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Hungarian nationalism and the ghosts of Turan

In Harper’s, The Call of the Drums Hungary’s far right discovers its inner barbarian:

The Great Kurultáj, an event held annually outside the town of Bugac, Hungary, is billed as both the “Tribal Assembly of the Hun-­Turkic Nations” and “Europe’s Largest Equestrian Event.” When I arrived last August, I was fittingly greeted by a variety of riders on horseback: some dressed as Huns, others as Parthian cavalrymen, Scythian archers, Magyar warriors, csikós cowboys, and betyár bandits. In total there were representatives from twenty-­seven “tribes,” all members of the “Hun-­Turkic” fraternity. The festival’s entrance was marked by a sixty-­foot-­tall portrait of Attila himself, wielding an immense broadsword and standing in front of what was either a bonfire or a sky illuminated by the baleful glow of war. He sported a goatee in the style of Steven Seagal and, shorn of his war braids and helmet, might have been someone you could find in a Budapest cellar bar. A slight smirk suggested that great mirth and great violence together mingled in his soul.

The whole article is fascinating. Though the author is clearly disapproving of Hungary’s current nationalist resurgence, the description of Turanism, the cult of Attila in Hungary may seem strange, but it isn’t surprising when you consider that Mongolia has a cult of Genghis Khan.

Hungary is unique in Europe because the people speak a language that is only related to two groups in western Siberia, the Mansi, and Khanty. Most linguists place these Ugric languages as a distant sister clade to the Finno-Permic group. But it seems incontrovertible that the modern Magyar people are culturally descended from a group of people who were in close association with various Turkic nomads (e.g., the Khazars) in the lower Volga region. Their migration westward seems to have recapitulated the movement of the ancient Huns, who were likely Turkic. Additionally, not only did the Magyar tribes absorb Turkic tribes as they moved out of Khazar territory but in later centuries gave they refuge to Turkic groups fleeing the Mongols.

The Turanism described in the article is a real thing, but much of it seems to consist of the co-option of the lifestyle of the Altaic nomadic peoples, Turks, and Mongols, to add glamor to Hungarian history. In fact, the inclusion of groups such as Scythians and Sarmatians (Indo-European Iranians) indicates that what is common is not descent or ethnolinguistic affinity, but a lifestyle. It’s the lifestyle and ethos that Christopher Beckwith writes about in Empires of the Silk Road.

The mobile steppe nomads were not born, they were made. For thousands of years, peoples that occupied the fringe of the forest-zone seem to have taken up the horse, and full pastoralism, and so become part of a lifestyle which was optimally suited to militarization and therefore extraction of resources out of wealthy sedentary societies. The transition was natural because humans would rather be predators than prey.

This reality, that what Turanism celebrates is the idealization of brutal martial past, mitigates the fact that genetically modern Magyars descend overwhelmingly from the conquered, not the conquerorsThe conquest elites did have an eastern affinity. But the best recent data indicates that modern Hungarians are only a few percent enriched for this ancestry. Rather, the ancestors of modern Hungarians probably are Slavic peasants as well as the post-Roman peoples of Pannonia.

One explanation for the discrepancy between elite burials from the Late Antique and Medieval period and modern Hungarians is that military conflicts between the first Mongol invasion and the Ottoman conquest took a disproportionate toll on the nobility descended from the Magyars and Turks. But I suspect a more prosaic one is that Hungary is an open plain, and gene flow with neighboring regions would have diluted the initial signature of admixture over the centuries.

Modern Hungarians are surely aware of the genetic realities on an intuitive level: they don’t look particularly different from their neighbors, and they know this. But, culturally they are distinctive, and that is due to the history and lives of the Turks and Magyars, and Hungarian nationalists nod to this reality in forming their own mythos.

The Magyarization of Pannonia requires a deeper investigation by both historians and cultural evolutionists. A pastoralist pagan people imposed their language on recently Christianized Slavs. How? Why? This is a sharp contrast to the Bulgars, who were Turks absorbed by their Slavic subjects.

“….for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.”

14 thoughts on “Hungarian nationalism and the ghosts of Turan

  1. It’s fascinating that Hungarians speak the language of Siberian hunter-gatherers from the far side of the Ural mountains, yet there is zero sign of this in the genetic makeup of not just modern Hungarians, but in 10th century Magyar conquerors either. There must have been at least 2 subsequent language adaption events, where proto-Hungarian gained prominence in a population where its original speakers were just a small minority: the first event probably happening on the Steppe where some Turkic tribe must have adopted the language of neighboring hunter-gatherers, and then the second event being the conquest of the Carpathian Basin by the Magyars.

