I 148 Perspectives from Hungary continues to do so.18 The cover design clearly shows fascist aesthetics updated for the 2020s (fig. 1 and 2). In 2022 the HNM had its own exhibition yurt at Kurultáj for the first time, 19 and several HNM archaeologists presented in the science tent. The new Eurasian narrative has been established and institutionalised to a point that it can integrate the scholarship of what even critical Hungarian scholars consider to be legitimate academic actors not known for their illiberal affiliations or nationalist leanings: in 2022, a scholar affiliated with the (then) Eötvös Loránd Research Network (Eötvös Loránd Kutatási Hálózat, ELKH) – which the government broke away from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (HAS) in 2019 and re-named Hungarian Research network (HUNREN) in 202320 – presented their current work at Kurultáj. The HNM cooperation with Kurultáj continues today: with the museum’s yurt in 2024, exhibits, publications and products from the museum’s gift shop available to festivalgoers. Dr. Gábor Virágos, Archaeological Deputy Director of the HNM and director of the HNM National Institute of Archaeology, discussed future closer cooperation and research possibilities at Kurultáj 2024.21 By now, seasoned festivalgoers are ready to embrace any new information about Eurasian nomadic peoples of the past and present as part of Hungary’s civilisational heritage and national identity. By early 2023, the MKI was becoming very vocal about its mission having succeeded: [It claims to have] reinstated the genuine past of the nation, restoring the truths of our chronicles [...] and popular consciousness, which had been expunged from history with defiant insolence by malicious adventurers of foreign origin,[22] and with sheer blunt violence in the absence of scientific facts. It is now an indisputable fact that the Hungarians are the organic heirs of the Scythians, the Huns and the Avars, in short, of the Eurasian archery culture of the Steppe, the first representatives of which were demonstrably present in the Carpathian Basin six thousand years ago at the latest. There is no longer any question that a significant proportion of the Avars spoke Hungarian, and it is also clear that some of the Huns were already Christians – and it is in this light that the Scourge of God, Attila the Hun, who was punishing the West then drowning in aberrations and cynicism, should be interpreted.23 Fig. 3 Street parade commemorating the foundation of Hungary in Budapest, Hungary, 2021.
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