Well, they went and did it. Our new
FIDESZ government voted in a new constitution for Hungary, replacing the former constitution adopted after the fall of communism in 1990. A lot of people both inside and outside of Hungary are not extremely happy about this. During their election campaign, which saw FIDESZ running against the
MSZP (Socialists) FIDESZ never proposed any program for dealing with the economy or mentioned proposing a new constitution, which can only be done if a party has a full 2/3 majority in the Hungarian Parliament. Since the MSZP and SZDSZ (the two liberal parties who were the ruling coalition since 2002) had become flabby on the issue of internal corruption, FIDESZ easily ran over them, rather like a steam roller meeting a small animal on the road at night.
Poor things didn’t have a chance. (Actually, that’s a hedgehog that Fumie saved a few nights ago from being squashed by a bus in the city park. Which brings to
three the number of hedgehogs we have
saved from death in the past year.) Now, if you want to learn more about our new constitution, I suggest you read about it in the
Economist or perhaps the
German reaction in
Der Spiegel, which carries a quote from the late-night news program
Tagesthemen on German television station ARD: "
It's strange, the more some countries profit from the European Union, the more prone they are to anti-European sentiments. The constitutional state has largely been abolished, future elections are efrfectively meaningless, the media are being whipped into line, as are theaters and museums and everything else that could shape the nation's culture.
.."
After kicking up a big storm of debate in the EU parliament last January over the arcane new media law, FIDESZ reformulated the media law somewhat and plowed on formulating its new constitution. What stuns me the most are not the details about gay rights, or definition of when life begins, or even the religious references to Hungary being a Christian nation (it case anybody thought they were all Baha’i.) What gets me is that we just went from being the “Republic of Hungary” to simply “Hungary.” Magyarország. What does that mean? Well, considering that FIDESZ started out as a bunch of law students at the Bibo Collegium of the ELTE Law School, you have a bunch of hair splitting lawyers taking apart the idea of what “republic” means and stands for, and replacing it with something that can be molded to fit the Dear Leader’s vision of what he wishes it to be - which is increasingly the idea of one Party rule, a form of governance that Dear Leader's generation is all too familiar with and perhaps nostalgic for. The new constitution also reinstates the Hungarian Holy Crown as the seat of political authority in Hungary. This is interesting in a modern, EU state, since the Holy Crown’s role in history has been that, unlike western Monarchies and later Parliamentary Monarchies in which the King is the legitimizing authority because he has the crown, in Hungary the legitimizing authority is the crown itself.
According to popular tradition, St Stephen I held up the crown during his coronation (in the year 1000) to offer it to the "Nagyboldogasszony" (the Virgin Mary) to seal a divine contract between her and the divine crown. Anybody who has read Harry Potter can easily understand where this is going. We have a Magic Hat, and if the Bishop of Esztergom lets you wear it, you are the ruler. In truth, nobody has worn the Magic Hat since Franz Jozef in 1867 – which legitimized his authority over the Hungarian domains in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. But now it all goes pear shaped and trying to explain the twentieth century history of the Hungarian Holy Crown becomes something you do not want to attempt in a bar after 11 pm because it quickly becomes a bad parody of the Jerry Springer Show in Hungarian, as do so many historical arguments in Hungarian. But I’ll try… After the breakup of Austria-Hungary in 1918 the new Hungarian Kingdom quickly passed from a Social Democrat coalition to one led by Communist Bela Kun, who hoped that the new Soviet Union would help Hungary regain lands lost during the war. Kun declared the First Republic of Hungary, won a few battles in Slovakia, but soon was faced with Romanian Army occupying Budapest and Serbs in the south demanding territory. In marched Admiral Horthy on his white horse, which reinstated the Holy Haberdashery as the legitimate apex of power in Hungary, with himself ruling merely as regent. And rule he did.
