Who Gets to be Hungarian?

Horsemen at Kurultáj in Bugac, Hungary, 2014. The festival uses equestrian culture, historical dress and martial performance to evoke Magyar and steppe ancestry. Credit: Derzsi Elekes / Wikimedia Commons.

What makes a culture authentically national? Is it a language passed down for generations, an old folk song, a religious tradition, or a story about where a people came from?

These questions matter because national identity is never simply a description of everyone who happens to live within a country's borders. Nations tell stories about themselves: where they came from, which experiences bind their people together, and which traditions make them distinct.

Benedict Anderson famously described the nation as an “imagined political community.” Members of even a small nation will never know most of their fellow citizens, yet they can still understand themselves as belonging to the same community. The important question is therefore not whether a national community is real, but how it is imagined.

Eric Hobsbawm approached the issue from another direction. His idea of the “invented tradition” describes practices that create a sense of continuity with the past through repetition and ritual. These traditions do not have to be fabricated. They can draw on genuinely old cultural material. What changes is how that material is selected, organized and presented as representative of a community.

Hungary offers an especially revealing example. The history from which modern Hungarian identity emerged was never culturally uniform. The historical Kingdom of Hungary was multilingual and multiethnic. Yet modern Hungarian nationalism increasingly tied the nation to Magyar language, history and culture.

This raises a difficult question: when a complicated cultural past becomes a coherent national story, who decides which parts of that past count as Hungarian?

Nations Need a Past

One of the strange things about nationalism is that nations are relatively modern political creations but often experience themselves as ancient. Anderson describes this as the tension between their historical modernity and their “subjective antiquity.”

This does not mean the cultures surrounding nations are new. Languages, songs and customs can be much older than the modern state. Nationalism instead gathers particular elements of those histories into a story of continuity.

Folklore is particularly powerful in creating that connection. A folk song can connect someone to people who lived generations earlier. A dance can be performed by strangers across an entire country. Anderson makes a similar observation about communal singing: strangers repeating the same words and melodies together give physical expression to an otherwise imagined community.

But how does something local eventually come to represent an entire nation?

Hobsbawm distinguishes between living “custom” and formalized “tradition.” Customs change as communities change. Traditions tend to repeat particular practices and present them as stable connections to the past. He gives the example of nineteenth-century Switzerland, where existing practices such as folk singing and shooting competitions were incorporated into a developing national culture alongside flags, processions, speeches and ceremonies.

The distinction matters. A folk practice does not become politically significant simply because it is old. It matters who selects it, who teaches it, where it is performed and what it is said to represent.

The Making of the Hungarian Nation

Béla Bartók records folk songs using a gramophone in 1908. The collection and preservation of vernacular culture played an important role in turning local traditions into nationally recognized heritage. Credit: Unknown photographer, 1908 / Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

Hungary's own history complicates the idea of a timeless national culture.

Before modern nationalism, Central Europe was largely organized through dynastic empires rather than nation-states. The Habsburg monarchy governed Magyars, Croats, Slovaks, Germans, Italians, Ukrainians and many other communities without assuming that political borders had to correspond neatly with linguistic or ethnic ones.

The Kingdom of Hungary itself was deeply diverse. Anderson notes that roughly half of its population was non-Magyar and only around one-third of its serfs spoke Magyar. Even among Magyar elites, French, German and Latin circulated alongside Hungarian.

Modern Hungarian nationalism therefore did not simply uncover a political identity that had always existed in the same form. The relationship between language, culture and political belonging changed over time.

Hungarian-language literature became increasingly important through figures such as György Bessenyei and Ferenc Kazinczy. Language itself became political when Emperor Joseph II attempted to replace Latin with German in imperial administration. During the nineteenth century, Hungarian political identity became increasingly associated with Magyar language, even as this project unfolded within a kingdom containing millions of non-Magyar speakers.

Culture changed alongside language. Anderson places Béla Bartók within a wider European movement in which writers, folklorists and composers collected vernacular culture and helped transform it into nationally recognized forms.

Collecting a village song does not make the song artificial. But writing it down, arranging it, performing it nationally and eventually recognizing it as Hungarian heritage changes its scale and meaning. The nation is therefore not simply inherited. It is also curated.

Pál Teleki's ethnographic map of Hungary, based on the 1910 census. The historical Kingdom of Hungary contained a complex mixture of linguistic and ethnic communities. Credit: Pál Teleki, 1919 / Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

Performing the Magyar Past

Few contemporary examples show this more clearly than Kurultáj, a large festival held in Bugac in central Hungary.

Kurultáj draws on Turanism, a tradition that emphasizes connections between Hungarians and peoples of Central Asia. The festival combines cultural celebration with horse riding, archery, combat displays, historical dress and reconstructed or revived martial practices. Fabian and Molnár describe it as a space where heritage, nationalism and political performance increasingly overlap.

Its power lies partly in its physicality.

People do not simply hear stories about ancient Magyar warriors. They watch versions of that ancestry being performed. Horsemen cross the landscape; participants wear historical clothing; martial practices are presented as links to an ancestral world. Fabian and Molnár describe this appeal through the idea of “heritage nostalgia”: an idealized past is made meaningful in the present.

Some of these practices have complicated histories. Baranta, for example, is presented as an authentically Magyar martial tradition connected to warrior ancestry, although its modern form developed in the 1990s. Other Hungarian wrestling traditions contain Ottoman Turkish, Slavic and Germanic influences that can become less visible when they are reconstructed around supposedly pure Magyar origins.