    The popularity of the Turanism “cult” in Hungary is partially due to the nationalists wanting to separate themselves from the neighboring Slavic nations, as the Slavs and the Romanians are the hated “outgroup”, and Turanism offers a glorious past and a story of dominance over them. The Romanians have an equally ridiculous origin myth about how they are all direct descendants of the Romanized Dacians and insist that there was no significant immigration to the area for a 1000 years after the Roman Empire fell, while the Slovakians have their own origin myth about Great Moravia. Everybody wants a glorious past in Eastern Europe: the Slovakians put Great Moravia into the preamble of their constitution, while the Daco-Romanian continuity hypothesis is thaught as an indisputable fact in Romanian history classes. At least in Hungary, Turanism is relegated to the fringe. The Hungarian high school history textbook gives a 1/3 Magyars and 2/3 Slavs for the demographic composition for the Carpathian basin at the time of the Magyar conquests, and then the author admits that these numbers are kind of made up, and the real Magyar rate could have been much smaller.
    The Hungarian Turanism cult is also constantly feuding with the “scientific establishment” about the Finno-Ugric language hypothesis, which the Turanists see as insufficiently glorious and thus not true, and most of the Turanism followers seem incapable of understanding that the linguistic and genetic heritage of a nation can be different.

    Connecting Turanism to the current nationalist resurgence in Hungary is kind of misleading, as Orban’s governing party doesn’t really make use of Turanism, the Turanists were all fans of the far-right Jobbik party, but Jobbik’s support collapsed recently going from ~20% to 6%.

  2. For interest, the 27 nations taking part in the Kurultáj event:

    The Azerbaijani, Avar, Bashkir, Bulgarian, Balkar, Buryat, Chuvash, Gagauz, Kabardino, Karachay, Karakalpak, Kazakh, Madjar tribe of Kazakhstan, Kirghiz, Kumi, Mongolian, Nogai, Uzbek, Madzsar tribe of Uzebekistan, Tatar, Turkish, Tuva, Turkoman, Uyghur, Yakut, Hungarian.

    (From: https://dailynewshungary.com/bugac-more-than-just-a-horse-stud/)
    I assume the Uyghurs are represented by diaspora.

    Very Turkic affair, perhaps an ironic contrast to what the author says about his Hungarian grandmother’s family in the article.

    In the more “academic” nationalist circles attempts to connect Hungarian to Sumerian occasionally still abound. The cultural pull Sumerian connections would have is of different type and for the greater public probably less interesting than that of pastoralist warriors but the underlying idea – addition of glamor – is the same.

  3. I doubt that Bulgars, Magyars, Khazars (or “Huns”) were predominately one “ethnic” or “race.” No one comes to empire by a sudden increase in birth-rate, but by alliances and allegiances bred from success. None of this is controverted by your essay ‘The barbarian invasions, illuminated by genetics,’ or Veeramah’s recent paper. It will be awhile before enough ancient individuals from like time-periods are unearthed, categorized and sequenced to have a better understanding of these “ghost” peoples. “Humans would rather be predators than prey,” is an apt expression! Yes, recent gene-flow has obscured the past. Nor do we understand the dynamics of language adoption… However, I and 400 million other people speak “Anglish,” though few (if any) of my ancestors originated from Schleswig-Holstein via Eastern England.

  4. Turanism may be old but the whole idea of the Kurultaj is entirely premised on the contemporary genetics, on a 2009 paper by Zsolt Andras Biro in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology ( https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ajpa.20984 ) which discovered modal Y-haplogroup G among the Madjar (whose name is of course pronounced the same as Magyar), and hypothesized that the two peoples share the roots.

    Even before the publication, it attracted attention of the Kazakh authorities, and the first Kurultaj was a two-nations Hungary-Kazakhstan affair. Details here
    https://szerveto.com/events/58

    It has to be noted, of course, that Y-haplogroup G is rare in Hungary today, and in fact less common than in great many Eurasian populations.

