There are about ten million inhabitants. They also inhabit Romania (about 2 million people), Slovakia and many other territories not only on the Eurasian continent, but also in America and Canada.
How many are there?
In total, there are about fourteen million Magyars on the globe. Their main language is Hungarian. There are also many dialects, which make speech varied depending on the area.
The Magyars are a very ancient people, whose history can be long and fascinating to understand. Writing has been developing since the tenth century. The most common religion is Catholicism. Most of the rest are followers of the Lutheran and
Where did they come from?
Modern Magyars describe their origin as follows: previously they were nomadic small tribes, mainly engaged in raising livestock. They came from lands east of the Urals.
At the dawn of the first millennium, these people followed to the Kama basin, then settled on the northern shore of the Black Sea. At this time, they had to obey the ruling peoples in that territory. At the end of the ninth century, the Magyars rose to and settled on the banks of the Danube River.
Here they stayed for a long time, because this territory had everything for a sedentary lifestyle. The Magyars are, at their core, farmers. In the eleventh century these people became part of the Hungarian state and converted to Catholicism.
Thus, the ancient Magyars merged with the Hungarian people, creating enclaves. Local residents accepted them. It is worth noting that in the Hungary of that time, even without the Magyars, there were many different nationalities that were mutually enriched culturally and spiritually.
Officially, Latin was used for writing first, and then German. It was from them that I learned many terms. The Magyars are part of a huge seething cauldron, the contents of which have changed and flowed from one place to another over the centuries.
Also, some representatives of this people left the territory of Hungary in order to settle in the beautiful lands of the Eastern Carpathian region. In the 16th century, the Ottoman yoke reigned, it also affected Hungary, so that its citizens had to flee towards the north and east.
There are significantly fewer people in the state. When the Austro-Turkish War ended and the liberation movement was suppressed, the Habsburgs took possession of the Hungarian lands. German colonists were settled on the territory of Hungary. Over time, the Magyars changed as a people. History and cultural heritage experienced significant changes at that time, because national contradictions only grew.
The strength of the state grew stronger, and all the peoples being resettled underwent Magyarization. Thus Hungary became an independent republic.
Which one of them was good at what?
Various groups of Hungarians began to form. The Magyars are not a small cluster of inhabitants, but a whole people, as numerous as they are heterogeneous. Since the eighteenth century, these groups have maintained their distinctive characteristics. Of course, each settlement had its own strong point, something in which they were different and in which they were more successful than their fellow citizens.
For example, the inhabitants of the mountains (palotsi and mother) were distinguished by their great skill in embroidering on leather and linen. The Sharköz people are mainly remembered by posterity for their excellent skills in creating decorative arts and clothing. To the west of the Transdanubia region, during the Middle Ages, groups were formed in the territories of Hetes and Gocey. In terms of achievements in material culture, they were most similar to their neighbors - the Slovenes.
On the territory washed by the rivers Rab and Danube, the Rabaköz people are located. The Cumans, also known as Kuns, descendants of the Cumans, feeling the onslaught of the Tatar-Mongols in the thirteenth century, as well as the Yases, were awarded land from the kings of Hungary. Like a sponge, they absorbed culture and language. This is how the guides appeared.
What about today?
And now, centuries later, what is the Hungarian nation like? The Magyars do not forget their origins and honor history. Today Hungary is considered a fairly developed state. Industry and the service sector operate at a high level. However, agriculture also plays a large role, because these lands are still fertile and fertile, and technological progress only opens up new opportunities for its cultivation. Both cattle breeding (which began to feed the Hungarians first) and agriculture are well developed.
How did it all start?
In ancient times, the lowland territories of the country in the east were distinguished by the development of cattle breeding. Horse breeding was especially popular in southern Hungary. There are many benefits from pig farming. The Hungarians gained knowledge about the art of cultivating the land from the Turkic-speaking proto-Bulgarians, as well as the Slavs. This is reflected even in the then vocabulary of the peoples listed above.
Wheat fed the Magyars most of all. The main feed crop was corn. In the eighteenth century, potatoes began to be grown. Winemaking, growing garden trees and various vegetables did not go unnoticed. Flax and hemp were processed. Special attention can be paid to the beautiful and unique embroidery, lace, and works. The Magyars were also excellent at working with leather. Modern Hungarians respect their traditions and try to preserve ancient customs.
What conditions did they live under?
The villages of the Hungarians were quite large, and they also settled in farmsteads (mostly in the eastern part of Hungary). Today, the overwhelming majority of the state's population are city dwellers. Cities such as Pecs, Buda, Győr and others have survived from the Middle Ages to the present day.
In addition, settlements have emerged that are radically different from the classical idea of megacities. In the past, they were inhabited by peasants, so hence the name - agricultural towns. Today the difference between the two types of cities is not felt so strongly.
