“Eurasian Magyars” 149 I Besides establishing new research institutions, the Orbán government has also gradually been taking over existing state institutions of education and culture, such as universities, museums, scientific collections and theatres. The new Eurasian narrative is now being disseminated in museum exhibitions, state media and social media, music and theatre productions and the education system. What is at stake is the construction of a new hegemonic illiberal epistemic architecture.24 Designs and motives inspired by “ancient Magyar mythology”, which convey the aesthetics of the Eurasian nomads, are being generated and fed into the cultural mainstream, becoming part of the repertoire of national cultural institutions. Recent examples include the National Equestrian Theatre, the Open Air Theatre of Margaret Island, the National Opera House, the HNM, the Hungarian National Theatre, and the Capital Circus of Budapest (fig. 13).25 The new narrative is being disseminated in the educational systems via school textbooks and national-education projects outside the state school system. Aesthetics of Eurasian nomadic and ancient Magyar heritage are becoming increasingly present in public events and public spaces. The street parade commemorating the founding of Hungary in the year 1000 by St Stephen, the first king of Hungary, in Budapest in 2021 (planned for the Trianon centennial in 2020, postponed for the COVID-pandemic) clearly set out to dazzle its audiences by re-inventing the nation’s ancient symbols in the visual language of contemporary pop culture, starting with 9th century reenactors of the conquest era and shamans (fig. 3). They were followed by floats featuring gigantic portrayals of so-called ancient Magyar mythical totem symbols and symbols of Christian iconography: the Miracle Deer (whose design was inspired by the 6th-century Scythian Golden Deer from Tápiószentmárton in the HNM), the Turul bird, St Stephen, the Holy Crown of St Stephen, and the Virgin Mary. In 2022, the Hungarian National Bank erected a statue of a golden Miracle Deer as a new, monumental emblem of the nation’s dynamic economic recovery and expansion. Lifestyle influencers and a whole illiberal ethno- cultural identity industry complex that encompasses fashion designers, media companies and other cultural producers are promoting Eurasian nomad culture as being liberating and fulfilling, desirable and emancipatory and a path to personal growth and spiritual fulfilment for young women and, at the same time, are grounding motherhood in a cultural national identity and the concept of the warrior nation and constitutional sovereignty (fig. 4).26 In August 2023, the MKI, the National Theatre and the University of Theatre and Film Arts began negotiating future co-operation possibilities.27 Inventing the triumphant nation: the Battle of Pressburg (907 CE) as a victory over the West While my interest was originally focused on government involvement and the output from state research institutes and state media, my attention was grabbed by the growing reenactment scene. My research was not an ethnographic study of individual reenactors or reenactment groups; rather, I sought a broader understanding of reenactment that invested in shifting the meaning of historical battles from defeat to a narrative of victory. Battle reenactments and representations are one aspect of a larger project of cultural production, in an effort to stretch Hungarian statehood temporally backwards to the era of conquest (fig. 6). Fig. 4 Lifestyle blogger Rebeka Bársony in an online article of the newspaper Magyar Nemzet, 16 May 2021
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