Day of Hungarian culture

Citizens of Sopron, Ladies and Gentlemen,

We have gathered here to celebrate. To celebrate what is ours and what we long for. The Hungarian culture. The nourishment, the daily bread which we constantly hunger for even though it is available in abundance. The Hungarian culture which we know is ours and yet – or just because of this – our desire for it is reborn again and again.

You, who invited me, the Association of Christian Intellectuals, the Calvinist Circle, the Luther Association, you know what is ours, what is yours. The century old merit and sweet burden of loyalty and courage is yours and yours. Christianity, Calvin’s and Luther’s legacy of spirit and heritage of faith are all yours. It has been not since yesterday and not even for a quarter of a century, but much longer, that you have maintaining the noble tradition that you celebrate the birthday of the Hymn, our national anthem, together with the most prominent figures of our country and our culture. And it has been not just for five hundred or a thousand years that Christianity, Luther and Calvin have been yours and ours. Because we believe that what our literature, fine arts, our belief, the intellectual giants of theology create in thought, word, action and creation, are derived from the humankind’s primal founts. Although it flowers and bears fruit not in just any era by chance, it is always related to the very first beginning, that is, to creation. Thus it is ultimately God’s gift to the whole of mankind, including us, Hungarians.

Because as the Christian faith and thought, the teachings of Luther and Calvin, have become Hungarian, so will everything we allow through our souls will become Hungarian. This is how our hungarianness will be “a mountain cliff from which to view the world with not a shred of provincialism to narrow the horizon” as Aladár Kuncz said.

Today, on the day of culture, we turn our eyes not only to the greatest figures of Hungarian culture and we pay homage not only their work. Today we also celebrate all that has turned Hungarian from universal and what Hungarian artists, thinkers and men of letters contributed to European culture.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

today we are not only addressing people who enjoy the treasures of high culture as recipients. We are also celebrating the way our daily lives meet with our high culture. The miracle how an inspired artist can create a cathartic piece of work even from the smallest moments of human life which are perhaps not worth taking note of at all.

How many times have I also felt that it would be wonderful to be able to express in words, write down in some form, sing, paint, record and share, a moment which I happened to live through. And how many times have I had to face the fact that I have no skills to do so. I love the riches of our mother tongue yet the words I know could not express the feeling I was overcome by. How good it would be to share, multiply, keep forever in suitable words or pictures, love, minutes of happiness, pride, joy, abandon or the experience of the grace of God. Just the way it would be good to carve a sculpture of disappointment, failure or pain. I knew I did not have what it takes. And then I saw a poem, I opened a book, I heard a tune. And I was instantly overcome by recognition: this is it! This is me, this is the way I am, this is how I feel, this poem, this story, this music gives a form to what I have, formless, inside. This is how the writer, the painter, the composer speak to me and create union with me. And of course, the artist takes – theme, inspiration, energy, love – from my life. This is how we connect with each other.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

our culture is made Hungarian not only by our arts. It also includes all that have been shaped into customs over a millennium. The way we greet each other. The way we hold our holidays. The way we cut our bread. The way we rock our babies. The way we tend to graves. The way we Hungarians give meaningful answers when they ask “How are you?”. The way we drive our cars. Or the way we lead a city or the country. The way we root for whoever we wish to succeed. The way we drink our beer, particularly if it’s been brewed in Sopron. The way we turn to one another and to aliens.
Education? Style? Habit? Each of these.

The way our grandma marked our foreheads with the cross when we left home, the way our grandpa polished his boots, the way our father opened the door before our mothers, the way our mothers kneaded the dough, the way the kindergarten teacher held us in her arms, our schoolteacher educated us – all of these left their marks in us and we see these again in our children and grandchildren. This continuity teaches us humility and makes it possible for us to recreate what we have to, preserve what is worth preserving and increase what we can.
“If I were not, you wouldn’t be and I wouldn’t be if you were not.” The lines of Sándor Kányádi’s love poem could be about the Hungarian culture too. Where would we be without it? And where would it be without us?
Where would we be but for our ancestors, committed to continuing the Hungarian life even during the hardest of times, who defended, protected, developed our language, customs and traditions. Who said yes to having children and so passed down what is now ours. And where will Munkácsy’s Golgotha be, who will understand Attila József’s pain and what will be played in the House of Hungarian Music, if we abandon the possibility and shed the obligation to recreate, preserve and enhance Hungarian life?
Yes, we have had losses for which we mourn. But a hundred years of grief sometimes make us forget that we still have things to lose.