Having signed the flawed Treaty of Trianon, Horthy immediately set about denouncing it and for the next twenty years led Hungary towards its tragic collision course with World War Two and Fascism. In 1949 the Communist Party of Hungary, having easily jacked the elections, redefined Hungary again as a “Republic” albeit a “People’s Republic” in much the same way as East Germany and North Korea loved to define themselves as “Democratic Republics.” Stolen by the Nazis and held in Austria, in 1945 the Holy Crown was placed in Fort Knox, Kentucky for safe keeping by the US Army, in order to deny any legitimacy to the Communist rulers, a state of cold war affairs that lasted until 1978 when Jimmy Carter negotiated its return to Hungary on conditions that made it a museum piece which no Communist government official could take any part. So you can see why FIDESZ, a party of hair-splitting, bone-headed lawyers would decide that “Republic” is probably just some smart commie trick to push the Holy Headgear into the background and make all decision making a function of the messy rabble of democracy. On January 1, 2000, during the second year of FIDESZ’ first round as government, the Holy Crown of Hungary was moved to the Hungarian Parliament Building from the Hungarian National Museum. It has been there ever since… symbolically ruling.
But enough of our bygone republic and its crown bedazzled rulers. Let’s get more local! In our District, (Zuglo, District
FOURTEEN REPRESENTIN’, y’all) the city council has erected these welcome signs at six roads leading into our district. Notice the runic script on the signs. This is an ancient Hungarian form of writing based on the old Turkic runes of central Asia, which was brought to Hungary during the great migration and actually remained in use until the 1700s in Transylvania. Of course, only a few people have learned to read it, but it has become very popular among the extreme right wing crowd who like to wear T-shirts with maps of pre-Trianon Hungary with some runic inscription on it, and you can even find it on a local brand of “Extra Hungarian” bread. And so our local right-wing Jobbik representatives took time out from their busy schedule of harassing Gypsies to push the district government into officially marking Zuglo as a right wing territory. Great.
Yes, when Jobbik tell us that "The Truth will set you free" all I can do is to quote George Clinton:
Free your mind and your ass will follow. Personally, I would like to see the Nagyboldogasszony herself appear and give them a lecture on the power of love and tolerance. Speaking of Mary and the whole Ben-Joseph family, it is Easter this weekend, and in Hungary that means…
pork-pork-pork-o-rama!
It is the ham festival, heavy on the smoked pig, a few hard boiled eggs, and sprinkling water or cheap perfume on girls on Monday! The market this week is bullish on hams of all varieties: smoked knuckles, great wanking peasant hams, haunches smoked almost until they are black with soot and salty goodness. But what would Jesus think of this. He was after all, the King of the Jews. You can’t even get to the point where that is debatable unless the person in question is, in fact, Jewish. (And there are an awful lot of folks on the right wing in Hungary who just don't abide with that line of thinking...) So here the whole country is celebrating His Escape from the Tomb with… a feast of forbidden treyf meat. But hey…
it tastes good. It’s completely
hamalicious! OK, the Savior would probably be fine with matzoh balls and gefilte fish, but that shouldn’t stop Hungarians from engaging in a national pig out for a few days of gleeful swine ingestion.
Actually, most of these hams are terribly salty… you need to soak them in water overnight at least to remove some of the salt, but most people don’t, so the upcoming week can be characterized as National High Blood Pressure Week.
Well, they went and did it. Our new FIDESZ government voted in a new constitution for Hungary, replacing the former constitution adopted after the fall of communism in 1990. A lot of people both inside and outside of Hungary are not extremely happy about this. During their election campaign, which saw FIDESZ running against the MSZP (Socialists) FIDESZ never proposed any program for dealing with the economy or mentioned proposing a new constitution, which can only be done if a party has a full 2/3 majority in the Hungarian Parliament. Since the MSZP and SZDSZ (the two liberal parties who were the ruling coalition since 2002) had become flabby on the issue of internal corruption, FIDESZ easily ran over them, rather like a steam roller meeting a small animal on the road at night.
