieving lasting results, after Mohács, the external marchland was definitively destroyed by the Ottoman armies.
‘The deepest metaphysical layer of Prohászka’s concept is…the interpretation of Hungarian history as a Passion narrative’
It is at this point that the radical break occurs: in Prohászka’s interpretation, this is not merely a historical–political, but a metaphysical and spiritual–psychological turn. The external marchland thus permanently became an internal, spiritual, and psychological marchland, now against both the East and the West, while the Hungarians were forced to let the Wanderer come closer to themselves than ever before in order definitively to protect themselves from the East—from which they themselves had torn away. The Hungarian nation is no longer held together by common goals or success, but by the Corpus Sacri Doloris (The Body of Sacred Sorrow), the mystery of shared suffering.
The way in which Prohászka projects the period from the country being torn into three parts up to Trianon all the way back to the early Árpád era reveals that he never truly believed that the Hungarians could have existed in their chosen homeland as a stable folk community freely expressing their own essence. ‘We were the Holy Crown or at least wanted to be, a whole corpus, but we are a broken body, with bleeding, mangled limbs.’ This definition, deeply Christian in inspiration yet saturated with historical pessimism and Spenglerian determinism, positions the Hungarians as a kind of sacred sacrifice, a defensor christianitatis bleeding to death under blows, whose peculiar raison d’être is martyrdom.
The Hungarians, at the same time, are the Clipeus oppositorum (The Shield of Opposites): at the collision point of East and West, they are not a bridge, not a ‘ferry-country’ as László Németh thought, but a shield upon which opposites are blunted. For Prohászka, however, the peculiar tragedy lies in the fact that this protective role slowly grinds down the one holding the shield. In the Hungarian soul, Eastern descent and the assumption of Western destiny caused an irresolvable tension, an ‘internal, spiritual Trianon’ well before the actual, historical Trianon, which almost inevitably led to the experienced tragedies. The Hungarian soul, in truth, could no longer bear this tension.
The Eastern and Western Nature of the Hungarians
Prohászka described the Eastern origin tradition of the Hungarians—which surfaced in the era as the ‘Turanian idea’—and the deeper connection to the Eastern origins of the Hungarians as ‘Attila-dreams’ or, summarily, as a simple pagan rebellion. This ‘Koppány-spirit’ is an ‘aborted myth’ that appeared only as a sterile rebellion throughout Hungarian history, just as contemporary Turanism is merely a barren turning to the past that prevents facing the realities of the present.
Although Prohászka writes that there is no separate ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ type of Hungarian, only a single ‘split’ Hungarian, notice how he envisions the ‘exclusively Eastern’ Hungarian, if such existed: ‘the defiantly seclusive, purely defensive, motionless, primitively comfortable, Eastern-type Hungarian’.3 In that era, numerous significant philosophers of history besides him identified the heritage brought by Hungarians from the East partly with a murky ‘world of instincts’, and partly with a primitive or raw force juxtaposed against the ‘cultivated West’. If this does not receive a ‘Western form’, it inevitably dissipates. Thus, for many of them—in a highly unjust manner, unworthy of Hungarian roots—the Eastern ‘Puszta’, from which the Hungarians originally arrived, was nothing but the metaphysical symbol of irrationality and formlessness.
Prohászka’s view of the East appears even more pregnantly in the subsection titled ‘The Latin Way of Life’, where he considers it utterly impossible that ‘wise deliberation, the sober recognition of life’s possibilities’ in ‘Hunnia, which loves to swing itself in dreams’, could be traced back to anything other than ‘the influence of the Latin spirit’. According to Prohászka: ‘…he who associates this deliberation with the contemplative, lazy apathy of Eastern man is on the wrong track.’4
For Prohászka, Eastern behaviour is ‘duckweed’—‘Slavic melancholia and Turkish fatalism’—from which the Hungarian is saved from sinking definitively only by ‘the rationally acting spirit of the Christian West’.5 It is curious, however, that precisely in the ‘Westerner’ Babits’s critique of Prohászka, the Eastern ‘comfort’ mentioned so often in The Wanderer and the Hider takes an unexpectedly dialectical turn. Instead of escapism, this suddenly becomes ennobled into the aristocratic dignity of the ‘contemplative lord’.
