Noémi Petneki
a steppe nomad or stray
rider?
W
hen we come to think of
Hungary in geographical
terms, our first association
is with a lowland country.
Over a half of its area are plains: the giant
triangle of the Great Hungarian Plain,
which stretches from the North-West to the
South-East of Hungary and covers the whole
land situated east of that diagonal line,
and the Little Hungarian Plain, also called
the Danubian Lowland, which lies in the
North-West. Part of the latter is situated in
Slovakia, and a small stretch is in Austria,
while the former lies in present day Croatia,
Serbia, Romania and reaches as far out as
Ukraine and Slovakia.
So much for geography. Also Hungarian
culture is mainly associated with plains. The
puszta, goulash, herdsmen lashing horses
with whips are living stereotypes of the na-
tion. To what extent is the image true, and
to what is it secondary? Let us search for an
answer.
The Great Hungarian Plain is the western-
most part of the Euroasian steppe. Once it
was the very heart of the historical Kingdom
of Hungary. It was there, in the locality
now known as Ópusztaszer, that the seven
Hungarian tribes became blood brothers
myths of hungarian plains
when their chiefs drank from the goblet into
which they had spilt their blood. Did the
Hungarians who had come to the Pannonian
Plain over one thousand one hundred years
ago decide that the land would replace the
limitless Asian steppes for them? Nothing
could be further from the truth: over one
thousand one hundred years before, when
Prince Arpad’s people were taking over the
Pannonian Plain, the whole Hungarian
Plain was thickly covered with oak forests.
Today’s picture is a human creation. The
majority of Hungarians, however, seem to
ascribe such feelings to their ancestors.
After all, they are familiar with the whole
of Hungarian history and culture, and they
know what poets and painters have had to
say about the plain. Ever since the Middle
Ages the Hungarian people have cherished
the myth of the origin of the nation (the so
called ethnogenetic myth) which claims that
Magyars are brothers or even descendants of
the valiant Huns. Before Ugro-Finnish phi-
lology was established, Hungarian scholars
had claimed that their language was related
to Turkish languages (now we know that
Ugro-Finnish languages are indeed probably
distantly related to Turkish, and belong to
the so called Ural-Altaic language family); in
the 19th century there emerged the concept
of ‘Turania’ as the original common home of
autoportret 3 [32] 2010 | 64
equestrian steppe peoples like Hungarians,
Turks, Mongols, Huns, Avars and even the
Japanese. Turanism played an important
role in the rightist ideology of the interwar
period, and is still popular in certain circles,
just like contemporary forms of medieval
and early modern ethnogenetic myths are
still alive in all small countries in Central
and Eastern Europe.
It may be added that the Hungarians
themselves settled the nomadic Kuman
and Iazyge peoples on the Great Plain and
granted them numerous privileges.
In their past, the Hungarians experienced
partitions similarly to the Poles: after the
Turkish invasion the country remained
divided into three parts from the mid-16th
century to the end of the 17th century. The
western and northern part – the so called
Kingdom of Hungary – was in the spacious
Habsburg Empire. The middle region, of
which the greatest part was the Great Plain,
was occupied by the Ottoman Empire, and
Transylvania and eastern parts of the Plain
(the so called Partium, or ‘Parts’) became
a quasi-Hungarian principality suspended
between Turkey and Austria, which in real-
ity owed its existence to the sultan. Protes-
tant culture flourished in Partium and it was
here that the so called field towns, which
dated back to the Middle Ages, survived,
bridging the gap between the village and the
town. Residents of these localities who lived
in towns but earned their living from the
land were later referred to as cívisek, a special
and very conservative social class of its own.
After the expulsion of the Turks, the victori-
ous Habsburgs repopulated the land ravaged
by the Ottomans, mainly with Slovaks from
the northern part of the then kingdom.
