I 146 Perspectives from Hungary years, the government has sponsored the festival with the equivalent of around 1 million euros per year. Since the event’s inception, the volunteers providing event security have been a regional branch of the Magyar Gárda Mozgalom (“New Hungarian Guard Movement”), a legal successor organisation to the far-right paramilitary Hungarian Guard that was disbanded in 2009 by the (then) socialist-liberal coalition government. In odd-numbered years, the organising body (Magyar-Turán Alapítvány, or “Magyar-Turán Foundation”) hosts a smaller, “domestic”, event called Ősök napja (“Day of Ancestors”), which caters to ethnic Hungarians from the neighbouring countries in the Carpathian Basin, the region covering the historical kingdom of Hungary in its pre-1920 borders imagined as ethno-national space. At the venue, a special exhibition pavillon is dedicated to vendors from Slovakia, Romania, Ukraine and Serbia. As I saw for myself between 2014 and 2022, the strong far-right presence at Kurultáj and Ősök napja declined, whilst the government delegations from Turkey and Central Asia came to play a more central role, with their national television teams broadcasting the event to audiences back home. Kurultáj’s target audience in Hungary encompasses a broad spectrum, ranging from “ordinary” families and visitors attending with their respective cultural or sport associations performing at the event through to farright politicians and visitors displaying explicit far-right affinities. Hungarian society is said to be polarised to a “pernicious” degree between liberal and national camps; the division is not only about political affiliations but also includes opposing notions of national culture and cultural belonging. It is important to note that the socalled national camp, which identifies with conservative to far-right concepts of national culture, is not united in terms of its political party affiliations and cannot be assumed to be pro-government. One aim of the new Eurasian project is to integrate and unite this “national camp” in metapolitical – cultural – terms against the liberal camp and “Western liberal hegemony”. This new Eurasian political project is not just a recent invention engineered and administered from the top down. It draws on a wide spectrum of alternative national prehistory narratives in the popular culture of the national camp, stretching back to the interwar period and the 19th century – Hungarian Orientalism – a tradition that only needed to be modernised and streamlined for the 21st century. The advent and rapid development of archaeogenetics is at hand: a group of nationalist scientists started looking for Eastern haplogroups in archaeological skulls from Hungarian territory in a pattern fairly similar to what historian Richard McMahon has described as “genetic ethnology”.12 In fact, shared genealogies with Central Asian physical anthropology were established as long ago as the 1960s.13 As already mentioned, displays of archaeological crania and facial reconstructions of “Europid-Mongolid” racial types are a key component of Kurultáj. Since 2010, they have been provided by scientists affiliated with the HNHM. According to the museum’s annual reports, these displays started out as initiatives by individual staff scientists volunteering at the event, using skulls and other materials from the museum’s collection. Since 2016, this research strand has received new backing from geneticists from the University of Szeged. While researching 9th-century archaeological burial sites in Hungary, they identified a genetic link to Central Asia and started presenting their findings at Kurultáj in 2016. Since 2018, they have published their results in a number of international science journals.14 Based on these findings, they constructed a narrative of historical Hungarian statehood and Central Asian kinship. By 2023, the Magyar-Turán-Foundation had developed an extensive international network for scientific cooperation and exchange involving a wide range of state institutions and individual scholars and scientists in Turkey, Kazakhstan and Mongolia as well as Western Europe and the US. Fig. 1 Launch of Kommentár issue 3 at the Hungarian National Mueum, Budapest, published on Facebook in 2022.
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