‘Around us live all nimble peoples, active, even pushing nations…[The Hungarian, by contrast] is not active, but contemplative, who calmly looks around, and always knows well when he must not and when it is not worth acting. His very situation dictates this. With action, he can usually only make things worse. His only self-defence is caution. Thus he seems sluggish, apathetic: indeed, he has no intention of pushing.’6
According to Gyula Szekfű, medieval Hungary was not a model of ‘hiding’ or the ‘marchland spirit’, but of successful ‘political realism’. The Hungarians did not barricade themselves in, but recognized the ‘natural borders’ provided by the Carpathian Basin, and therefore did not strive for unrealistic imperial conquests. This was not passivity, but a sobriety capable of maintaining a balance between Eastern heritage and Western Christian culture. This allowed the country of the Árpáds and the mixed-house kings to become one of the most stable and strongest states in Europe. In this era, the national character still formed a harmonious unity: there was no insurmountable cultural gap between the leading stratum and the people, and political action was in harmony with national interests.7
In light of these contemporary critiques, there is a strong suspicion that Prohászka also started from the optically deceptive image of the ‘passive East’ versus the ‘active West’. In European intellectual history, before the 17th–18th centuries, the conception of Ex Oriente Lux (‘Light from the East’) was still dominant: in medieval and early modern Europe, the East was not yet the source of ‘backwardness’, but of sacred origin, religious revelation (the Holy Land), and ancient wisdom (prisca sapientia). In Hungary, this positive image of the East formed the cornerstone of feudal national consciousness: the Scythian–Hunnic tradition, spanning from the medieval chroniclers (Simon of Kéza) to Werbőczy’s Tripartitum, interpreted Eastern descent not as passivity, but as the source of warrior virtue, the right of ‘free conquerors’, and noble (national) liberty.
Prohászka relates to the Turkic peoples in 1936 in a 19th-century manner. At that time, the Ottoman Empire was no longer the conquering world power, but ‘the sick man of Europe’, slowly and helplessly drifting towards collapse. The Turkic peoples of Central Asia, meanwhile, had, precisely in this era, disappeared into the sea of the Tsarist empire. Projecting this declining, weakened state back onto the ancient, steppe Turkic character—with which the Hungarians of the Conquest and the Árpád era actually have a serious connection—is decidedly mistaken.8
The Eastern equestrian nomadic peoples (Huns, Turks, Mongols), who are spiritually and materially (genetically) related to the conquering Hungarians, can actually be called ‘finitists’ in the Prohászkan sense the least. Their living space was the Eurasian Steppe, the symbol of earthly ‘infinity’. The essence of nomadic empires is mobility and boundlessness, that incessant expansion which could perhaps be most aptly condensed into the symbol of the ‘horizon’. ‘Contemplative, lazy apathy’ or resigned ‘fatalism’ are not at all characteristic of the Turkic peoples or the Mongols. This is precisely the opposite of Prohászka’s ‘marchland spirit’. The dynamism of the Turkic and Mongolic peoples lay exactly in the fact that they did not recognize physical and spiritual borders. The Göktürk Khaganate, the Seljuks, or the Ottoman Empire never stopped at natural or historical borders; they expanded across mountains, rivers, trade routes, tribal settlement areas, and cities. The Mongol Empire, related to them on a spiritual-cultural level and ethnically, created the largest contiguous land empire in world history.
‘The essence of nomadic empires is mobility and boundlessness’
It is a strange paradox that, when Prohászka was writing about ‘Turkish fatalism’ and the inability of the Eastern soul to act in 1936, at the publication of The Wanderer and the Hider, one of the most dynamic, radical state-building experiments in world history was taking place in Turkey. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s ‘Westernizing’ reforms were culminating exactly at this time, in the 1930s.
The real difference is not between activity and passivity, but in the direction of the activity. Celtic–Germanic (Western) and Greco–Roman (Southern–Latin) activity is often transcendental and—when the transcendent direction secularizes with the dissolution of the medieval Christian ecumene—decidedly utopian in direction: it seeks to reshape, permeate, or conquer the world according to an idea. Turkic/Eastern activity, however, is immanent and realistic in its power-technique: it is not in the least ‘inward-turning’ or ‘dreamy’, but is directed primarily at acquiring power, maintaining order, and pragmatically expanding the empire. This is precisely the ‘political makeup’ and will that Gyula Szekfű also perceived in connection with the ‘Hungarian character’.
