The Anniversary of the Hungarian Conquest 1996

Előszó

Hungary will be holding celebrations in 1996 to mark the 1100th anniversary of Hungarian settlement in Central Europe. The Conquest makes 896 one of the seminal dates in Hungarian history. Hitherto the Hungarian (Magyar) tribes who arrived in the Carpathian Basin had been largely nomadic. Thereafter they gradually adapted to a new, settled way of life, mingling and merging with the peoples and cultures already inhabiting the region. This opened up for the Hungarians a new line of development that incorporated it as a state into the Europe of the time. The consolidation of Hungarian statehood came in the reign of St Stephen of Hungary, who had himself crowned Hungary's first king in the
1. Stephen, King and Saint, and his wife. Queen Gisella, build a church. From the Uth-c. Illustrated Chronicle (National Széchényi Library, Budapest)
year 1000, with a crown requested and received from Pope Sylvester II of Rome, as a symbol of laying the foundations of the state and the Christian Church. So the country will be celebrating a second major anniversary four years later: the Millennium of the Foundation of the State in the year 2000.
So the 1100th anniversary of the Settlement or Conquest can be seen as the starting point for a series of festivities continuing through until the year 2000. During this period the country will be looking back on the way in which it became integrated into Europe and on the intellectual and material advances it made in company with the peoples around it. This recollection of the country's past and traditions, however, will be combined with contemplation of the future. Hungary, having become a fully independent country again after an interval of several decades, now stands on the threshold of a new qualitative level of integration into Europe. For Hungary's accession to the European Union can be expected in the next few years, and could even coincide with the millennium of its statehood. Hungary will also be returning symbolically to the fold of European-type bourgeois development in recalling the celebrations of a hundred years ago for the millennium of the conquest, for this came as the culmination of a process of development into a modern bourgeois state Vissza