Hungarian Orientalism and the Zichy expeditions

By
András Maracskó

Submitted to
Central European University
Department of History

In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Master of Arts

Supervisor: Professor Nadia Al-Bagdadi

Second Reader: Professor László Kontler
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Budapest, Hungary
2014
 “Copyright in the text of this thesis rests with the Author. Copies by any process, either in full
or part, may be made only in accordance with the instructions given by the Author and lodged in
the Central European Library. Details may be obtained from the librarian. This page must form a
part of any such copies made. Further copies made in accordance with such instructions may not
be made without the written permission of the Author.”
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 Table of Contents
Table of Contents................................................................................................................................... 3
Chapter I. Introduction to Hungarian Orientalism.................................................................... 5
Introduction to Thesis .................................................................................................................................... 5
1. Orientalism debate ...................................................................................................................................... 7
2. Romanticism and Hungarian Orientalism .......................................................................................... 9
3. Linguistics .................................................................................................................................................... 15
4. Archeology ................................................................................................................................................... 19
5. Ethnography................................................................................................................................................ 21
6. The Finnish connection ........................................................................................................................... 23
7. State of the art ............................................................................................................................................ 24
Chapter II. A “Who’s Who” of the expeditions and the intellectual preparations ........ 26
1. Introduction ................................................................................................................................................ 26
2. Zichy the mastermind and his fellow world traveler Béla Széchenyi .................................... 28
3. Companions for the expedition of 1895............................................................................................ 32
4. Companions for the expedition of 1897-99 ..................................................................................... 37
5. Influences on Zichy: a short biography of Orientalist travelers before Zichy ..................... 42
6. Inspirations: textual sources, theories, ideas that influenced Zichy during the first
expedition......................................................................................................................................................... 45
7. Inspirations: textual sources, theories, ideas that influenced Zichy during the third
expedition......................................................................................................................................................... 50
8. Finances ........................................................................................................................................................ 52
9. Space, routes and modes of transport ............................................................................................... 53
10. Map of the route of the third expedition ........................................................................................ 55
Chapter III. The First Zichy expedition of 1895 ........................................................................ 56
1. The travelers and their goals ................................................................................................................ 57
2. The journey to the ancient homeland................................................................................................ 59
3. The Caucasus............................................................................................................................................... 62
4. The towns of Magyari............................................................................................................................... 64
5. Social issues in the Caucasus ................................................................................................................. 65
6. In the Southern Caucasus ....................................................................................................................... 71
7. In Central Asia ............................................................................................................................................ 72
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8. Return trip ................................................................................................................................................... 75

Chapter IV. The third expedition: Béla Pósta and the beginnings of Hungarian
comparative archeology ................................................................................................................... 78
1. Archeology and national romanticism .............................................................................................. 79
2. The diary of Béla Pósta............................................................................................................................ 82
3. Mór Décsy the stanch critique of Zichy.............................................................................................. 86
4. Into the Caucasus....................................................................................................................................... 87
5. Conflict with Zichy .................................................................................................................................... 89
6. Pósta’s archeological report.................................................................................................................. 93
Chapter V. The third expedition: János Jankó and Hanti ethnology.................................. 99
1. Description of the diary ........................................................................................................................ 101

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 2. From Tiflis to the Hanti ......................................................................................................................... 102
3. Jankó’s personal reflections on Hungarian science .................................................................... 107
4. Jankó and the Hanti ................................................................................................................................ 109
5. Journey to the Hanti lands ................................................................................................................... 111
6. Ancient traditions and Gods ................................................................................................................ 113
7. Jankó’s method of data collection ..................................................................................................... 115
8. Scientific publication ............................................................................................................................. 119
9. Conclusion.................................................................................................................................................. 121
Chapter VI. Pápay and the Reguly collection .......................................................................... 123
1. Work in St. Petersburg and Helsinki ................................................................................................ 124
2. Trip to Obdorsk........................................................................................................................................ 126
3. Life in Obdorsk ......................................................................................................................................... 128
4. First trip to the Hanti ............................................................................................................................. 130
5. Hanti Pagan Festival............................................................................................................................... 130
6. Trip to Poluj .............................................................................................................................................. 132
7. Solving the riddle with Kirikori ......................................................................................................... 133
8. The scientific publication ..................................................................................................................... 134
Chapter VII. Conclusions to the Thesis ..................................................................................... 136
1. Brief conclusion on the scientific publications ............................................................................ 136
2. Aftermath for the scholars ................................................................................................................... 137
3. MTA’s relationship with Zichy ............................................................................................................ 139
4. Hungarian Orientalism and Romanticism ..................................................................................... 140
Bibliography ...................................................................................................................................... 144
Primary Sources: .............................................................................................................................. 144
Secondary Sources: .......................................................................................................................... 145
Appendix ............................................................................................................................................. 148
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 Chapter I. Introduction to Hungarian Orientalism