Hungarians. Origin and early history
The origin and ethnicity of the Hungarians, as well as any other people, is the subject of close attention and provides food for the most incredible assumptions mixed with objective facts that arose at the dawn of the written history of Europe, not only among the peoples surrounding the ethnic group being studied, but also in himself. The authors of medieval Western chronicles usually traced the origin of their own peoples to the sons of the biblical Noah (since only this family survived the flood) - to Ham or to Japheth (Shem was considered the progenitor of the Jews and Arabs, hence the name - Semitic peoples). Both versions had a Hungarian variant. According to one of them, the son of Ham - the great hunter Nimrod - had twin sons. One day they saw a “beautiful deer” and chased after her to the very shores of the Sea of Azov, where her trace was lost, and instead of the deer the brothers found beautiful girls. So the twins Gunor and Magor turned out to be the progenitors of their own peoples - the Huns and Magyars. The idea of the kinship of these two peoples was very much to the liking of the Hungarians themselves: the reflection of the greatness of Attila, whose Carpathian conquests gave them the “historical” right to consider themselves his heirs, seemed to fall on them. This idea survived the rationalism of the Enlightenment and later played a role in the formation of national identity. In parallel with this version of the origin of the Magyars, there has always been a second one, according to which all the nomadic tribes of Eurasia had Magog, the son of Japhet, among their distant ancestors.
The scientific study of ethnic groups, that is, ethnology, however, begins only with the advent of comparative historical linguistics. From the point of view of anthropology and even cultural studies, the concept of “Hungarians” is far from unambiguous. So the expression “purebred Hungarians” lost all meaning already in time immemorial. As a result, the only reliable criterion for the existence of the Hungarian ethnic group is language. The history of the Hungarian ethnos is the history of a human community, the tribal composition and cultural characteristics of which have experienced constant changes with the indisputable preservation of the Hungarian language (or the Hungarian proto-language) over the past several thousand years. The decisive factor for ethnographic research, of course, turned out to be the linguistic “mechanism” for identifying related connections between different languages. These connections are determined not by detecting their external, superficial similarity, but by comparing the processes that took place in their phonetic systems (in particular, the discovery by the Grimm brothers of the Lautverschiebung law on the movement of vowels in Germanic languages), as well as a comparative analysis of the most ancient layer of vocabulary: a comparison of basic verbs, nouns denoting body parts, family relationships, animals and plants, numerals, etc. On this basis, Hungarian linguists already two centuries ago came to the conclusion about the Finno-Ugric origin of the Hungarian language. To many, such a pedigree did not seem prestigious enough, and they continued to search for more enviable ancestors that the small Hungarian nation could be proud of. Some continued to insist that biblical genealogy was “scientific”; For others, the search has led to the Etruscans, Sumerians, and most recently (believe it or not) the Incas. For real science, however, the Finno-Ugric origin of the Hungarian language has long been an established fact, although in itself it does not explain everything in this rather dark and confusing history, which lasted at least until the 7th century, when the data of historical linguistics, archeology and geobotanists are beginning to be supplemented by written evidence. And although most of this evidence relates to the Hungarians indirectly, they give an idea of \u200b\u200bother steppe peoples, among whom at that time there were Hungarians as one of the components of the tribal quasi-symbiosis of nomads.
The search for the original, original territory of the tribes to which the ancestors of the Hungarians once belonged led us to the border between Europe and Asia, to the so-called. Ural region. It includes the northern part of the Urals and Western Siberia. These are the data of linguistics. Some archaeologists believe that the territory was much larger and stretched from Western Siberia to the Baltic Sea. The Ural peoples spoke one common language until in the 4th millennium BC. did not begin to split into various ethnocultural and linguistic groups. Rock paintings discovered in the Urals indicate that the peoples there were at the Paleolithic stage. They were hunters, mainly elk and reindeer, and gatherers. Hungarian words related to hunting and fishing belong to the most ancient, “Ural” layer of vocabulary. Tools and weapons were still made of stone, although people already knew sleighs, skis, ceramics, and even had pets - dogs. Around 3000 BC From the Uralic language family, two main branches emerged: Finno-Ugric and Samoyed. During the 3rd millennium BC. The Finno-Ugrians, among them the ancestors of the Hungarians, while still hunters and gatherers, had already reached the Neolithic stage. The vocabulary dating back to this period is the most important in modern Hungarian. It contains only about a thousand basic words, but 60% of complex words (in written language almost 80%) are of Finno-Ugric origin. Finno-Ugric roots underlie the generic and genealogical, as well as nature-related (sky, snow, cloud) vocabulary and the most important verbs (live, eat, drink, stand, walk, look, give, etc.).
