“Eurasian Magyars” The Role of Historical Reenactment and Experimental Archaeology in Hungary’s Illiberal Heritage Regime Katrin Kremmler In illiberal Hungary, the concept of historical statehood has undergone a process of political re-engineering, with a cultural heritage festival as a main site of experimentation.1 In 2007, actors on the fringes of Hungarian academia and far right groups started revitalising Hungarian Turanism2 – understood here as the belief in a shared cultural and biological link with people of Turkic descent – at a cultural heritage festival called Kurultáj,3 which translates as “great tribal assembly”. In 2010, the promotion of Turanism was taken up by the Orbán government and, from 2019 onwards, was supported by genetics and bioarchaeological research carried out in new government institutions running parallel to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.4 These new institutions play a significant role in furthering Hungary’s geo-economical alignment with Turkey, Central Asia and China. Putting on combat and archery reenactments and horse races involving 500–600 reenactors on horseback and on foot, national and international ethno-sports competitions, Neopagan rituals, nationalist rock music, and Hungarian and Eurasian folklore concerts and performances, Kurultáj is similar to popular mediaeval festivals all over Europe but on a surprisingly larger scale, attracting between 150,000 and 200,000 visitors over a long weekend. Kurultáj is also a platform for popular science education, presenting the culture of Eurasian nomad warriors in a framing of what Marlène Laruelle calls “archaeological patriotism”5 – patriotically interpreted results and considerations from the field of archaeology, in displays provided by the Hungarian Natural History Museum (HNHM), regional archaeology museums and, from 2022 onwards, the Hungarian National Museum (HNM). The new Eurasian “ancestors” of contemporary Hungarians are represented as “Europid-Mongolid” racial types, with archaeological crania and facial reconstructions prepared by the HNHM. Drawing on experimental archaeology, a range of reenactment groups and heritage communities participate in order to demonstrate the combat and cultural techniques of nomadic warrior military elites dating back to the Huns and Avars, all of which are considered relevant for Hungarian military history and statehood. This allows the Hungarian government to integrate what observers consider conflicting civilisationist agendas: “White” Christian Europe as the “real Europe” 6, and Eurasian civilisationism for the purpose of geo-economic, cultural and scientific co-operation with Turkic Muslim states. Since 2014, the content and aesthetics of these heritage events in Hungary have been characterised by close partnerships with recently established major cultural heritage sites and events in Central Asia and Turkey: the National Museum in Astana, the world music festival Spirit of Tengri in Kazakhstan, and the World Nomad Games7 in Kyrgyzstan. The Hungarian project is therefore part of a geopolitical network connecting various transregional culture war agendas: Kurultáj, held in the southern Hungarian countryside, is referred to as one of the biggest Turanist events in the context of Turkish Eurasianism. The event has attracted large numbers of Turkish visitors since 2014, and the cultural stage has been sponsored by the Turkish Cooperation and Coordination Agency (TIKA). There are also links to the new (Pan-) Turkic History Museum and Statue Park in Ankara.8 As Aurélie Stern has shown in her ethnographic study of the Turkish delegations at Kurultáj in 2021 and 2022, the festival serves as an intermediate space for the circulation of conservative ideas at a transnational level; it is a space for the construction of a transnational conservative identity, where religious differences are resolved through Tengrism9 as a shared ancient religion,10 evoked in shamanic ceremonies.11 The Orbán government has increasingly embraced the festival since 2010, the opening ceremony is regularly held in the Parliament Building, and the speaker of the National Assembly László Kövér delivered the welcome address at the event site in 2018 and 2022. In recent
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTMyNjA1