Hungarian Conservative

The Wondrous Stag that, according to the legend, led Hungarians to the Carpathian Basin is one of the most significant animals in the before-Christ Hungarian worldview. As in many other ancient myths of origin, the Magyars believed their ancestors had either been animals or turned into animals after their passing—a common trope among probably all world cultures, somehow deeply ingrained into our psyche. As recorded in the Gesta Hungarorum, the Turul was believed to be the Árpád dynasty’s totemic ancestor.

‘The clashes are ongoing, there is no harmony, they were sent here to carry out the school’s death sentence’, Pál Popovics, an informatics teacher at the school said.

The Hungarian community in Mukachevo has been harassed in a number of ways by the Ukrainian local authorities over the past year. Beside the attacks on the Hungarian secondary school, the municipality has been waging a war on all Hungarian symbols in the town, ordering the removal of Hungarian flags from public buildings and of the Turul statue from the Munkács Castle.

The size of the Ukrainian trident compares to the magnitude of the massive Mukachevo castle the same way decades of Ukrainian rule compare to the one-thousand-year-old Hungarian history in Transcarpathia.

The past will not be annulled by short-sighted and counterproductive acts like the removal of the turul statue. What those acts do, however, is demonstrate to Hungarians that despite all the good will, aid, and political support bestowed on their neighbours, there is not much good to expect from Ukraine when it comes to its ethnic minorities and friendly neighbourly relations.