By 2000 B.C. Finno-Ugric tribes also begin to fragment. The main reason for the migration that began among them, apparently, was the overpopulation of their former habitats. It was previously believed that the Ugrians, including the ancestors of the Magyars, Voguls and Ostyaks, joined the Finno-Permian branch, crossed the Urals and settled in the triangle between the Volga, Kama and Belaya. Now, however, a different route seems more likely: apparently, the Ugrians descended from the eastern side of the Urals strictly south along the Ishim and Tobol rivers. In new lands they began to come into contact with more culturally advanced peoples of Iranian origin. Now not only hunting, but also cattle breeding and agriculture have become the sources of their existence (Hungarian words meaning cow, milk, felt, cart, undoubtedly have Iranian roots). The Ugrians also learned about copper, and around 1500 BC. - and bronze. They lived in clans in small settlements, where each house apparently served as a common dwelling for one large patriarchal family, where all the sons brought their wives. According to excavations of burials, during that period the horse began to play an increasingly important role in their lives, households, and even religious beliefs. It becomes not only a sign that determines the status of the owner, but also almost a sacred animal. His favorite horse was always buried in the grave of a rich Ugrian. In poor graves, relatives placed the head, skin or harness of a horse eaten at the funeral.
Thus, the Ugric tribes were fully prepared for the transition to a nomadic way of life when they, at the very end of the 2nd millennium BC. ended up in the steppes. And between 1250 and 1000 BC. the mornings separated again. Escaped from the drought caused by global warming, the Voguls (Mansi) and Ostyaks (Khanty) returned to the north, settled on the lands along the Ob River and again became a people of hunters and gatherers (when cold weather began at the beginning of the 8th century BC, they They have completely forgotten the culture of horse breeding, although the image of a horse still retains a cult meaning in their worldview). The proto-Magyars, on the contrary, decided to stay in the steppes and learned to survive in the changed conditions. And then the living ties that connected them with their Finno-Ugric relatives were broken. But the linguistic basis was preserved and, by some miracle (one only has to think about all the vicissitudes of the future fate of this people), also Finno-Ugric religious ideas. Comparative ethnology has been able to reveal the identity or kinship of beliefs and traditional rituals characteristic of some peasant communities in the Carpathians and modern Finno-Ugric peoples. These include the idea of the “tree of life”, connecting the three worlds (underground - earthly - heavenly), as well as the doctrine of the “duality of the soul” and the special nature of shamanism.
Then, for a whole thousand years, the history of the Magyars' ancestors plunges into the darkness of the unknown, where everything is uncertain, everything is just speculation. Roaming across the vast territory between the Ural River and the Aral Sea throughout the 1st millennium BC, they most likely must have come into close contact with nomadic peoples of Iranian origin, with the Sarmatians and Scythians, who, throughout probability, and learned to use iron. In any case, the Hungarian word for sword has an Iranian root, which symbolically emphasizes the warlike nature of these steppe nomads. The above-mentioned legend of the hunt for the “beautiful deer” can also be considered a reflection of these influences. However, we do not even know for sure when exactly the proto-Magyars left their settlements in the south of Western Siberia and settled on the lands of their first European habitat - east of the great Volga arc. Now these are Bashkir lands, and in the 13th century. wandering monks, for example the Hungarian-Dominican Julian, called it “Great Hungary” because they found people here whose language (one of the Magyar dialects) they understood. Perhaps these people ended up here about 100 BC, wandering along with the Iranian tribes. But perhaps the resettlement occurred much later - between 350 and 400 as a result of the mass migration of peoples caused by the appearance of the Huns. Or even later - in the middle of the 6th century, when a wave of Turkic peoples covered the steppe.
But even after the mornings settled in the Urals, the history of the proto-Magyars consists of only hypotheses. Even widely known and seemingly established facts must be approached with caution. The only thing that is beyond doubt is that the Turkic tribes, who came to the steppes after the Huns, had a profound influence on all non-Turkic peoples, including the Alans and Magyars, with whom they coexisted for a long time, colliding and interacting. The economic and cultural influences of this period are reflected in the layer of ancient Turkic words included in the Hungarian language. There are about 300 of them, and among them are the concepts of plow, sickle, bull, calf, pig, chicken, mind, number, write, law, sin, dignity, confession, forgive. And even such political institutions as “dual rule”, that is, the division of power between the spiritual and military leaders, borrowed by the Magyars, if not unique to the Turks, was nevertheless typical for them. Uniting clans into combat units, i.e. into tribes or hordes is also considered a Turkic (Bulgarian) heritage inherited by the Magyars, as is the use of armor and stirrups. All this shows that over the centuries of coexistence with the Turkic peoples, the Magyars gradually stratified - a predominantly nomadic way of life was already combined with parallel developing agriculture, and law and religious ideas were already very complex, concepts of political power and military discipline were formed, until, however, only for the purpose of coordinating military operations for the sake of capturing booty and slaves.
The external form that facilitated the Turkic influence on the Magyars’ culture was the Onogur Union of Tribes (literally “ten tribes”), which occupied lands in the lower reaches of the Don. The Magyars joined him around the middle of the 6th century, and then almost immediately, together with the Onogurs, they were included in the Turkic Khaganate (552), ruled from Central Asia. After a short period (beginning of the 7th century) of the independent existence of the Onogur-Bulgarian “empire,” they all became subjects of the Khazar Khaganate, which arose in 630 on the territory of the western part of the former Turkic empire - between the Caspian and Black Seas. After 670, a group of Onogurs and Bulgarians fled from the Khazars and settled in the lower Danube.