Poor things didn’t have a chance. (Actually, that’s a hedgehog that Fumie saved a few nights ago from being squashed by a bus in the city park. Which brings to three the number of hedgehogs we have saved from death in the past year.) Now, if you want to learn more about our new constitution, I suggest you read about it in the Economist or perhaps the German reaction in Der Spiegel, which carries a quote from the late-night news program Tagesthemen on German television station ARD: "It's strange, the more some countries profit from the European Union, the more prone they are to anti-European sentiments. The constitutional state has largely been abolished, future elections are efrfectively meaningless, the media are being whipped into line, as are theaters and museums and everything else that could shape the nation's culture..."After kicking up a big storm of debate in the EU parliament last January over the arcane new media law, FIDESZ reformulated the media law somewhat and plowed on formulating its new constitution. What stuns me the most are not the details about gay rights, or definition of when life begins, or even the religious references to Hungary being a Christian nation (it case anybody thought they were all Baha’i.) What gets me is that we just went from being the “Republic of Hungary” to simply “Hungary.” Magyarország. What does that mean? Well, considering that FIDESZ started out as a bunch of law students at the Bibo Collegium of the ELTE Law School, you have a bunch of hair splitting lawyers taking apart the idea of what “republic” means and stands for, and replacing it with something that can be molded to fit the Dear Leader’s vision of what he wishes it to be - which is increasingly the idea of one Party rule, a form of governance that Dear Leader's generation is all too familiar with and perhaps nostalgic for. The new constitution also reinstates the Hungarian Holy Crown as the seat of political authority in Hungary. This is interesting in a modern, EU state, since the Holy Crown’s role in history has been that, unlike western Monarchies and later Parliamentary Monarchies in which the King is the legitimizing authority because he has the crown, in Hungary the legitimizing authority is the crown itself.
According to popular tradition, St Stephen I held up the crown during his coronation (in the year 1000) to offer it to the "Nagyboldogasszony" (the Virgin Mary) to seal a divine contract between her and the divine crown. Anybody who has read Harry Potter can easily understand where this is going. We have a Magic Hat, and if the Bishop of Esztergom lets you wear it, you are the ruler. In truth, nobody has worn the Magic Hat since Franz Jozef in 1867 – which legitimized his authority over the Hungarian domains in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. But now it all goes pear shaped and trying to explain the twentieth century history of the Hungarian Holy Crown becomes something you do not want to attempt in a bar after 11 pm because it quickly becomes a bad parody of the Jerry Springer Show in Hungarian, as do so many historical arguments in Hungarian. But I’ll try… After the breakup of Austria-Hungary in 1918 the new Hungarian Kingdom quickly passed from a Social Democrat coalition to one led by Communist Bela Kun, who hoped that the new Soviet Union would help Hungary regain lands lost during the war. Kun declared the First Republic of Hungary, won a few battles in Slovakia, but soon was faced with Romanian Army occupying Budapest and Serbs in the south demanding territory. In marched Admiral Horthy on his white horse, which reinstated the Holy Haberdashery as the legitimate apex of power in Hungary, with himself ruling merely as regent. And rule he did.
Having signed the flawed Treaty of Trianon, Horthy immediately set about denouncing it and for the next twenty years led Hungary towards its tragic collision course with World War Two and Fascism. In 1949 the Communist Party of Hungary, having easily jacked the elections, redefined Hungary again as a “Republic” albeit a “People’s Republic” in much the same way as East Germany and North Korea loved to define themselves as “Democratic Republics.” Stolen by the Nazis and held in Austria, in 1945 the Holy Crown was placed in Fort Knox, Kentucky for safe keeping by the US Army, in order to deny any legitimacy to the Communist rulers, a state of cold war affairs that lasted until 1978 when Jimmy Carter negotiated its return to Hungary on conditions that made it a museum piece which no Communist government official could take any part. So you can see why FIDESZ, a party of hair-splitting, bone-headed lawyers would decide that “Republic” is probably just some smart commie trick to push the Holy Headgear into the background and make all decision making a function of the messy rabble of democracy. On January 1, 2000, during the second year of FIDESZ’ first round as government, the Holy Crown of Hungary was moved to the Hungarian Parliament Building from the Hungarian National Museum. It has been there ever since… symbolically ruling.
