“Eurasian Magyars” 147 I The illiberal heritage regime A new government Research Institute of Hungarian Studies (Magyarságkutató Intézet, or MKI) was founded in 2019.15 The term magyarság, innocuously translated as “Hungarian”, conveys ethnic semantics of the interwar period. Interwar “magyarság research” was an interdisciplinary national sciences paradigm of studying the nation’s body politic (“nemzettest”) and ancient cultural and biological origins in an integrated approach that took in physical anthropology, archaeology, folklore studies, ethnology, medieval history, linguistics and orientalist studies. For all the interwar disciplines involved, influences from German science and scholarship can be documented, but have not been synthesised to date. As Róbert Keményfi and Tamás Csíki have shown, Hungarian Volkstumsforschung, inspired by its German counterpart, has used the cultural nation rather than the “state-nation” (the nation in the political sense) as a guiding concept, meaning that people were considered not only citizens but also part of an older religious, cultural, “racial” and national community predating the modern nation state. This notion was extended to include the Hungarian minorities in its neighbouring countries under post-First World War borders.16 In interwar physical anthropology, packaged as national science, this involved measuring and comparing 9th-century archaeological skulls and skeletons with living populations of the post-imperial ethnic Hungarian majority. While most of the other ethnic minorities were considered compatible, Hungarians with a Jewish and Romani background were excluded as “alien races”, not only in terms of their “racial biology” but also for their lack of autochthony, as “recent”, modern-era “newcomers” to the Carpathian Basin, which had been thought of as the Magyars’ kingdom for a millennium. MKI staff nowadays combine references to interwar authors concerning medieval Hungarian chronicles with cutting-edge archaeogenetics, their stated aim being to strengthen Hungarian national identity. The institute enjoys a sizeable budget, employs over 100 researchers and has signed cooperation agreements with most of the major Hungarian universities as well as a number of Turkish scientific institutions and the Mongolian Academy of Sciences’ Archaeology Institute. MKI scientists publish extensively in international sciences journals and under international partnerships, and flood the Hungarian Science Bibliography database (Magyar Tudományos Művek Tára, MTMT) with content (1,778 publications, 692 citations since 2019; number of entries: 2018: 0; 2019: 174; 2020: 442; 2021: 378; 2022: 150; 2023: 103).17 The MKI addresses the public through government and social media and through a partnership with Mediaworks Hungary, one of the biggest media companies in the country, for exclusive content in the (pro-)government daily newspaper Magyar Nemzet (“Hungarian Nation”). The MKI board sees their work as expressly continuing the interwar Turanist tradition of science and scholarship and provides regular accounts of the MKI’s scientific progress on M5, the cultural channel on government TV. Over time, the most prominent scientists that have presented at Kurultáj since 2016 – geneticists from the University of Szeged – have become affiliated with the MKI or its partners. In 2019, the physical anthropologist Zsolt Bernert, one of the scientists who had prepared the skull displays at Kurultáj since 2010, was appointed as the new director of the HNHM. His first project was to display the narrative of Hun-Avar-Magyar ancestry in the exhibition Attila Örökösei – A hunoktól az Árpád-házig (“Attila’s heirs – from the Huns to the House of Árpád”) in October 2019. In 2021, László L. Simon, a Fidesz member of parliament and former state secretary for culture and a writer and poet by profession, was appointed as the new director-general of the HNM. Simon is a member of the editorial board of the conservative/alt-right journal Kommentár, which, under his management, has been presenting new issues in the HNM on a regular basis, and Fig. 2 Launch of Kommentár issue 1 at the Hungarian National Mueum, Budapest, published on Facebook in 2023.
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