As noted above, there is an assumption that among the peoples who simultaneously populated the Caspian basin there were also Magyar tribes that broke away from the Onogur Union. The “double conquest” theory could provide intelligible answers to a number of questions that remain unanswered, such as how it, in particular, explains the early layer of borrowings of Slavic words into the Hungarian language, most likely dating back to the 8th-9th centuries. Moreover, although Charlemagne and the Bulgarians undertook large-scale military campaigns, they could not be responsible for the complete extermination of the numerous Avar tribes. The Avars were supposed to remain on the lands of the Middle Danube Plain. However, there is no evidence that the Magyars who settled in this region after 895 were joined by any significant group of ethnically alien elements. Therefore, it is possible that those “Avars” who we know for sure remained in these lands could in fact be Hungarians. Be that as it may, this hypothesis remains controversial: it has almost as many opponents as supporters among archaeologists and historians.
The Magyars threw off the Khazar yoke around 830, and, of course, many centuries of coexistence with the Turkic peoples did not pass without a trace. They must have called themselves magyar, i.e. “speakers” (from Finno-Ugric mon - to speak and er - person), which in early Islamic sources was rendered as madzhgir. In the earliest Western European texts, however, they were called turci or ungri - Turks or Onogurs. From ungri comes the corresponding ethnonym in most European languages. This is exactly what the Magyars were called in the Byzantine chronicle of 839 - the first written monument in which special attention was paid to them and where, without any doubt, we are talking specifically about the Magyars. At that time, they lived in a vast territory called Etelköz in Hungarian and spread out on the lands between the Don (Etil) River and the lower reaches of the Danube. Since in the Northern Black Sea region in the VIII-IX centuries. there was no significant relocation of nomadic peoples, it is clear that the Magyars separated from the Khazar Kaganate and established dominance over the new steppe territories, where for several decades they roamed as Khazar tributaries, but not as a result of external pressure, but as a result of awareness of their own strengths, that they have now gained significant political weight. It was from here that they struck their first blow on the eastern outskirts of the Frankish empire in 862, and then repeatedly repeated raids on their own or together with allies, such as the Kabardian Turks or the Moravian prince Svatopluk. In 894, in alliance with the Byzantine Emperor Leo VI the Wise, who left the first detailed description of their peculiar customs, traditions and habits, especially in the field of warfare, they took part in a successful campaign against the Bulgarian Tsar Simeon.
That same year, however, the relative calm that reigned in the Wild Field came to an end. For the history of the Magyars, this event is of great importance. The next wave of Turkic peoples, pouring into the steppes from the east, forced the Pechenegs (they at that time lived in the lands from the Urals to the Volga and, presumably, starting from 850, had already made two raids on the Magyars) cross the Don. This development of events played into the hands of Tsar Simeon, who concluded a military alliance with them against the Magyars. Under the burden of double motivation, the Pechenegs fell upon the Magyars, who, finding themselves sandwiched between two hostile forces, began to think about looking for a new habitat - further to the west.
From the second third of the 9th century. The Slavic population of the Don and the entire forest-steppe zone was attacked by the Magyars, whom the Slavs called Ugrians, the Arabs and Byzantines called Turks, and in Central and Western Europe they became known as Hungarians.
They were a people speaking a language belonging to the Finno-Ugric language family. The ancestral home of the Magyars - Great Hungary - was in Bashkiria, where back in 1235 the Dominican monk Julian discovered people whose language was close to Hungarian.
Having broken through between the Volga and Don rivers, the Magyars then settled in areas that in their legends are called Levedia (Swans) and Atelkuzy. Researchers usually believe that we are talking about the Lower Don and the Dniester-Dnieper interfluve, respectively.
The entire Magyar horde numbered no more than 100,000 people and, according to contemporaries, could field from 10,000 to 20,000 horsemen in the field. Nevertheless, it was very difficult to resist them. Even in Western Europe, which had recently defeated the Avars, the appearance of the Magyars caused panic. These nomads - short, with three braids on their shaved heads, dressed in animal skins, firmly sitting on their short but hardy horses - terrified with their very appearance. The best European armies, including the Byzantine, turned out to be powerless against the Magyars’ unusual military tactics. Emperor Leo the Wise (881 - 911) described it in detail in his military treatise. When setting out on a campaign, the Magyars always sent horse patrols ahead; during stops and overnight stays, their camp was also constantly surrounded by guards. They began the battle by showering the enemy with a cloud of arrows, and then with a swift raid they tried to break through the enemy formation. If they failed, they turned to feigned flight, and if the enemy succumbed to the trick and began pursuit, then the Magyars turned around at once and attacked the enemy’s battle formations with the whole horde; An important role was played by the reserve, which the Magyars never forgot to deploy. In pursuit of the defeated enemy, the Magyars were tireless, and there was no mercy for anyone.