And at such times we recognise our dwindling riches and then we make a go at it. We not only preserve and try to save but also add and enhance. We turn our economy patriotic, fill our villages with life, renew our universities, build nurseries and churches on both sides of our borders and at the same time we appreciate and tend to the work of previous generations, not allowing to slip it into oblivion. And yet, culture is of the essence. If there is culture, then even if there is not everything else but everything can be made.

The way a single cell carries the possibility of a whole new life, so does culture provide opportunities for our communities for material growth. It is not the growing economy and the multiplication of family supports that prompt young couples to have children. Of course it would be more difficult without these. But money can only remove obstacles. The desire to have children and the will to perpetuate ourselves stems from deeper down: it is rooted in our culture. Because we do not only want to survive but also to accomplish and to grow. And not only in the seventy or eighty years that we can live but in the next generations as well. This looking forward, beyond the confines of our life spans is why it is important for us Hungarians to have homes that can be inherited, to protect the created word and to know and pass down the histories of our families. When I was a little girl I loved to look at old photos. I took the heavy hardback albums and started to cautiously turn over their pages. I was carried to a world where my brother and I only existed in the amorous looks between Mum and Dad, where my grandfather wore thick dark hair on his head and where my grandmother’s face was not so heavily lined with wrinkles. And then there were the faces of unknown people on even older picture, so we could ask who they were. I used to spend a lot of time standing before the family tree hanging on the wall. I was proud to know that our family had existed for so long. And it is from, and through, these family stories, that the story and history of our greater community, the Hungarian nation, stems from and unfolds.
“bring upon it a time of relief” we ask in our anthem and not only for ourselves but for all Hungarians entering this world after us. This is why it is good to see growing families, the national pride emerging and unfolding in young people, the artists taking possession of restored and newly built cultural centres, the global success of the brilliant Hungarian intellect and the strengthening of Christian symbols. Economic strength and political capacity for action provide frameworks for recreation, preservation and enhancement but our culture is what feeds the spirit, intellectual power and will for each of these.

Dear Celebrators,

we, Hungarians, have not one but two birthdays. On 20 August we celebrate the birthday of the country and on the day of Hungarian culture we celebrate that of the nation.
Kölcsey’s Hymn is a poem of Hungarian pain, Hungarian hope and reverence. It is inseparable from us. Even atheist regimes only dared to go so far as to allow only its music to be played, without the verse. But during the years of dictatorship our grandparents and parents, and even ourselves, could sing with mouths closed: ‘O Lord, bless the nation of Hungary!’ We can all unite in this sentence, in this desire. And unite we do, time and time again. This is the most wide-open gate, the most encompassing embrace. An invitation to those who do not yet feel and experience the dignity of national cohesion. This is the miracle of the Hymn. A prayer said even by those who have never clasped their hands for a prayer. It talks about us while going way beyond us: up, to the Creator, who wants us to be, to be Christians. Our national prayer does not let itself be expropriated by anybody in petty ideological struggles.  It projects the unity of the nation by recreating it time and time again. It assures us that over and above any contention, inunderstanding, animosity, gloating and pure joy, dissention and unity, there is a cohesion, not of our own making but a gift from the Creator.
This is how the Hymn is ours and this is why we long for it.

“Europe knows precious little about the Hungarian spirit (...) and it didn’t care much about it. (...) The Hungarian spirit was predestined from the very beginning to add a new and special tone to the European concert. (...) The Hungarian culture is not alien and contrasted to the European culture: a special twin branch or, rather, an image in the mirror of a different spirit.” – wrote Mihály Babics and his thoughts still hold up.
We still make a good mirror, and so do other nations of Central Europe with whom our fate has come to be closely intertwined over centuries. Today it is the mission of this Centre to keep whatever of the West belongs to us too from being wasted. We started this with ourselves because we recognised, as a lesson drawn from the past decades and the last century that “Hungarians must be urgently be made more self-conscious.” as the previous century’s great Reformed Bishop László Ravasz szaid. Neither the conquering Hungarians, nor the Kurucs asked what was Hungarian. They knew they were Hungarians, their existence was one with their hungarianness, they felt that hungarianness was what would be destroyed if they were destroyed, and that they would be destroyed if hungarianness were to be destroyed ...the survival of our nation requires the evolution of a more self-aware and stronger hungarianness. Hungarianness needs therefore to be strengthened... We need to get to know better what is Hungarian and want what is Hungarian.”

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Who could know better than the citizens of Sopron, what it means to want “what is Hungarian”. Please continue teaching loyalty to everything Hungarian to your children, grandchildren, us and every Hungarian.
Long live to the people of the Hymn, every Citizen of Sopron!

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