“Asia begins at Landstrasse”

Klemens von Metternich

Introduction to Thesis

Travel has been an important human activity since the dawn of man. Whereas most

animals travel on the same route between their mating ground and feeding ground for

generations, humans tend to venture out to places they have no serious biological reason to go to.

Throughout human history travel manifested itself in different shapes and forms. The earliest

recorded tale The Epic of Gilgamesh is centered on the act of traveling. Not to mention Homer’s

Odyssey. Ancient historians were also interested in writing on travels. The Campaigns of

Alexander by Arrian tells the story of Alexander’s travel into Asia as well as his military

exploits.

Whilst on the one hand travel was done in order to carry out some great human deed or

for military reasons, it also served as a means to gather knowledge, mostly historical and

anthropological. This kind of travel writing goes back to Herodotus who traveled the Eastern
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Mediterranean to write about and observe the local people and their customs. Julius Cesar’s

Conquest of Gaul is as much a political propaganda as it is a travel narrative and an

anthropological observation of the northern tribes. Following ancient times Europe saw the

beginning of a new kind of travel writing namely, on pilgrimages to the Holy Lands, which were

deeply imbedded in religiosity. By the Renaissance a common literary form emerged in Italy the

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 private diaries. A notable writing from that period is the travel diary of Buonaccorso Pitti a

Florentine nobleman who traveled Europe in the 15th century. The Renaissance diaries were

solely intended to be read by the members of the family and not by the public. In Europe, the

Renaissance period was the stepping stone to a slow but steady economic growth. This growth

overtime was combined with technological advancements like gunpowder and the compass both

of which enabled ocean faring and European military supremacy over much of the globe during

the upcoming centuries.

As the Western European monarchies consolidated their rule over the Americas, Africa,

South East Asia and Polynesia, travel acquired a new meaning in an imperial context. The act of

travel by Europeans became a means to accumulate knowledge on the far corners of their

empires and mediate that knowledge back home for the scholarly and public audiences. This

knowledge production started in the 18th century and although it reached its height in the 19th it

remained important to a lesser degree in the 20th century.1

Travel and scientific knowledge production became a contest between the imperial

capitals. Until the mid-19th century Paris, London and St. Petersburg breed scores of Jack of all

trades2 and polymaths who voyaged across the seas and oceans on ships or tracked across Siberia

or North America to carry out, sometimes quasi-scientific, observation on geography, botany,

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zoology, anthropology and so on. Thanks to the growing printing press their reports were eagerly

picked up by the curious public in the European capitals. These travelers not only published

diaries but also scientific reports. These scientific reports became more standardized as

ethnography, archeology, linguistics etc. became serious disciplines at European universities thus

1
Liebersohn, Harry, The Traveler’s World, (London: Harvard University Press, 2006), 1-14.
2
Ibid, 2.

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 the students these institutions produced became more and more professional on their fields from

the second half of the 19th century. This scientific knowledge production about the East is

generally referred to in European scholarship as Orientalism.

1. Orientalism debate

Orientalism as a discipline received a negative connotation with the groundbreaking

publication of Edward Said’s3 book titled Orientalism. Said expressed a strong criticism of

Western European orentalist literature that he saw imbedded in imperialist discourse. Orientalist

scholars put the emphasis on the study of philology and linguistics of Oriental languages.

According to Said European Orientalist scholars aimed to exploit the Orient through their

scientific inquiry into eastern languages, culture and history. The trait of this exploitation was

clearly visible for Said in the biased European literary representation of the Arab world. In the

first part of his book Said identified two arch villain scholars of enlightened thought Ernest

Renan and Silvestre de Sacy.4 According to Said, these two scholars were able to scientifically

draw a line between the civilized West and the barbarous Orient in order to justify European

supremacy over the East. By doing so they greatly influenced European views on the East in a

negative light. Said called this intellectual process Orientalism.5 In other words, he viewed the
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study of Oriental languages, history and cultures as a tool for European scholars to downgrade

the Oriental “others.” Since Said was of Palestinian origin he focused on the treatment of the

Arabs by these orientalists and thus he largely ignored other Orientals around the globe. My

3
Said was not the first who tried to articulate a criticism of colonialism, scholars of the postcolonial era like Talal
Asad, Bryan Turner and Roger Owen all predate Said by a few years.
4
Said, Edward, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 2-3.
5
Ibid, 123-148.