The dominance of the Magyars in the Black Sea steppes lasted for about half a century. In 890, a war broke out between Byzantium and the Danube Bulgarians. Emperor Leo the Wise attracted the Hungarians to his side, who crossed to the right bank of the Danube and, devastating everything in their path, reached the walls of the Bulgarian capital Preslava. Tsar Simeon asked for peace, but secretly decided to take revenge. He persuaded the Pechenegs to attack the Hungarians. And so, when the Hungarian cavalry went on another raid (apparently against the Moravian Slavs), the Pechenegs attacked their nomads and massacred the few men and defenseless families remaining at home. The Pecheneg raid confronted the Hungarians with a demographic catastrophe that threatened their very existence as a people. Their first concern was to fill the lack of women. They moved beyond the Carpathians and in the fall of 895 settled in the valley of the upper Tisza, from where they began to carry out annual raids on the Pannonian Slavs in order to capture women and girls. Slavic blood helped the Hungarians survive and continue their family line.
Prince Arpad's crossing of the Carpathians. The cyclorama was written for the 1000th anniversary of the conquest of Hungary by the Magyars.
Magyar rule made us remember the times of the Avar yoke. Ibn Ruste compared the position of the Slavic tribes subordinate to the Magyars with the position of prisoners of war, and Gardizi called them slaves obliged to feed their masters. In this regard, G.V. Vernadsky makes an interesting comparison between the Hungarian word dolog - “work”, “labor” and the Russian word “debt” (meaning “obligation”). According to the historian, the Magyars used the Slavs for “work”, which was their “duty” to perform - hence the different meaning of this word in Hungarian and Russian. Probably, the Hungarians borrowed the Slavic words for “slave” - rab and “yoke” - jarom ( Vernadsky G.V. Ancient Rus'. pp. 255 - 256).
Probably during the 9th century. The Slavic tribes of the Dnieper and Don regions also more than once experienced the heavy onslaught of the Hungarian cavalry. Indeed, “The Tale of Bygone Years” notes under 898: “the Ugrians marched past Kyiv along the mountain, which is now called Ugorskoe, and when they came to the Dnieper they stash with vezhas [tents]…”. However, upon closer examination, this fragmentary message is hardly credible. Firstly, the date of the invasion is incorrect: the Hungarians left the Lower Dnieper region for Pannonia no later than 894. Secondly, the lack of continuation of the story about the “standing” of the Ugrians near Kiev indicates that the chronicler-local historian in this case just wanted to explain the origin name Ugric, which actually goes back to the Slavic word eel- “high, steep bank of the river” ( Vasmer M. Etymological dictionary. T. IV. P. 146). Thirdly, it is not clear where the Ugrians could be heading, walking “past Kiev by the mountain” (that is, up the Dnieper, along its right bank), not to mention the fact that, fleeing from the Pechenegs, they moved from their Atelkuza by no means to north, and straight to the west - into the Pannonian steppes.
The last circumstance again makes us suspect that the chronicler here, too, timed a legend relating to one of the Dnieper to the historical reality of Kyiv on the Dnieper. In a more complete form, it can be read in the “Acts of the Hungarians” (an unnamed chronicle written at the court of King Béla III in 1196 - 1203), where it is said that the Hungarians, retreating from Atelkuza, “reached the region of the Rus and, without meeting any or resistance, marched all the way to the city of Kyiv. And when we passed through the city of Kyiv, crossing (on ferries. - S. Ts.) the Dnieper River, they wanted to subjugate the kingdom of the Rus. Having learned about this, the leaders of the Rus were greatly frightened, for they heard that the leader Almos, the son of Yudjek, was descended from the family of King Attila, to whom their ancestors paid an annual tribute. However, the Kiev prince gathered all his nobles, and after consulting, they decided to start a battle with the leader Almosh, wanting to die in battle rather than lose their kingdom and, against their will, submit to the leader Almosh.” The battle was lost by the Russians. And “the leader Almosh and his warriors, having won, subjugated the lands of the Rus and, taking their estates, in the second week went to attack the city of Kyiv.” Local rulers considered it best to submit to Almos, who demanded that they give “him their sons as hostages”, pay “ten thousand marks as an annual tax” and, in addition, provide “food, clothing and other necessary things” - horses “ with saddles and bits" and camels "for transporting goods." The Russes submitted, but on the condition that the Hungarians leave Kyiv and go “to the west, to the land of Pannonia,” which was fulfilled.
In Hungary, this legend was obviously intended to justify Hungarian dominance over the “Kingdom of the Rus,” that is, over the subordinate region of the Carpathian Rusyns, thanks to which the heir to the Hungarian throne bore the title “Duke of the Rus.”
In view of all this, we can say that the period of Magyar domination in the Northern Black Sea region passed almost without a trace for early Russian history.
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This is what some Hungarian scientists think
The Kazakhs, indeed, often use the name Madiyar (Magyar)
Hungarians have Kazakh roots
Kazakhs and Hungarians are brother nations, says the famous Hungarian orientalist scholar and writer Mikhail Beike, author of the book “Turgai Magyars.”