The culture in many localities on the Great
Plain is not as genuinely ‘flatland’ as it is
commonly thought to be. Even the famous
19th century poet Sándor Petőfi was a pure-
blood Slovak by birth, not half-Serbian or
half-Croatian, as it has been believed before;
he would probably have spoken Slovak had
his father, who aspired to assimilate among
the Hungarians, not forbidden his wet
nurse to speak to him in that language. We
owe all that the Hungarians associate with
the plains today to Petőfy – each Hungar-
ian child reads his poems at school. The
romantic soul found the boundlessness it
needed in the plains where it could roam at
will. Its imagination was nourished by the
surrealist fata morgana, tales of legendary
highwaymen and, most importantly, the
people who were considered the source of
authenticity and genuineness in the spirit
of the time. Moreover, the indeed archaic
shepherd culture was appealing due to both
its exoticism and familiarity. The romanti-
cism of the landscape and its inhabitants
was then discovered by Nikolaus Lenau,
eminent Austrian poet born and raised
in Hungary, through whose influence the
German-speaking part of Europe learned
about the phenomenon of the Hungarian
puszta. Interest was also stimulated by
both Hungarian and German painters. The
knowledge of that land that Western Europe
now has is based on Romantic literature and
art. Indeed even today the puszta visiting
route in the Hortobágy National Park is
designed in such a way that the visitor can
see all attractions mentioned in poetry and
depicted in paintings.
The plain rose to the status of the symbolic
and authentic homeland landscape that the
Polish Tatras and Podhale region had later.
And yet the same land embodied and still
embodies backwardness and ...havoc. Petőfi
himself started the trend in his poems, like
Kutyakaparó (Dog’s Gravedigger – the name of
a rundown csarda [inn]) or A puszta télen [The
Puszta in Winter], which starts with the words,
‘Hey, the puszta is deserted now!’. Another
great Hungarian poet, Endre Ady, transforms
the landscape into a symbolic ‘Hungarian fal-
low’ (Ady felt uncomfortable in Velky Varadin
and Debrecen). Naturalist Zsigmond Móricz
shows the true (or other) face of the people.
Native shepherds of the plains are Barbarians,
taciturn and introverted but ready to maim
or kill in cold blood. The Debrecen cívisek tor-
ment a peasant youth who attends a Calvinist
college. The lowland, with its remote, uncivi-
lised hamlets, is also a place of exile: a sym-
bolic and actual exile after the communists
had taken power, where aristocrats deprived
of their possessions were deported.
Over the last decades these contradictory
trends have co-existed in Hungarian con-
autoportret 3 [32] 2010 | 65
sciousness and in works of art created by
artists who seek to depict it and change it.
Town dwellers have been moving to hamlets.
The fashion for ecology has re-promoted
mud-huts, i.e. the once despised little
huts of the poor. On the other hand, living
conditions of many people who live in the
lowland countryside have deteriorated. The
decline and demoralisation in small lowland
localities are shown in works by László
Krasznahorkaia and hypnotic, limitless’
films by his collaborator, Béla Tarr (the cult
film Satan’s Tango lasts 7.5 hours!). Multi-
culturalism of the Great Plain is also being
discovered: books by Pál Závada treat about
the life of the local Slovak community.
In August two competing major ‘meetings
of Hungarians’ were held in the puszta to
uphold the ‘steppe tradition’ of the na-
tion. Both events were very popular and
hundreds of thousands of people attended.
In the case of Western Slavs and Croats the
creation of a large scale national myth and
strengthening of imaginary, ‘ancient’ tradi-
tions connoted the rejection of Latin or Eu-
ropean culture and led to the emergence of
contemporary nationalist populism. It has
also caused many tragedies. Will the Hun-
garians be threatened by the same fate? Will
the present day individual who pretends to
be a steppe nomad not become Endre Ady’s
Stray Rider who trots across the plains which
‘are suddenly overgrown with forests and
reeds’, misty and haunted by -
Only bleeding, only secrets,
Only embraces, only ancestors,
Only forests and rushes,
Only ancient lunatics?
translated by anna mirosławska-olszewska
illustration: anna zabdyrska