Summary of the Articles

Zsigmond Jakó: 1100 Years

This article is dedicated to the 1100 years anniversary of the Hungarian conquest. The author sees the historical importance of the foundation of the Hungarian state in the fact that in the Carpathian basin it put and end to the political, cultural and economic instability which had lasted for about five hundred years beginning from the end of the III-rd century and it connected this buffer zone between Byzantium and Rome forever to the Latin cultural and development model. And this, on the other hand, made it possible for a new unit of European development to be formed on the territory between the Baltic and the Adriatic: Middle-Europe. From this on until 1918 the Hungarian kingdom connected the peoples living here to the general European development. In order to prove this statement the author mentions some facts about the history of monastic orders, schools and Western European relations. After losing its historic statehood following the Trianon Peace-treaty the Hungarian nation was forced to a change of consciuousness similar to the one that it had to face 1100 years ago when it tried to integrate into the European Christian world.

István Ferenczi: The Question of the Hungarian Conquest
of Transsylvania Reflected by Archeological Finds

The author deals with the question of the archeological finds of the period that followed the conquest of Transsylvania in 895 by the people of Árpád. He lists all the graves and graveyards whioch were discovered by chance or to a lesser degree through systematic archeological excavations on the whole territory of Transsylvania. He analyses their unique and specific archeological features which probably originate from the East, from the steppes beside the Black Sea. He also deals with the question of the most important early central settlements. The graveyards indicate the presence of two: „middle” and „lower” social layers. These archeological finds in Transsylvania prove that the Eastern European territory, surrounded mainly by mountains, became quite evenly populated at the end of the IX-th and at the beginning of the X-th centuries.

Sándor TONK: The Settlement of Hungarians in Transsylvania Reflected
in Middle Age Chronicles

The settlement of  Hungarians in Transsylvania is one of the most disputed questions of the early history of our people as there are very few written documents referring to this period and even those speak very briefly about the events which took place. The author of the article tries to offer a review of those Hungarian Middle Age chronicles which presumably were less biassed and more interested in presenting the facts referring to the events of the Hungarian settlement in Transsylvania. He offers the readers interested in this question authentic documents by publishing original Latin fragments of texts together with their Hungarian translation, in the same time he presents their possible interpretations as well. According to these documents, following the Petcheneg attack in 894–95, the Hungarians who left Etelköz and crossed the Carpathians came to Transsylvania, which became their first place of settlement. And it was from  here that  they started to conquer the Great Hungarian Plain which could provide better conditions for the keeping of animals, while the group of people who remained in Transsylvania had the continuing mission to beat off any possible attacks. After the adventurous campaigns in Europe the power of Hungarians strengthened in Carpathian basin and the total conquest of Transsylvania began.

Gyula Kristó: Keans in the Carpatian Basin

In the Hungarian chronicles the name Keanus (Kean) appears three times, first in Anonymus's chronicle, then twice in the XIV-th century chronicle. According to the author these latter appearances refer to the same person, a Hungarian nobleman of Bulgarian descent named Kean who had his territories at the end of the X-th and at the beginning of the XI-th centuries in the South of Transsylvania and his descendants were the members of the important Kán family in the Middle Ages. He was the opponent of the reigning prince Géza, then his domination over Southern Transsylvania was weakened by King St.Stephen. The majority of his estates remained here but his descendants lived in Baranya for some time. Anonymus used his character as a model to create a fictitious forefather of chief Salanus, the heroic figure of Great Kean.

Loránd Benkõ: A Thousand Year's Struggle for the Hungarian Language

The author describes the long historic struggle fought by the Hungarians for the preservation of their own mother tongue. The question is made timely by the fact that the 1100 years anniversary of the Hungarian conquest urges a rendering of account in all domains. The Hungarian language which was of Finno–Ugric descent was marked after the Turkish influence by the effect of the variety of languages coexisting in the Carpathian basin. The intellectuals have preserved the unity of the Hungarian language in spite of the Latin clerical and official language and later on Hungarian maintained its priority over the German official language as well. After the period of language reform and the tearind apart of Hungary's historical territory the ideal of the preservation of the Hungarian language did not dissappear, and this constitutes up to the present days the basis of existence of the national entity. Therefore we have to do everything in order to protect it.