We managed to meet with the famous writer, interviewing him.
We offer fragments of this conversation to the reader.
What is your new book about?
The fact is that the scientific schools existing in the world today give completely different interpretations of where the Hungarian people originate. Some confidently classify us as a member of the Finno-Ugric language group, identifying us with such peoples as the Khanty and Mansi. Other scientists, of which I include myself, suggest that our common ancestors were the Turks of the ancient world. The search for evidence ultimately led me to Kazakhstan. But there is a little backstory here.
The very name of our state, Hungaria, as the Hungarians call it, according to one scientific hypothesis is translated as the country of the Huns, or Huns - in Russian transcription. As is known, it was the Huns, who emerged from the steppes of Central and Central Asia, who are the ancestors of the entire family of Turkic peoples inhabiting the territories from the foothills of the Altai and Caucasus to the borders of modern Europe. But this is just one theory. There are other assumptions. Since ancient times, among our people there has been a legend about two brothers - Magyar and Khodeyar, which tells how two brothers hunting for a deer parted on the road. Khodeyar, tired of the chase, returned home, while Magyar continued the pursuit, going far beyond the Carpathian Mountains. And here's what's interesting. It is here, in Kazakhstan, in the Turgai region, that the Magyars-Argyns live, in whose epic this legend is repeated, as in a mirror. Both we and they identify themselves as one people - the Magyars. Children of Magyar. This is what my book is about.
Is it possible to be more specific?
As scientists suggest, in the 9th century, the united Magyar people divided into two groups, one of which migrated west, to the lands of modern Hungary, the other remained in its historical homeland, presumably somewhere in the foothills of the Urals. But already during the Tatar-Mongol invasion, this part of the Hungarian tribes became part of two large tribal federative unions of Argyns and Kipchaks on the lands of Kazakhstan, while maintaining self-identification. Scientists call them that: Magyars-Argyns and Magyars-Kipchaks. Until now, on the gravestones of the deceased, these people, essentially Kazakhs in all respects, indicate that the deceased belonged to the Magyar clan. Now comes the fun part. If the ancestors of the Magyars who remained in their historical homeland were not related in language, culture and way of life to the peoples included in these tribal formations, do you think they would have been accepted there? And the second question. Why did the Kipchaks, who defended Otrar, flee from the retribution awaiting them from Genghis Khan in 1241-1242 not just anywhere, namely to Hungary, under the protection of King Bel IU? The presence of family ties is clearly visible here.
It is difficult to imagine Hungarians as nomads.
Nevertheless, it is true. Until the 11th century, Hungarians followed a nomadic lifestyle. Our people lived in yurts, milked mares, and raised cattle. And only later, with the adoption of Christianity, our ancestors switched to a sedentary lifestyle. The same Kipchaks living today in Hungary, with regret we have to admit, for the most part do not know folk customs and have forgotten their native language. But at the same time, among Hungarians there is a growing interest in everything connected with our distant history. The collection of Kazakh folk songs, compiled by Janos Shipos, caused a huge resonance in our country. Publications about modern Kazakhstan and its history are increasing. About Kazakhs, Kazakh-Magyars. Back in the distant 13th century, the monk Julian first made an attempt to find his historical roots, equipping two expeditions to the East. Unfortunately, both of them did not bring results. A new wave of interest in the search for one's historical ancestral home erupts in Hungarian society at the turn of the eighteenth century. Searches are being conducted in various regions of the planet, including a large part of Asia, Tibet and India. And only in 1965, the famous Hungarian anthropologist Tibor Toth discovered a Magyar village in the Turgai region of Kazakhstan. Unfortunately, he was not allowed to conduct serious research at that time. The Turgai region in those days was closed to foreigners. And only with the collapse of the USSR and the Republic of Kazakhstan gaining independence, long-term scientific expeditions of Hungarian scientists to your country became possible.
It took you about two years to finish your photo-heavy book. Could you tell us about the trip to the Turgai steppe itself? And what particularly stuck with you on this trip?
We, I and the Scientific Secretary of the Central Museum of the Republic of Kazakhstan, Babakumar Sinayat uly, who accompanied me on the trip, visited there in September. We talked to many people. We visited the grave of the famous Kazakh political figure Mirzhakup Dulatov from the Magyars-Argyns family, paying tribute to the man who openly opposed the tyranny committed during Stalin’s times. And this is what struck me to the depths of my soul - how many Magyars-Argyns in those years fell under the rink of repression. And how few of them are left today. Many of these people served seventeen, twenty-five years in Stalin’s camps and learned to remain silent. It was very difficult to get them to talk. And I consider the legend I heard here, in the steppes of Turgai, about two brothers, Madiyar and Khodeyar, told to me by old people, to be a genuine scientific find. Repeating its Hungarian version word for word.
Is this your fourth book on a Kazakh theme?
