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.”