Vilmos Apor is known as the Bishop of the Poor, and as the martyred prelate who was fatally wounded defending the girls and women under his protection from Soviet soldiers on the Good Friday of 1945.
During the regime change following the fall of the Iron Curtain, the Hungarian National Bank gradually sold almost all of the country’s gold reserve, which by 1992 fell to around three tonnes, with the proceeds from the sale of gold invested in foreign government bonds deemed safe and high-yielding. However, the promised returns were not realized.
‘Europe’s most powerful nation is now led, without exaggeration, by political extremists. The heads of the other large nations, France and Britain, are all cynical, complacent, and indifferent to the problems of their citizens to a degree not seen here since the French Revolution.
It is an interesting situation for us. So far, we have been the ones always divided up: by the Ottomans, Habsburgs, Germans, and French. Now they are the ones being sliced up and bid on by the hungry peoples of the Third World and the coldly calculating networks of people smugglers.’
In essence, Europe needs Poland and Hungary, Polish MEP Ryszard Czarnecki argues. An interview about double standards, rule of law concerns about the Tusk administration, and the key role of conservative journalists and experts in the conservative European realignment.
How should we Hungarians relate to our heroic dead who perished in the two world wars? Some thoughts and proposals by our Sopron-based contributor Botond Szabó.
Pál Teleki, prime minister of Hungary in the interwar era, was probably one of the most tragic figures of twentieth century Hungarian history. He was torn between his conscience and geopolitical reality, a tension he could only resolve by ending his own life as a shocking act of protest.
The work of Gombos, both as a writer and a literary historian, is still undeservedly understudied. As one of his admirers quite aptly wrote of him: ‘His place in the hierarchy of “populist” thinkers and writers is not in the second, but in the first rank, in the company of those whose intellectual and creative achievements can be considered particularly valuable and significant.’
Miklós Horthy de Nagybánya, former Regent of the Kingdom of Hungary, died in exile in Portugal in 1957 and was buried there. One of his last wishes, however, was for his ashes to be brought home once his beloved country was liberated from Soviet occupation.
Although it is perfectly legitimate to suggest that the noise pollution caused by the huge number of vehicles passing through his town needs to be addressed, the solution is not to penalise those who cross the border. Possible, more constructive solutions may include the improvement of the community transport infrastructure at local level or the opening of new crossing points so that those wishing to enter Austria are distributed more proportionately.
With their fearless undertaking on 15–16 July in 1931, György Endresz and Sándor Magyar forever etched their names into the annals of Hungarian and global aviation.
‘Nations are creations of God, borders are drawn by people. Supporting the homeland is important, and it has become a constitutional obligation. However, the Hungarian people have survived even when the leaders of the Hungarian state…forgot, gave up, or betrayed national unity, as it happened during the four decades of communism or during the periods of left-wing governments,’ the Chief of the Prime Minister’s Office stated on 4 June.
Losing the World War and the experience of the Treaty of Trianon triggered a discourse in Hungarian public life that was not without precedent, but had never been so vehement before. Perhaps the opinion of many was reflected by the renowned writer Ferenc Herczeg, who declared that ‘Europe, free press, liberalism—all these are slogans that have deceived us.’
The following are poems by cross-border Hungarian poets translated into English that originally appeared in a 2019 anthology published by Hungarian Review.
For over a thousand years, Hungarians and Rusyns have lived peacefully together. This shared history offers important lesson of cooperation and mutual respect.
Rastislav Káčer made the controversial statements on the same TV programme where Speaker of the National Council Boris Kollár expressed similar views last April.
A line-up of expert historians presented the story of how the many different nations living by the River Danube had collaborated with each other over the tides of history and of the ambitions to create a confederation of independent Danubian nations.
Paradoxically, Communist Béla Kun and the contemporary nationalist racists had more in common in terms of their views than the Communist leader had with the social-democratic and the left-leaning bourgeois émigrés.
In a referendum on 14 December 1921, the town of Sopron voted to remain part of Hungary, for which it has been celebrated as the town of loyalty and freedom ever since.
The majority of the refugees were intellectuals, mostly from Transylvania, followed by those from what is Slovakia, Serbia and Austria today, but there were also some who fled to Hungary from Bosnia-Herzegovina.
‘We try and keep the illusion awake in ourselves that we can cross to Nagyvárad or drop by to Nagyszalonta and then run from Makó to Arad, as it used to be—so natural, so self-evident. And then all of a sudden, we realise it is no longer possible.’
As a consequence of the treaty, four million Hungarians became overnight the citizens of foreign countries, some of them newly formed.
The kind of honest, pure, original shock and indignation of when we are cast into this world, start to become familiar with it, and find ourselves facing an injustice on a disproportionately large scale, which we would like to fix, but simply cannot: the pain and loss of which still lingers.
In its entirety, Scitovszky’s memoirs are a compelling and eloquent retelling of many of the obscure events at and after Trianon, written by a man of a sophisticated age, hardened by insurmountable challenges and driven by a sense
of duty and responsibility.
‘I’ve often said that if Donald Trump had had even half the intelligence and the focus of Viktor Orbán, America would be a very different place.’
Hungarian Conservative is a quarterly magazine on contemporary political, philosophical and cultural issues from a conservative perspective.