This closely resembles the process Hobsbawm describes. Old cultural materials can be reorganized and given new symbolic meanings without being entirely fabricated.

Kurultáj also shows why nationalism cannot be understood only through political speeches. National identity can be experienced through the body.

Fabian and Molnár connect traditional physical culture to a wider form of heritage populism under Viktor Orbán. Horse riding, archery, wrestling and martial performances can present Hungarianness as ancient, masculine and culturally distinct from Western European modernity. Turanist ideas also fit within the government's broader “Eastern Opening,” which has emphasized Hungary's connections with the East.

Yet the festival should not simply be dismissed as propaganda. Such events can provide genuine experiences of community, continuity and belonging. That is precisely what makes cultural nationalism powerful: it does not merely tell people what to believe - it gives them something to experience.

When Culture Becomes a Policy

Culture becomes more politically significant when it moves from voluntary participation into institutions.

A 2025 comparative study by Bálint Mikola and colleagues examined cultural policy in Hungary, Poland, Czechia and Slovakia between 2010 and 2023. The authors distinguish relatively “thin” populism from “thick ideological” populism, where nationalism, religion and traditionalism become central to the political project. They place Hungary under Fidesz firmly within the latter category.

Before 2010, Hungary largely followed a pluralist cultural model. Mikola and his colleagues argue that Fidesz shifted this system toward one in which cultural policy increasingly serves ideological objectives through funding decisions, institutional boards and political appointments.

The changes have been concrete. The Hungarian Academy of Arts received public status and greater influence. Leadership at important cultural institutions shifted toward government-aligned figures. Theatre appointments became increasingly politicized, literary institutions were reorganized, and previously marginalized conservative writers were incorporated into the national curriculum. The authors also identify greater political influence over film financing and the production of revisionist historical films after 2019.

This matters because political power does not need to invent traditions itself.

The ability to determine what receives funding, what enters a school curriculum, who runs a museum and which histories receive national visibility can be far more influential.

Mikola and his colleagues' analysis of 1,575 Orbán speeches reinforces this connection. When Orbán discusses culture, terms closely associated with it include “traditions,” “Christianity,” “civilization,” “roots,” “identity,” “religion,” “spiritual” and “origins.” Culture, in this framework, is not simply something a government funds. It becomes part of a larger argument about what Hungary is.

The Problem with Cultural Purity

A nineteenth-century depiction of the csárdás, a Hungarian folk-dance tradition. Living cultural practices can change over time even as they come to represent continuity with the national past. Credit: Via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

The strongest challenge to a culturally homogeneous image of Hungary comes from Hungarian history itself.

The historical diversity described by Anderson makes it difficult to imagine Hungary as a culturally sealed Magyar world. The Kurultáj study reveals the same problem on a smaller scale: practices presented as distinctly Magyar can contain Ottoman Turkish, Slavic, Germanic and other influences that become obscured when heritage is reconstructed around cultural purity.

This is not unusual. Cultures develop through contact. People borrow words, music and customs. Political borders move. Empires rise and disappear. Practices that later appear distinctly national can emerge from much messier histories.

Recognizing this does not make Hungarian culture less meaningful.

It changes what authenticity means.

A tradition does not have to be culturally pure to be Hungarian. It can become Hungarian through generations of use, adaptation and attachment. Hobsbawm's distinction between custom and formalized tradition is useful here because living cultural practices change. Fixing a tradition as “authentic” can sometimes hide the very exchanges and adaptations that allowed it to survive.

Who Gets to be Hungarian?

Hobsbawm argues that the history entering national consciousness is not everything that happened. It is what has been selected, written, pictured, popularized and institutionalized. Anderson similarly shows how nations construct their biographies backwards, finding ancestors and origins capable of connecting the present to a distant past.

Contemporary Hungary shows both processes at work.

Kurultáj turns selected visions of Magyar ancestry into physical experience. Cultural policy influences which representations of Hungary receive institutional support. Museums, films, literature, festivals and curricula can repeat those representations until they begin to appear less like interpretations of the nation than the nation itself.

The issue is not whether Hungarian tradition has been “invented” and is therefore false. After all, all national cultures require some level of interpretation.

The harder question is who has the authority to interpret them.

Who decides which traditions represent Hungary? Which histories become central? Which cultural influences are remembered, and which disappear when a national story becomes too tidy?

Hungary can preserve its folk traditions and historical inheritance without pretending that its culture developed in isolation. Cultural continuity and cultural exchange are not opposites. Hungary's own history shows how closely the two can be connected.

The past cannot decide by itself who belongs in the present. Someone always has to interpret it. This is ultimately what gives folklore its political power. Songs, dances, festivals and stories can make millions of strangers feel that they share not only a country, but a past. The question is what kind of Hungary that shared past is being asked to imagine.

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REFERENCES

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Revised ed. London: Verso, 2006.

Fabian, Tom, and Győző Molnár. “Deep Culture, Deep Kurultáj: Turanism, Muscular Nationalism, and Heritage Nostalgia in Hungary.” International Journal of Sport Policy and Politics (2026). https://doi.org/10.1080/19406940.2026.2662215.

Hobsbawm, Eric. “Introduction: Inventing Traditions.” In The Invention of Tradition, edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, 1–14. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

Mikola, Bálint, Piotr Zagórski, Dean Schafer, Tomas Cirhan, Jonas Suchanek, and Dominik Kevicky. “Cultural Policies of Populist Governments in Central and Eastern Europe: A Comparative Review.” International Journal of Cultural Policy (2025). https://doi.org/10.1080/10286632.2025.2477478.