Hungary [antikvár]

vv here is Hungary situated? Sometimes even this simple question is difficult to answer. Her latitude and longitude are easily defined. But what does that reveal? The geograph-ical position of our small country today, its geological space - which, alone, expresses less than does Hungary's place in time. Where is Hungary situated? The geological record gives one answer. Plate tectonic experts say that, deep beneath the surface, the Carpathian basin is divided by a fault line - drawn on the surface by the volcanic rangé of the Hungárián mid-level mountains - along which a strip of the earth's crust that drifted here from the body of prehistoric Africa clasps onto prehistoric Eurasia. More recently -five or six thousand years ago, after humans appeared - telis sprang up in lines along the Tisza River, growing higher by the layers heaped up over the centuries. These dwelling hillocks are well known from Mesopotamia, Asia Minor and the Balkans, everywhere where the first impetus of the Neolithic era, the revolution of food production, had a direct effect. However, the westernmost and northernmost locations of the telis - as they are called in Arabic - are with us, along the Tisza River. This is the frontier. This is where the spread of the New Stone Age development was blocked. That is, for a long time the cultural standard was much higher east of the Danube River than west of it. It was to be the opposite in all successive eras. Cultured East and barbaric West - that formula was never again to be repeated in Europe. So sometime around the birth of Christ, the Román reign of the Latin era began, grew in strength for several centuries and finally collapsed in this region. The then-Roman Pannónia provincia corresponds more or less to today's Transdanubia. And its bordér, the limes, is the River Danube itself. This divides the well-organized Impérium from the dim Barbaricum here, in the heart of the Carpathian basin. The Hungárián people arrived here 1100 years ago along the long and bloody East-West path of the great migration. A thousand years ago, they settled in the Carpathian basin and founded a state. And when Latin Román Christianity and Orientál Byzantine Christianity both offered themselves, the Hungarians chose the former. In this region, this is how the eastern edge of the Hungárián settlement area became a dividing line between the Gothics and the onion domes. Nor did the Protestantism that held sway over the Hungarians spread to the East from here. At the peak of its power, the Ottoman sultanate, expanding toward the heart of Europe, reached through the Balkans to the fringes of the Hungárián Great Plains and Transdanubia; it besieged, but could never seize, Vienna. The Leithe ("Lajta," in Hungárián) is a tiny river beneath Vienna and above the Fertő Laké - a laké divided by the Austro-Hungarian bordér. The Leithe is hard to find on maps. Still, the phrase "over the Leithe" became part of Germán consciousness when referring to the East. For this is the region, up to the Leithe, where the Germans (although called Austrians here) lived in a closed enclave; they came "over the Leithe" only sporadically, becoming a minority with the passing of time. It is already an irony of history that, in the middle of this century, as soon as the victory euphoria of World War II in 1945 evaporated and the Cold War loomed, the Iron Curtain divided Europe into two. The frontier between the western part, sentenced to a good life, and the eastern one, dominated by the Soviets, coincides with the Austro-Hungarian bordér - on the Leithe - which thus became a long-standing dividing line between the two world camps. Well, where is Hungary situated? She is alsó described as a "ferry country," drifting or desperately rowing between East and West. But whoever searches for her in Central Eastern Europe will fail to find her. For Hungary is situated in Eastern Central Europe. And this small shift in words carries a great meaning.