The negatively signed evaluation of the East–West dichotomy in Prohászka is, in fact, the legacy of 18th–19th-century Western European thought—the French/Scottish Enlightenment and German Idealism. The turning point was brought about mostly by the Enlightenment (especially the concept of ‘Eastern despotism’ appearing in Montesquieu’s Persian Letters) and the fetishization of technical progress. It was from this point onwards that the East became ‘lazy’ and ‘backward’ in the eyes of Western man. Although Prohászka did not have a very high opinion of the French Enlightenment, the philosophy of history of German Idealism and Romanticism affected him with elemental force. While the anti-Eastern bias of Western rationalism does not appear in him, or only in a highly sublimated, latent form, under the decisive influence of German philosophy he evaluated the Hungarians in a distorting refraction in his most famous—and undoubtedly deepest—philosophical work, where the Eastern roots and origin tradition of the Hungarians could only be interpreted as a deficit.
Although Prohászka’s analysis is psychologically quite accurate and coherent regarding the Kuruc era and 19th-century noble melancholia, it also contains severe one-sidedness, both historically and in relation to the full, diverse picture of the Hungarian national character. The most important of these is that the image of the ‘Hider’ simply ignores the active, empire-building, dominant period of the medieval Kingdom of Hungary. The self-image of Hungarians in the 10th–15th centuries cannot be characterized by anxiety at all, but was rather a confident, integrating exercise of power.
The Avar ‘Hring’ and the Hungarian Marchland
Prior to Mohács, the Hungarians actually built their marchland (gyepű) outwards. From historical factual material, it indeed appears that equestrian nomadic peoples of related culture and consciousness, such as the Huns and the Avars, strove for a world empire, cultural–spiritual permeation, and westward expansion, while the Hungarians only engaged in ‘incursions’ (kalandozások). After Augsburg, the Hungarians almost immediately began building the western marchland—a kind of physical and cultural wall.
When the conquering Hungarians began their inward turn, in reality they only renovated the marchland system built by the increasingly seclusive Late Avars. In connection with the renewal of the ‘rings of the Avars’—that is, the building of marchlands mainly in a western direction—we can indeed speak of a spiritual and military–technological continuity. Prohászka does not note this either. Western ‘marchland-building’ was actually not started by the Hungarians, but by the Late Avar Khaganate; the archetype of the Hungarian ‘marchland spirit’—let us disregard the positive or negative signs here for a moment—therefore stretches much deeper back in time than the Árpádian conquest.
This seclusive, concentric logic of organizing space in the Carpathian Basin was first immortalized by the Frankish chronicles in connection with the Avars. The monk Notker of St Gall, in his work Gesta Karoli Magni, gives a fascinating description of the ‘Ring’ (Hring) of the Avars, believed to be impregnable. According to his description, the Avar empire was surrounded by nine concentric ramparts (haga or indagines), built of living wood, hedges, and stone, with territories stretching for miles between them.9
This ‘ninefold ring’ could be the most perfect symbol of Prohászkan finitism, though not merely in a negative sense. The ‘Avar ring’, alongside protection against external forces, also strives for the hermetic closure of the internal, sacred space against the chaotic infinity of the outside world. Viewed from Mircea Eliade’s perspective of the history of religions, the meaning of the ‘ninefold ring’ is organically connected to premodern man’s conception of space. ‘For religious (that is: premodern—my interjection) man, space is not homogeneous; he experiences interruptions, breaks in it; some parts of space are qualitatively different from others.’10
For him, occupying and delimiting territory is nothing but creating the Cosmos out of Chaos. The Huns, Avars, and Hungarians were new conquerors in the Carpathian Basin: it follows precisely from this that they had to establish the sanctified, ‘real’ world of the space within the walls (the marchland), while the ‘unknown space’ beyond the walls appeared to them as the realm of demonic forces and formless confusion.