István Pál Demény: Emese's Dream

Emese's Dream is one of the oldest Hungarian legends, no doubt dating back to times before Christianity. Its presence in the chronicles is explained by the fact that the Árpád-dynasty wished to legitimize its power with an illustrious descent. The legend has two main motifs: the miraculous conception and the river seen in the dream. Except for the Hungarian legend, these two motifs are very rarely connected. The first one can be related to a widely spread international motif. The second one is so rare that the question arose whether it could not be an influence of Herodotos. The author lists all the known appearances of the tree and river seen in a dream not only in textual documents but he refers also to some iconographic material. His conclusion is that these are some ancient mythological elements which were used by Eastern peoples repeatedly to create the legends about the origin of their reigning dynasties.

Klára Sándor: The Unwritten History of the Székely Runic Scripts

The author reviews the history of the székely runic scipts and their special literature. She speaks about some of the much debated and unsolved questions of these scipts (their origin and use, the history of the research, what can be considered as such, the problem of vowels etc.). The need of a collection and cataloque of the székely runic scripts and the drawing up of a bibliography concerning them is also stressed.

József Faragó: The Memory of an Old New Year Chant ("hejgetés")
in Szabófalva

The so called "hejgetés" is the most archaic form of the New Year customs in the Hungarian folklore. The word itself is derived from the interjection "hej", the lexical means to express an exclamation, to make noise in the New Year chant. This custom which used to be wide spread among the Northern csángós died out about a century ago as a result of the influence of the majority Romanian population. It was replaced by a Romanian custom of a different genre having the same function called "urálás" ("urare" in Romanian). In these circumstances, having looked it up in all the Hungarian dictionaries as well as in archive documents of ethnographical research work done on location, the author found only five villages in which the name of the custom is still remembered. The New Year Chant itself is even less known, only four fragments of its text are to be found, all of them come from Szabófalva, the central village of the Northern csángós. These fragments are undoubtably among the oldest documents of the Hungarian folklore, but exactly because of their fragmentary nature and cryptic metaphors their meaning is ambiguous. Hungarian folklorists are trying to interpret them by comparing them to similar customs of the peoples living in the surrounding area and in the East.

István Imreh: The Useful Public Life of Sándor Bölöni Farkas

This study deals with the statement of expenses found among Sándor Bölöni Farkas's manuscripts. This "budget" contains the list of salaries and other incomes received before his death, between 1833 and 1841, as well as the few expenses of the author of the famous account of an American journey at the time. With the help of these data he reconstructs not only the lifestyle of an intellectual state official before the burgeois revolution but also makes us familiar with the daily life and mentality of a great founder of institutions and organizer of associations. Beside his public activity he even offers his financial support to the cultural and economic societies. As an avarage he offers 18 per cent of his income for this purpose. After his death his large library, all his moveable property and money – deposited in the first association founded by himself – was donated according to his will to the youth of the Unitarian College.

Imre Ungvári-Zrínyi: The Philosophical Ideas of Károly Böhm

The validity of the values of knowledge and culture, respectively man as a cognitive and culture-forming person was in the centre of Neo-Kantian philosophical inquiries. In this philosophy the basic spiritual functions determine both the essence of the categories which are at the basis of the world concept and the structure of this world concept. Károly Böhm was a professor at the Philosophical Department of the "Franz Jozef" University in Cluj between 1896 and 1911. He was the first Hungarian philosopher to properly deal with questions of the contemporary European thought, and within this, most importantly with basic questions of Neo-Kantianism, but he also integrated his own philosophical investigations into an original philosophical system. He published this in his main work comprising six volumes entitled "Man and his World", in which he offers an example of a creative Neo-Kantian philosophical interpretation.

Márton Tonk: The Epistemology of Sándor Tavaszy

Sándor Tavaszy was a member of the much disputed Böhm-school and was also known as one of the first Transsylvanian representatives of Barthianism and dialectics theology. He was one of those philosophical minds of the beginning of the century who – more or less – managed to create an original philosophy. In spite of the fact that his work is marked by the duality of philosophy and theology – and therefore it is often difficult to separate thesetwo aspects – the present study is an attempt to present Tavaszy's philosophy. The epistemological problem is one of the main questions of his philosophy. In his own epistemology we can find influences of Böhm, Kant as well as unique, original thoughts derived from these. The dual character of the epistemological process described by him: its transcendentalism and axiology can be traced back to the influence of these two authors. This study tries to outline this duality as well as the problems connected to these with the presentation of the background of ideas and influences.