    And according to Nazarbayev 2015, a similar low-percentage Turkic-related admixture is common among all peoples of the Eastern European plain, and is also about a millennium old (attributed tentatively to Khazars and Bulgars, the Magyars’ predecessors)

  5. It’s fascinating that Hungarians speak the language of Siberian hunter-gatherers from the far side of the Ural mountains,

    well, they may have had origins further west tho. east->west->east.

    I doubt that Bulgars, Magyars, Khazars (or “Huns”) were predominately one “ethnic” or “race.” No one comes to empire by a sudden increase in birth-rate, but by alliances and allegiances bred from success.

    the recent genetic results clearly indicate that a lot of these steppe peoples were cohesive patrilineages. so they clearly had an ethnic component.

    the key issue why the steppe people expanded so fast though is just that all men were potential soldiers. there are plenty of treatments of the dynamic, but ian morris’ *war* book has a good treatment of how quickly and powerfully militarized nomads came to call the terms btwn ~0 AD and ~1500 AD (including semi-mobile agro-pastoralists).

    And according to Nazarbayev 2015, a similar low-percentage Turkic-related admixture is common among all peoples of the Eastern European plain

    even excluding russians, there does seem to be low-level turkic admixture into slavs to the north and east of the hungarians. but the hellenthal et al. paper shows the hungarians are a few % enriched vs. groups like belorussians. i think that can be attributed to the magyar domination of the region (which attracted more turks for centuries).

    (pannonia had good pastures)

  6. “even excluding russians, there does seem to be low-level turkic admixture into slavs to the north and east of the hungarians. but the hellenthal et al. paper shows the hungarians are a few % enriched vs. groups like belorussians. i think that can be attributed to the magyar domination of the region (which attracted more turks for centuries).”

    Looks like Hellenthal 2014 gives about 16% mixture to Hungarians and 8% to Belorussians but the source for Hungarian is Turkish and for Belorussians much more eastern Uyghur, which gives an end result that matches geography. Latter papers like Busby 2015 which include more diverse source groups follow this pattern, Hungarians are basically a mixture of their neighbours in every sense but linguistic which, when it comes to culture, still has an impact.

  7. RE: “Asiatic” brides in Bavaria
    https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/2018/03/13/the-barbarian-invasions-illuminated-by-genetics/

    This Bavarian actress mentioned in an interview that she had trouble to find an acting job in her native Germany because of her non-standard looks:

    https://www.imdb.com/name/nm3758734/

    In Allegiant she was chosen to cast Juanita / Nita, described by Tris as:

    “tall but not too tall, thin but not too thin, and had warm brown skin with dark brown or black hair”

    https://divergent.fandom.com/wiki/Juanita

  8. “Most linguists place these Ugric languages as a distant sister clade to the Finno-Permic group.”

    I don’t think there’s been practically any doubt about this for a *long* time.

  9. It’s easy to figure out how they avoided Slavicization – the Catholic church!

    Otherwise they’d probably end up like Avars, and in that way the Slavic groups would probably diverge far less. The finesse of how it was done is another thing, but historians like Radovan Damjanović probably know (but good luck finding anything from him in English)

  10. During the Second World War, the Arrow Cross under Ferenc Szálasi made use of the Turanist ideology to justify the alliance with Japan. Szálasi even harangued his followers on the importance of this relationship immediately before the Red Army encircled Budapest. A Japanese POW captured during the Soviet invasion of Manchuria recounts that Hungarian POWs he encountered were very knowledgeable about Japan.

  11. @levantine

    This Bavarian actress mentioned in an interview that she had trouble to find an acting job in her native Germany because of her non-standard looks:

    Well there’s not a lot of mystery there as to why she does not look like a German, her mother is Tunisian.

  12. cohesive patrilineages … Maybe, maybe not, depending which group and when they were sampled …

    Y-chromosome haplogroups from Hun, Avar and conquering Hungarian period nomadic people of the Carpathian Basin, Neparáczki et al, 2019 [see the xlsx supplement]

    Mitogenomic data indicate admixture components of Asian Hun and Srubnaya origin in the Hungarian Conquerors, Neparáczki et al, 2018

    Perhaps not big papers, but the consensus may change as more data becomes available. If you were referring to the “Steppe” invasion of Europe you are correct. But I was referencing the “empires” that blossomed rather suddenly, lasted several hundred years and then disappeared. Hungry (and to a lesser extent Bulgaria) are unique in that unlike the Huns, Avars and Khazars they haven’t disappeared, yet the construct between the past and present is tenuous.

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