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 criticism below of Said’s theory only applies to the first part of his book. Debating the

“Palestinian Question” is out of the scope of this thesis.

The main argument against Said would be to point out that he was student of literature

and not of history. Historians use different methodologies regarding their sources then literature

students. For historians primary source work is a must if they want to draw sound conclusions

about their topics, here lays Said’s weakness. Although eminent scholars like Robert Irwin,6

formed valid criticisms of Said; yet Said’s principal notion still stands in academia. Irwin

basically argues that Said created a biased picture of the Orientalists, only including in this

picture what served his purpose and his theory, but left out a great deal of information about the

benefits of the works of Orientalists and moreover, Said did not mention a score of important

scholars who would not fit his scheme. We can add to this that Said unconsciously, since it was

not his aim, created a contrariety between the aggressive West and the submissive East. 7 More

importantly for the topic of this thesis, Said also failed to tackle two angles of this discourse first,

that Orientalism as a scholarly movement was not restricted to Western Europe and, that it was

not always hostile or exploitive towards the East.8

On a positive note, Said was able to identify a core problem with orientalism that was

previously ignored by scholars of orientalism namely, that the views of European orientalists
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about the Orient were imbedded in scientific racism and religious bias. On the other hand,

6
Irwin, Robert, Dangerous Knowledge Orientalism and its Discontents, (New York: The overlook press, 2006). It is
worth reading for anyone interested in this debate the introduction. The following quote is some food for thought:
“Although some admirers of Said’s book have conceded that it contains many errors and often misrepresents the
achievements of the Orientalists it discusses, they sometimes go on to argue that it deserves praise and attention
because of the subsequent debate and research it has provoked. I am not so sure about this.” Then he goes on saying
that our notion of Orientalism is actually the interpretation of what Said thinks happened with Orientalism and not
what actually or factually happened. pg 4.
7
Burke Edmund III and David Porchaska, ed., Genealogies of Orientalism: history, theory, politics (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 2008) 1-4.
8
Said, 57-73.

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 Hungarian Orientalists also produced knowledge about the East yet, the Hungarian’s knowledge

production was neither primarily directed towards the Arabs of the Middle East nor did it further

Hungarian colonial aspirations in the East. The reason for this was that Hungarian Orientalism

was first and foremost preoccupied with finding the ancient homeland and the closest linguistic

relatives of the Magyars in the Eurasian steppe.9

The academic debate which Orientalism started turned many scholars away from

Western European Orientalism. Subsequently, inquiries into orientalist movements outside the

Western world are slowly gaining importance as this topic attracts the attention of contemporary

scholars anew. In more recent scholarship Susan L. Marchand’s German Orientalism and

Empire (2009) has to be mentioned which aimed to move the compass from Western Europe to

Central Europe thus coming closer to the Hungarian case. Marchand’s grandiose work studied in

depth the orientalist movement in Germany during the 19th century. She emphasized the

correlation of German Orientalism with Renaissance philology and Protestant thought. While her

inquiry deals with the Germans and their colonial projects, it only touches briefly on the

Hungarians.

2. Romanticism and Hungarian Orientalism

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In order to understand the ways in which Hungarian Orientalism was different from

Western European Orientalism I will use Géza Staud’s work Orientalism in Hungarian

Romanticism. Staud argues that European national romanticism in Hungary manifested itself in

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To be fair here, I am well aware of the Turanist movement of the post Trianon period in Hungary. Although this
movement was greatly imbedded in orientalism and sought to establish economic relationships with our “brothers”
in the East, I would not categorize this attempt as imperialist in nature since the Turanist were rarely taken seriously
by the Horthy regime. Lajos Nagy Sassi, a member of the Turanist movement, has played with ideas that can be
vaguely defined as imperialist but he mostly sought to establish economic ties with the East.

