Bányai Balázs - Kovács Eleonóra (szer.): A"Zichy-expedíció"- Szent István Király Múzeum közleményei. A. sorozat 48. (Székesfehérvár, 2013)
The "Zichy Expedition"
FOLLOWING OUR ANCESTORS 215 short time while plenty of social events were organized by the somewhat vain Count.'70 Zichy deemed the expedition a success, he thougth to have found the ancestors of his and other nobles’ families.17' The scientists must have thought otherwise, for the conflicts between them and the Count, who made many monetary sacrifices to fund the expedition, led to the termination of their professional relationship. Later on Szádeczky wrote about this: “There was no regular report about the scientific results, for the publication of our work was dependent on conditions that where in opposition to our scientific principles.”'72 The material of this expedition to the Caucasus did not remain entirely unknown however. Zichy exhibited the ethnographical collection at the National Millenary Exhibition. Later he donated it to the Hungarian National Museum.'73ln two huge volumes entitled "Travels of Jenő Zichy to the Caucasus and Central Asia”, the ethnographer János Jankó published the ethnographical objects while archeologist Béla Posta published the archeological findings. The Count himself summarized his knowledge in the work under the title "The migration of the Hungarian race”. The two experts of the Hungarian National Museum did not make any analysis and comparison, they "merely” described the findings because despite the hopes of Zichy - and the public - they did not find any analogies to the memories of the ancient Hungarians.,7‘, Ethnographer Ottó Herman countered everything written by Zichy. His arguments were mostly right but full of unnecessary personal agression and mockery.'75 The critics were not able to deter Zichy from lecturing about this subject in Hungary and abroad and from handing over the volumes in Hungarian and in French to Franz Josef and the Russian Tzar Nicholas II.'76 The expeditions were not without results after all because the accumulated objects are still good sources of the history and ethnography of the Caucasus. The descriptions and photographs of the expeditions presented a mostly unknown world to the public. The critics urged the Count to prepare more carefully for the next expedition. He read more literature and consulted with experts in the field. While he planned the expedition in the second half of 1897, his scientist colleagues visited the museums of Russia and Finland and studied the material related to Hungarian migration.177 An important contribution of this third Asian expedition was that it investigated the Hungarian migration in a complex way involving many scientific disciplines. The main duty of Béla Posta was the comparison of the archelogical findings of foreign museums with those of the Hungarian museums, the actual archeological excavations were of secondary importance. The duty of János Jankó was the comparison of the ancient Hungarian and Russian occupations and the research of analogies of Hungarian and Khanti languages. The linguist József Pápay was entrusted with the comparison of the Hungarian and Turkish languages (including the Chuvash and the Bashkir