In this light, the demand to draw borders is not a lack of dynamism, but precisely the precondition for sanctifying space. Without a clear, distinct border, there is no Centre (Axis Mundi), and without a Centre, there is no orientation, only the homogeneity of profane space. The Avar Hring—and later the Hungarian Gyepű—can thus show a parallel with the Imago Mundi (‘Image of the World’) in the Eliadean sense: an attempt to establish a fixed, sacred order of forms in the chaotic infinity.11
‘The demand to draw borders is not a lack of dynamism, but precisely the precondition for sanctifying space’
Prohászka writes about the ‘entrenchment’ of the Hungarian soul, but he errs when he identifies this exclusively with seclusion or an escape from dynamism. This circular defence can also be the geopolitical embodiment of the Katechon (‘the Restrainer’) in the Carl Schmittian sense. In St Paul’s Second Epistle to the Thessalonians, the Katechon is that mysterious force that restrains the coming of the Antichrist and the ultimate chaos swallowing the world. Schmitt, in his work The Nomos of the Earth, points out that the essence of the Christian Middle Ages was precisely this static but heroic resistance against chaos:
‘The Christian empire of the Middle Ages was not a state…The empire in this sense was the katechon, “the restrainer”. This means it was a historical power capable of restraining the appearance of the Antichrist and the end of the present eon.’12
Áron Czopf, in his volume Spatial Revolution (Térforradalom), observes that the foundational experience of modernity is ‘space turning into time’: the logic of the Ship (the free flow of capital, progression, and ‘logistical indifference’) liquidates the logic of the House and the Cathedral (arrival, dwelling, and sacred order). The Avar–Hungarian ‘marchland spirit’—as Katechon—is, in this sense, nothing but the counter-revolution of Space against the all-sweeping, Hegelian regimes of Time. As Czopf formulates:
‘Space plays the same role in politics as silence does in music: we always find it in the background, because it not only precedes politics…but it also determines the entire internal structure of musical/political space.’13
The Marchland is that political Silence and, at the same time, sacred Space, which stems the tide of mere temporality (that is: destructive progress), thereby allowing the Hungarian nation, in opposition to Faustian, daemonic Germanness, not merely to ‘progress’, but to arrive in the sacred space defined by itself.
The most remarkable thing about the Hungarian ‘marchland spirit’ is not that, when the Hungarians took over dominion of the Carpathian Basin, they executed a grandiose metapolitical and sacred inversion. They preserved this ancient, ‘pagan’, and Eastern form of defence (the marchland and centralized space), but changed its content and direction. What the Avars built against Christianity, the Hungarians utilized for the defence of Christianity. We can see that between the Hungarian ‘marchland spirit’, the Avar Hring, and the medieval idea of the antemurale christianitatis (‘the bulwark of Christianity’), there is actually a deep-rooted continuity despite the inversion. This is the desperate but heroic maintenance of metaphysically interpreted Order against the rushing ‘Deluge’—whether it be Western feudal ambition masquerading as religious conversion, an Eastern steppe flood, or modern nihilism now pouring in equally from West and East.
For the conquering Hungarians, the Carpathian Basin was actually not yet a closed cauldron to be entrenched, but a massive, unified geopolitical base from which power could be radiated. While Prohászka decidedly saw contemporary ‘Attila-dreams’ as a characteristic and current case of ‘derealization’, and perceived in the ‘Koppány-spirit’ only sterile rebellion against necessary European integration, believing that Turanism is an escape into a ‘glorious past’, according to him the Eastern (‘Turkish–Slavic influence’) only amplified melancholia and the inability to act in the Hungarian.
According to Prohászka, the ‘hiding’ soul cannot form an organic unity; it can only ‘scatter’. In Horthy-era Hungary, in reality, the Turanian Society and the movement of Turanism—though admittedly often burdened with ‘mirage-chasing’ theories—attempted to expand the spatial and spiritual horizon. Where Prohászka saw the narrowing of space—primarily towards the West and South—the Turanists proclaimed the cognitive expansion of space towards the East.
Surprising parallels can be drawn between the spatial conception of Turanism and postmodern philosophy (Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari). Smooth space is the nomadic spatial conception: this is the space of directions, flows, and intensities, where there are no walls, only vectors—the steppe, the sea, the desert. This is the space of the ‘Wanderer’ and the ‘Sovereign’. Contrast this with striated space (espace strié): the space of the settled state, fragmented by walls, borders, property rights, and bureaucratic grids. This is the space of the ‘Hider’ and ‘finitism’.[15]
‘This is the space of directions, flows, and intensities, where there are no walls, only vectors—the steppe, the sea, the desert’
Overall, Prohászka viewed the Hungarian Great Plain and the steppe mentality entirely through the eyes of Western, settled man. For him, ‘empty’ space signifies lack (horror vacui). Conversely, according to the logic of ‘smooth space’, the steppe is not a space of deprivation, but of pure potentiality. The nomad does not ‘hide’ in space, but fills it with his speed and intensity. What Prohászka saw as the ‘finitism’ (seclusion) of the Hungarian soul is the instinctive defence of the ‘war machine’ (in the Deleuzian sense) against the ‘striating’, parcelling logic of the state.