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 orientalism from the late 18th century; first in literature then in architecture and lastly in oriental

expeditions. Moreover, while in the West the Oriental others were the subjects of interest

because they were perceived as exotic; in Hungary the exotic Orient was found, first and

foremost at home, in folk culture and language. In addition, there were Asians in the Orient. But

even this Orient was split in the Hungarian imagination between related Asiatic tribes and the

other Oriental tribes. Subsequently, the Hungarians did not think of all the Orientals in the East

as “others” but viewed some as kindred.10 This is an important distinction since it would be hard

to find a British official, who writes in his travel diary back from India, with tears in his eyes,

how he longs to be back with his long lost Indian ancestors; which is precisely the case with

some members of the Zichy expeditions.

Furthermore, Staud argues that romanticism in Europe evolved out of the individual’s

need to express his idea of liberty and freedom. The individual in literature can be a lone hero

and in real life a lone world traveler to the Orient. Freedom as an idea, for the men of

romanticism, translated itself into travel to distant lands. Here what is important is the romantic

thought, that there is the possibility to travel and discover. Moreover, I would argue that for

Hungarian travelers, like Zichy’s men, the idea of freedom was projected onto and subsequently

found with the primitive Siberian tribes. Traveling was, in a way, a form of escape from the
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present. In the heart of the Hungarian romantic men, according to Staud, two antithetical

emotions battled the belief in the nation’s glorious future and the belief in the hopeless present.

10
Staud, Géza, Az orientalismus a Magyar Romantikaban [Orientalism in Hungarian Romanticism] (1931),
http://mek.oszk.hu/01300/01385/html/. Staud (1906-1988) was a professor of literature and studied the history of
theather.

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 This idea I believe, is most clearly present in János Jankó’s diary but it also can be found in the

others as well to some extent.11

In addition, Staud points out that the emerging nationalism of the 19th century influenced

the topics chosen by romantic writers, architects and travelers.12 This means that the romantic

men chose his topics based on his romantic emotion. This romantic emotion in the Hungarians

case was imbedded in nationalism and the therefore, in the need to find the ancient homeland of

the Magyars (nationalist) in the East (romantic). Thus in the fields of archeology, ethnography

and linguistics the romantic topics became the study of the “free spirited” volk at home and in the

Orient.

Studying Hungarian Orientalism is a complex undertaking. If we can generalize about

the nature of the Hungarians at all, we could say that Hungarians take their orientalism seriously.

For many Magyar scholars like István Kiszely (1932-2012) this is a discipline that can answer

the most fundamental of human dilemmas, who we are and where do we come from.13 For others

like Palóczi Horváth (1908-1973), Hungarian Orientalism was the manifestation of nationalist

delusions.14 Thus, for contemporary young scholars to objectively write about the merits of

Hungarian Orientalism is no easy task because one will be inevitably sucked into one of these

academic rabbit holes if not carful. The section below will introduce some of the core
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problems—or rabbit holes—of orientalist scholarship in Hungary.

The first orientalist dispute is over the question of national origin. When the Hungarians

first appeared in Europe and when exactly they conquered the Carpathians Basin is still hotly

11
Ibid.
12
Ibid.
13
Kiszely, István, A Magyar nép őstörténete [The ancient history of the Hungarians], (Magyar Ház, 2001).
14
Szendrei László, A Turánizmus [Turanism], (Gödöllő, Attraktor, 2010), 67-68.

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 debated in Hungarian scholarship today. Folk legends and medieval chronicles tell us that Attila

(434-453), greatest king of the Hungarians, was a Magyar who tried to expend his rule over the

already disintegrating Western Roman Empire. After his tragic death his generals and sons

fought each other for control over the numerous tribes however, none were able to triumph. As

the Hunnish armies scattered one of Attila’s son Csaba, fled to Greece but some of his generals

who stayed behind led a Magyar speaking tribe into Transylvania and settled them there, they are

known today as the Székelys. According to this legend Magyar presence in Europe goes back to

the 4th century.15

In the 20th century another popular theory was developed, but not invented, by the

archeologist Gyula László (1910-1998). He theorized based on his archeological work that there

was a two-phased conquest of the homeland first by the Avars then by the Magyars. His theory

led to misunderstandings amongst general public. The more nationalist minded readers of his

work wrongly interpreted his theory. The amateur readers, based on László’s theory, thought that

the Avars, who occupied the Carpathian Basin before the Magyars, were actually Hungarians.

Yet, László only pointed out that the Magyar and Avar warrior graves he inspected were found

in separate clusters; that there was no Hungarian settlement names that resembled Avar names,

which meant that the Avars probably spoke a Hungarian-Turkic language. And that the late
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Avars experienced the Magyar invasion and they peacefully integrated into Magyar society

possibly because there was no serious linguistic difference to overcome between the two tribes.