Yes. Previously, I published your President’s book “On the Threshold of the Twenty-First Century,” translated into Hungarian. In 1998, the book “Nomads of Central Asia” by Nursultan Nazarbayev was published. In 2001, the book “In the footsteps of the monk Julian.” And finally, my last scientific work, “The Torgai Magyars,” was published in 2003 by the TIMP KFt publishing house in Budapest.
P.S. Let us add that this book was published in four languages: Hungarian, English, Russian, Kazakh, and was released in a trial edition of 2500 copies. Presumably it will be republished.
There is a lot of evidence in archeology, mythology, and linguistics that the Hungarian-Ugrians came to the Danube from the Middle Kama region in the 9th century.
It would seem that Hungarians should come by plane and carriage on excursions to Solikamsk and Kishert in order to at least look at their distant historical homeland. But this doesn't happen. Why?
First, let’s read a short chapter from B. Ehrenburg’s book “Animal Style” (Perm, 2014).
The mystery of the Hungarians
During the era of the creation of the animal style in the Kama region, there were two peoples, the northern and southern Bjarms. Two archaeological cultures are known in science, Lomovatovskaya and Nevolinskaya. The first was located in the Upper Kama region along the Kama, Kolva and Vishera, the second, Nevolinskaya culture, at the end of the 4th - beginning of the 9th century. occupied quite a significant area - about 15 thousand square meters. m (this is approximately half of modern Belgium) in the basin of the Sylva River, one of the large left tributaries of the Kama. More than 270 monuments are known on this territory, of which about 200 are settlements and about 50 settlements (Goldina R.D., 1990). The Nevolinians traded with Byzantium and Iran, more than 20 treasures of southern imports were discovered on the territory, metallurgy was developed, the craftsmen were famous for inlaid belts, armchairs, pendants, etc.
Descendants of the Alans and the Ugrians who came here in the 6th century, the Nevolin people preserved horse breeding, the mobility of nomads and Alan legends about the cities of the Black Sea region in the Kama forest-steppe.
At the beginning of the ninth century, the southern Bjarms mysteriously disappear.
According to archaeological data, by the end of the ninth century, the cities of the Nevolin culture were empty, the burial grounds were abandoned. They usually write that the population went south and became part of Volga Bulgaria. This is partly true. For unknown reasons, the people left, but much further, not just to the Volga.
It is known that the Hungarians came to the Danube in the 9th century from somewhere in the southern Russian steppes.
Their language, as proven, has an undoubted relationship with the Ugric languages of the Khanty and Mansi. There are many Alan words in the Hungarian language: hid - bridge, vert - armor, asszony - lady, woman, kard - sword, ezüst - silver, üveg - glass, etc. Silver death masks were discovered in ancient Hungarian burials. A silver dish was found in a burial on the Danube, marked with a dagger in the Ural manner (Fodor I.). The Ugric language, graffiti on dishes and the custom of burial in silver death masks intersected in one place: in the Kama region. And we know an entire people who mysteriously disappeared from these places.
We can even trace the path of this people through burials with masks and evidence from medieval written sources. Masks and many Kama objects are found in the Bolshie Tigani burial ground in the lower reaches of the Kama in the center of Volga Bulgaria. The funeral rite is similar to burials in Hungary. The burial ground dates from the mid-ninth century.
In the Tankeevsky burial ground on the left bank of the Volga (Bulgaria), in addition to masks, many noisy pendants, kopoushki and other women’s jewelry typical of the Perm creators of the animal style were discovered. Further, a silver mask was discovered in a Hungarian burial ground near the village of Manvelovka in the Dnieper region. We see that the Ugric-Hungarians went through Bulgaria to Meotida, to the Black Sea region, where the cities of the Greco-Sarmatian Bosporan kingdom once flourished and where at the beginning of our millennium nomadic Alan tribes came every winter. The early Hungarian chronicle "Anonyma" (Magistra P.) names two possible ancestral homelands of the Hungarians - Meotida (Azov region) and the steppes beyond the Volga near the Ural Mountains. These are exactly the extreme points of the nomadic Alan “pendulum”.
But the Ugrians did not find the homeland of the “Golden Age” of the Alans in Meotida. By the 9th century, the cities of Bosporus lay in ruins for four centuries. The Khazars who ruled there were not happy with the warlike newcomers and forced them to leave the territory of the Kaganate. According to written sources, we know that the “horde of Levedia” (as the Byzantine Emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus called a group of tribes in his treatise “On the Administration of the Empire”) left Bulgaria, at one time lived in the Dnieper region near the borders of the Khazar Khaganate, then went west and along the mountains, which they later began to call them Ugric, and bypassed Kyiv.
Under pressure from the Pechenegs, the Hungarians retreated to Bulgaria, where they suffered a military defeat from the Bulgarian king, but then in the Battle of Pressburg, under the leadership of Prince Arpad, who united seven tribes, they defeated the troops of Great Moravia. The warlike tribes of the Hungarians still wanted to capture Bavaria, but lost the Battle of Lech to the Germans and settled on the Danube.