If we take this interpretation further, we can actually see in Prohászka’s ‘hiding’ the peculiar tragedy of the nomad trapped in striated space, rendered immobile. The Hungarian, however, as a ‘sovereign’ ruling spirit, was capable of interpreting the Carpathian Basin as a ‘smooth space’, that is, as the space of possibilities and free movement. The successful eras of Hungarian history (the foundation of the state, the age of St Ladislaus, the empire of the Angevins, or Matthias) always applied the logic of ‘smooth space’: the permeability of borders, mobility, and the extension of the diplomatic and military radius of action.
- In the case of contemporary Hungarians, the Asian and ‘steppe Europid’ (in older terminology: ‘Turanid’) genetic trace arriving with the conquerors is not very high in today’s, mainly urban, average population—although a complete study has not been conducted, in light of results thus far it may be 10–15 per cent—the dominant element is the gene pool of the Europid population found here and settled later. This is also proven by newer genetic analyses, which find Hungarians living today to have genetics similar to the Central European population: at the same time, a maximum of 5–8 per cent Inner Asian trace also appears significantly, left behind by the Mongoloid genetic marker of the conquerors and the assimilation of the Avar-era population already living here (Avars, Onogurs, Sarmatians). See: Bíró et al, Testing Central and Inner Asian admixture among contemporary Hungarians, https://www.fsigenetics.com/article/S1872-4973(14)00247-6/abstract, last accessed: 31 March 2026. These examples vindicate both Prohászka and the ethno–symbolists: national character is not a function of genetic ‘purity’, but of symbolic historical consciousness. ↩︎
- Lajos Prohászka, A vándor és a bujdosó [The Wanderer and the Hider], Minerva Könyvtár, Budapest, 1936, pp. 84–85. ↩︎
- Ibid, p. 128. ↩︎
- ‘Which Eastern people,’ he adds, ‘likes clear, unobscured, concise, and well-articulated vision and speech, and can continuously adjust its abilities to new tasks and demands?’ (Ibid, p. 130.) ↩︎
- Ibid, p. 137. ↩︎
- Mihály Babits, ‘A magyar jellemről’ [‘On the Hungarian Character’], In: Gyula Szekfű (ed), Mi a magyar?, Magyar Szemle Társaság, Budapest, 1939, p. 38. ↩︎
- Gyula Szekfű, ‘A magyar jellem történetünkben’ [‘The Hungarian Character in Our History’], In: Szekfű, 1939, pp. 489–556. ↩︎
- From the era, we might cite as a counterexample László Németh’s work In Minority (Kisebbségben, 1939), where he describes Turkic nature not as a basis for decline, but as a deep, shared fate with Hungarians. The Hungarian: a Finno–Ugric language, says the linguist; the Hungarian: a people with a Turkic organization, says the historian. ‘From what Gyula Németh relates, it follows that the political culture of these Turkic peoples must have been very high, and the organizations set up for mobile Eastern peoples are more complex than we believe.’ László Németh, A minőség forradalma – Kisebbségben, Petőfi Irodalmi Múzeum, Budapest, 2014, p. 620. Jenő Cholnoky, president of the Hungarian Turanian Society, with his geographical determinism, saw extraordinary adaptability and vitality in the steppe peoples (The Turanian Idea, around 1930). Gyula Germanus, already in the 1920s, emphasized the internal dynamism and cultural regeneration of Eastern peoples—in contrast to Western condescension. ↩︎
- According to Notker’s description, the width of the ramparts was such that wagons could travel on them, and the distance between the ramparts approached 30–40 miles. Although the existence of the ‘nine rings’ is not proven, and archaeology rather posits a single massive central fortification system and a network of marchlands (cf István Bóna), the fact of concentric defense is indisputable. This structure (marchland principles, obstacle systems) echoes in the border defence of the early Árpád era. ↩︎
- Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, translated by Willard R. Trask, Harcourt, Brace & World, New York, 1959, p. 20. ↩︎
- See in Eliade, especially the chapter ‘Sacred Space and Making the World Sacred’. In Eliade’s interpretation, the drawing of a border is not a prison wall, but magical protection that prevents the Cosmos from sinking back into formlessness. ↩︎
- Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, translated by G.L. Ulmen, Telos Press Publishing, New York, 2006, pp. 59–60. ↩︎
- Áron Czopf, Térforradalom [Spatial Revolution], Századvég Kiadó, Budapest, 2019, p. 30. ↩︎
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