But enough of our bygone republic and its crown bedazzled rulers. Let’s get more local! In our District, (Zuglo, District FOURTEEN REPRESENTIN’, y’all) the city council has erected these welcome signs at six roads leading into our district. Notice the runic script on the signs. This is an ancient Hungarian form of writing based on the old Turkic runes of central Asia, which was brought to Hungary during the great migration and actually remained in use until the 1700s in Transylvania. Of course, only a few people have learned to read it, but it has become very popular among the extreme right wing crowd who like to wear T-shirts with maps of pre-Trianon Hungary with some runic inscription on it, and you can even find it on a local brand of “Extra Hungarian” bread. And so our local right-wing Jobbik representatives took time out from their busy schedule of harassing Gypsies to push the district government into officially marking Zuglo as a right wing territory. Great.
Yes, when Jobbik tell us that "The Truth will set you free" all I can do is to quote George Clinton: Free your mind and your ass will follow. Personally, I would like to see the Nagyboldogasszony herself appear and give them a lecture on the power of love and tolerance. Speaking of Mary and the whole Ben-Joseph family, it is Easter this weekend, and in Hungary that means… pork-pork-pork-o-rama!
It is the ham festival, heavy on the smoked pig, a few hard boiled eggs, and sprinkling water or cheap perfume on girls on Monday! The market this week is bullish on hams of all varieties: smoked knuckles, great wanking peasant hams, haunches smoked almost until they are black with soot and salty goodness. But what would Jesus think of this. He was after all, the King of the Jews. You can’t even get to the point where that is debatable unless the person in question is, in fact, Jewish. (And there are an awful lot of folks on the right wing in Hungary who just don't abide with that line of thinking...) So here the whole country is celebrating His Escape from the Tomb with… a feast of forbidden treyf meat. But hey… it tastes good. It’s completely hamalicious! OK, the Savior would probably be fine with matzoh balls and gefilte fish, but that shouldn’t stop Hungarians from engaging in a national pig out for a few days of gleeful swine ingestion.
Actually, most of these hams are terribly salty… you need to soak them in water overnight at least to remove some of the salt, but most people don’t, so the upcoming week can be characterized as National High Blood Pressure Week.
12 comments:
Actually I think the Holy Crown is not the same as the Crown of St. Stephen in Parliament; it is a non-existent object that symbolically represents the 'divine force' governing Hungary, around which mystical theories of government arose in the late Middle Ages.
-Jim
The (so far) last apostolic king of Hungary, Blessed Charles IV was crowned on 30 December 1916. So he was who wore the Holy Crown for the last time.
How can you get this wrong, there's even a number of videos about it on youtube?
Btw as a monarchist, I'm glad that the republic - in name, not in reality - is gone. Gives more space for us.
A few years ago I met a person who made amongst other things Kosha Melton Pork pies. Now I understand how it could be done. His greatest advert was abour Watership Down. It read ‘You have read the book. You have seen the film. Now try the pie’. They were good, just the right amount of thyme for my liking.
I will not comment about constitutions my country has not got one! It has ‘sheds full’ of Acts ranging from those since ‘time immemorial’ (before the memory of man) through Magna Charta to the present day. It has its ‘Established Church’ but NO constitution. It generally seems to be OK. The U.S. Constitution was written in its language. But no constitution!
I always smirked when I read about the Peoples Democratic Republic of … Pure tautology but if you say things three times they are true.
Oh by the way the Holy Crown has acolytes who translate its silence and immobility into human speech for it.
Ps Do not tell Jobbik that one ‘Jesus bar Joseph’ was a Jew and probably a rabbi it will fuse their brain cell and give who ever has it that day a huge headache.
PPs if you what I can e-mail you several methods of curing hams if you want.
Another amazing post, although I must note — it's "free your mind and your ass will follow." Technically.
"great wanking peasant hams"? The mind boggles! Perhaps it means something different in Hungary (or the US)...
I missed the runic signs on my last visit to Zuglo - they seem to be mainly on the Motorway which is no longer visible since the new soundproof walls were built.
It is reassuring to know that if a Hungarian peasant in the Middle Ages invents a time machine and travels to our time he will be able to read where he is before being mercilessly mowed down by the traffic....
On the King of the Jews, the Hungarian far-right have a theory that Jesus was not Jewish but Hungarian. While this sounds like a joke, unfortunately it seems to be taken pretty resiously by those concerned.
Mr. Dumneazu, I have 3 observations, regarding the pictures and the text.
(Sorry for the length of my following 3 comments):
The revival of the ancient Hungarian notch script writing, and the Hebrew writing is very similar.