Disputes about the homeland of the Hungarians have raged for centuries. Hungarian scientists (A. Reguli, B. Munkacsi and others) came to the Trans-Urals more than once, studied the Khanty and Mansi, and found a lot in common between their ancestors and the Urals, including the ancient national myth about the seven brothers, leaders and the younger king-horseman who defeated the brothers in an equestrian competition. A similar myth was preserved among the Mansi, where the great hero Mir-Susne-Khum (Alvi, Alvali, Ali-Khum) defeated the brothers and was the first to tie his horse to the heavenly hitching post of his father Numi-Torum.
The Catholic Hungarian monk Julian, sent to search for the homeland of his ancestors and convert the Hungarians who remained in paganism to Christianity, in 1236 found “pagan Hungarians” in unknown lands beyond the Volga and spoke to them in the Hungarian language they understood. The Bulgars showed him the way to their north, so, most likely, the monk spent a month with the Ugrians of the Kama region.
So, we know that at the beginning of the ninth century one of the peoples of the Urals disappeared, and at the end of the same century a people appeared on the Danube with the same mythology, with a related language, with a similar funeral rite. We won’t say anything, draw your own conclusions.
***
Let us add to this chapter that at the Ogurdinsky burial ground in Usolye, A. Belavin found and described a number of things, analogues of which were found in ancient Hungarian burial grounds on the Danube. To prove the identity of the peoples, the only thing missing is photographs of the ancient Hungarians against the background of Sylva and Kama, and then of the same persons against the background of the Tisza and Danube in the ninth century.
So, the facts are there, but no curious Hungarians are visible in Solikamsk. From what?
Moreover, if the Finns consider the local Finno-Ugrians to be their younger unfortunate relatives, so to speak, lost forest brothers, then the Hungarians contemptuously turn away and disown all ethnic ties with the Urals. This can be said, for example, by Natalya Shostina, who more than once tried to invite Hungarians to the Kamvu ethnofestival.
Same question - why?
To answer this, let us immediately define the role of the official historiography of any country.
The official historian is a government service personnel, just like a security guard, a company car driver, or a janitor. The same personnel as the official writer, director, political scientist, editor of the state television channel. As you know, any history was immediately rewritten to please the new emperor and the government policy.
Today's Hungary, which liberated itself from socialism 25 years ago and has once again become part of the European world, needs a European history that is far from connections with Russia and the forest-steppe of the Kama region. The official historiography of Hungary believes that it is shameful and absurd to derive the history of the country from some forests of wild Finno-Ugric peoples. Hungarian nationalist historians generally call the theory of the exodus of the Ugrians from the Kama region and Trans-Urals a pro-Russian conspiracy in science and brand its supporters. Hungarian historiography looks for the ancestors of the Hungarians in the founders of huge nomadic empires and traces the history of the nation back to the Huns and Atilla. There is no evidence of this, except for one thing: a horde, that is, a nomadic people, came to the Danube. And here we are forced to agree with them.
But we will go further and correct the important mistake of the Hungarians.
It was not the wild Ugrians of the northern forests who came to the Danube. The descendants of the nomadic people of the Alans, who played a huge role in the ethnogenesis of the Kama Ugrians, came to Eastern Europe from the forest-steppes of the Kama region. The Sarmato-Alans, who came to the north in the 4th century, after the defeat of their main forces in the southern steppes by the Huns, settled on the Kama River and, together with the local tribes, formed the so-called. Nevolin culture, but retained the skills of nomadic peoples in the Kama forest-steppe. For unknown reasons, their descendants left our region after several centuries and, passing through Volga Bulgaria and the Azov region, rushed to Europe.
We have already talked about Alan words in the Hungarian language. It is characteristic that these are leader words denoting booty and weapons (sword, silver, mirrors, women, etc.). Let us add that the Yassy Alans subsequently fled to Hungary in the 13th century from the Mongols from the Caucasus and easily adapted to a “foreign” country.
The paradox is that nationalist Hungarians do not need to elevate themselves to the disgusting (in the opinion of Europeans of that time) Huns; their origins are much more noble.
The Sarmato-Alans are a famous people, with whom the Poles, Ukrainians and even the French were proud of their kinship, where the Alans left a great legacy in the toponymy of cities: Alanville, Alansonum and the aristocratic names Alen, Count Allon, etc. The Alan cavalry, as part of the Roman troops, crushed and destroyed the center of the Hunnic army led by Atilla in the famous battle on the Catalaunian fields. In general, Alans - Iranian speaking people European nomads, in contrast to the Asian Huns who came from afar.
Only recently have works appeared about the Sarmatians in the Kama region (D. Shmuratko, V. Ovchinnikova, etc.), unknown to Hungarian historians. Will we wait for the days when the truth will illuminate the proud Hungarians, and they will move to study their distant historical Ural homeland?
Moreover, in some places it is no less beautiful than the banks of the Tisza and Danube.