The Eighth Hungarian Tribe, 1982 (9. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)

1982-12-01 / 12. szám

Page 8

THE EIGHTH HUNGARIAN TRIBE

December, 1982

of wood. They preserved the old numerals, but did not know the letters.

Around the turn of the century one of the believers found a farmer who claimed that he learned the letters of the old script from his father. This created a stir.

The best Hungarian sculptor of the period, J. Fadrusz was commissioned by the Hungarian State to create a monument. This he did and the inscriptions were in the signs of the Hungarian runic writing. This angered the academic circles.

A committee of scholars cross-examined the farmer, who admitted that it was not his father, but a school-teacher who tought him the letters; his father knew only the rtumlerals.

The scholarly guild was triumphant: here was a clear case of fraud. That should put an end to the nonsense! Those, who still dared to believe in the authenticity of the script were savagely attacked in the scholarly publications. Especially vícíoub was L. Réthy, one of the alumni of the Vienna school

The sculptor Fadrusz was ordered by the State to take off the inscription written in the ridiculed and comprised script from the monument. The sculptor lost his mind.

The case of the runic script seemed well buried. But truths have strange ways of reappearing somehow.

A young German scholar, F. Babinger found in the archives of the Fugger family a manuscript from the XVI-th century. It was in 1913 that he discovered the diary of H. Dernschwamm, who described his visit to 'Istanbul in 1553. At that time Dernschwamm saw an intriguing inscription on the marble waU of the Sultan’s stables and copied it exactly.

Babinger, preparing the publication of the manuscript, supposed that the inscription was in old Turkish script, and sent it to the expert, ThomSen.

Thomsen saw at once, that this is not Turkish. He picked up the publication of Sebestyén and compared the signs. The inscription, dated 1515 was in Hungarian.

With the signs of the old runic script only slightly differing from the good cleric’s alphabets, a horse-groom Tamás Székely recorded, that he was there, in a delegation by the King of Hungary to Sultan Selim. He recorded, that they had to wait long before getting the audience.

This message of the bored horse-groom decided the question of the authenticity of the script. It

made obvious that simple people, unschooled in Latinletters, had known and used the ancient script. It was impossible to cast upon the German Babinger and the Danish Thomsen any suspicion.

At this point the Hungarian Academy of Sciences capitulated and published the book of Sebestyén, and all the authentic documents of the ancient Hungarian script, known until then.

The tragedy is, that the vindication came too late. Sebestyén’s book was published during the years of the first World War. To the best of my knowledge, there are two copies of it in the U. S. A.

The simple fact, that the Hungarians of the ninth century brought along a script of their own, which shows clearly, that they had passed long ago the phases of evolution called savagery or barbarism, became not a matter of common knowledge. Not even the experts know about it. A famous American expert on Oriental waitings when I began to tell him about the Hungarian runic script, smiled, amused and tolerantly, as if hearing about little green men from the planet Mars.

Wliat people know, or do not know about their fellow men, influences their emotions and actions.

The bad image which has been given through centuries to a Weakened, oppressed Hungary, came with a vengeance to the tables of the peace treaties after the first World War. No country, no nation, irrespective of the degrees of alleged war-guilt or other considerations, was so cruelly tom to pieces, mutilated and marked fot extinction by the misinformed dictators of the peace-treaties as the Hungarian.

After the Second World War the performance was repeated.

At this moment, small Hungary is abandoned to the Soviet-orbit, in flagrant contrast to the promises of the Atlantic Charter.

Superficial reportings tell the Western reader about people who live quite well in Budapest. These are not the Hungarians. The truth about the Hungarians is, that at this mondént they have the lowest birth-rate and the highest suicide rate in the world.

For a short.while there was a wave of sympathy in the Western World, after 1956. It passed. Now the old image of Asiatic intruders, savage nomad strangers mentioned in the publications with stereotyped slur-words reappears and helps the Western public to assist in callous, sometimes hostile silence to covert genocide.

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