The Hebrew alphabet was all but forgotten for centuries, very rarely used, but never truly abandoned, for obvious cultural, historic and religious reasons.
Now, in modern Israel, every road sign is written in the Hebrew alphabet, and it's a very normal and natural thing to do!
In the former Soviet Republic of Moldavia, everybody used the Cyrillic alphabet for generations, but now the Latin alphabet is reintroduced again!
I have many more similar examples of nations returning to the "old" form of writing, after a long hiatus (to debunk your argument regarding the reintroduction of the "old" form of writing).
To lose your identity, as a nation, is a very bad thing; the language, and the writing (alphabet) define who you are, and many nations, from the Chinese to the Israelis, preserve the old traditions. The Hungarians have the same right to revive and preserve the old alphabet.
Jobbik, and the other similar douchebags, cannot be associated with the Hungarian notch script writing, just as Osama bin Laden cannot be associated with the Arabic form of writing, or Yisrael Beiteinu with the Hebrew alphabet.
As a mater of fact, it was the Hungarian extremist, very similar to Jobbik, who eradicated the old "runic" alphabet (because it originated in pre-Christian times, and was considered a "pagan alphabet").
The extremists, from all nations and all historical periods, represent hatred and destruction, not culture or creation!
It's ironic the way the Hungarian extremist have confiscated Jesus, but a bigger irony is the use of the ancient Hungarian notch script, a form of writing eradicated by the same religious and nationalist fanatics...
It was also known as the "pagan writing", in opposition whit the "Christian writing" (the Latin alphabet).
The use of the "pagan writing" was outlawed, and the capital punishment was instituted for the teachers of the old script (the users faced severe public corporal punishment and long prison sentences)!
Every written document, painting, statue, or other things incorporating the ancient symbols, faced instant and merciless destruction, by the hands of the overzealous religious fanatics and the Holy Inquisition...
It was a total cultural and historic genocide!
Nothing survived the great purging.
Not a single piece of literature dating back to the pre-Christian period, no written history, no art, not a thing...
To comprehend the magnitude of the tragedy, just imagine some insane individuals and organizations, erasing everything ever written in ancient Hebrew, or Latin, or ancient Greek (all the poetry, history, art, etc)...
The ancient alphabet has 42 letters, to uniquely represent every sound in the Hungarian language, and several special signs to accommodate every language quirks the Hungarian has.
The Latin alphabet is unable to reproduce all the basic sounds of the Hungarian language, and many artificial constructs are needed to attempt an approximative reproduction of the oral Hungarian.
Many are very confusingly similar Latin letters:
- diacritics (punctuated regular letters)
- the association of 2 letters to create a collective 3'rd letter (sound)
- double or triple letters
- etc...
The original Hungarian alphabet is best suited to write the Hungarian language.
And let's not forget about the historical, cultural, and emotional ties to our alphabet.
The Hebrew speakers have similarly strong attachments to the Hebrew alphabet, as the Hungarian speakers to the Hungarian alphabet, but due to restrictive and oppressive historical times, both have suffered large periods of neglect, and now is time to be revived and preserved!
- The Hungarian "runic signs" are NOT runic signs; and the "Hungarian Runes" are not based on the old "Turkic runes" (both originate from a common main source, the Phoenician alphabet).
All of them are different: the signs are different, and the writing/reading method is different.
The similarity is superficial, and derives from the predominance of the straight lines and sharp edges (just as the Hindi and Arabic alphabets look similar to the superficial observer, because both use "wavy lines", but are different in essence!).
- The Hungarian notch writing is loosely based on the Phoenician Alphabet, and in fact, a similar form of writing is the Early Aramaic, Paleo-Hebrew...
The Paleo-Hebrew script and the Hungarian notch writing share many more similarities, for example the way the vowels are written or not, the special endings, etc.
Roughly 70 percent of the Hungarian notch writing is adapted from other alphabets (the majority is from the Phoenician, and a small number come from the old Turkic and the ancient Greek).
Approximately 30 percent of the notch alphabet is unique to the Hungarian ancient writing (mostly the signs related to the specific quirks of the Hungarian language)...
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