In other words he simply hinted for a distant kinship between the Avars and the Magyars. This

theory since then has been refuted on the ground that common people (Slavs, Avars, and

Magyars etc.) were buried in mass graves together. Plus, archeologists found in some parts of

15
Lengyel, Dénes, Régi magyar mondák [Old Hungarian tales] (Móra Ferenc Könyvkiadó, Budapest, 1985), 44-45.

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 Hungary that Magyars were buried on top of Avar graves and not in clusters, which to some

degree disproves László’s theory.16

In my opinion, we can conclude with some certainty that there was possibly no mass

invasion of Magyars led by Árpád on one specific day but rather the conquest was a slow--more

or less peaceful--process. In addition, the language of the Avars is a mystery since they left

behind no written records thus to prove linguistic kinship between Avars and Magyars is

impossible. To further complicate the issues at hand, the Europeans in their records called both

Avars and Magyars, Huns. This is quite evident in Einhard’s Life of Charlemagne17 where the

author repeatedly calls the Avars, Huns. It is more likely that the groups Einhard conveniently

calls Huns was a multi lingual alliance of different tribes.

The most generally accepted theory on the conquest that is taught in post-communist

Hungarian schools was developed in the 19th century, which stated that the Hungarians arrived to

their present day homeland in 896. The history of the establishment of this exact date is quite

controversial. After the Ausgleich that established the dual Monarchy of Austro-Hungary, the

Magyar nobles sought to commemorate the arrival of the seven tribes to Central Europe by

organizing the Millennia Exhibition. The Hungarian government dully called for the preparations

of a series of celebrations and commemorations across Hungary in 1892 to mark the thousandth
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year anniversary of Hungarian presence in Europe. The national assembly appointed the minister

of trade Béla Lukács to organize a six-month world exhibition known as the Millennia

Exhibition in the city park at the end of Andrássy Street. The preparations for this exhibition

coincided with the rapid urban development of the city of Pest, which began in the second half of

16
Gyula, László, A kettős honfoglalás [The two-phased conquest], (Magvető Kiadó, 1978).
17
Einhard, The life of Charlemagne (The University of Michigan Press, 1960), 37-38.

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 the century. The nobility decided that some of the building projects, like the subway, had to be

finished by the opening of the exhibition, which they wanted to happen in 1895; the city fathers

and historians agreed on this date to mark the Hungarian conquest of the homeland. But the

subway and many other buildings were only ready a year later; thus Árpád and his brave soldiers

were forced to linger in the swamps of Moldavia for an extra year. This means that what we

learn of the ancient Hungarians today is mostly based on late 19th century views, like the date of

896, and the education system rarely accepts contemporary finds and theories into their

curriculums.

Although scholarly orientalism originated in Western European culture first and

foremost, the Hungarians also had a long-standing tradition of what I would call “Orientalist

projects.” In the early 13th century friar Julianus traveled to the foot of the Ural Mountains to

convert Hungarian tribes to Christianity. In addition, there are obscure reports of a monk named

Otto who got as far as the Caucasus Mountains sometime before Julianus to carry out a similar

Christianization mission but we know little of what he accomplished. In a way these two

missions can be singled out as the beginning of Hungarian travels back to the ancestral lands.

The importance of these two missions was that they gave two locations for Magna

Hungaria or the birthplace of the Magyars, the Caucasus and the Ural Mountains. Otto’s mission
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alone did not influence Zichy in choosing the Caucasus as his main target of his first expedition.

But he did give a long speech at the Országos Casino before his journey to a group of reporters,

nobles and intellectuals about his goals and motives on 1895 March 31st. In his speech he made it

clear that he believed that the Magyars/Huns/Ugors, who he viewed to be one people, originally

inhabited the area of the Volga basin and the Caucasus. In other words, he imagined the Magyars

to be the “indigenous inhabitants” of this region, as he put it, a proto tribe. This was contrary to

14
 the belief that the Magyar-Ugor tribes migrated from the Gobi Desert region to Siberia and from

there to Finland and the Carpathian Basin. Some followers of the Finno-Ugric school that relates

the Magyar language to Finnish supported this latter mentioned migration theory. However,

many of the nationalists in Hungary viewed this theory as anti-Hungarian. The nobility argued

that Finno-Ugrism was Vienna’s scheme, base on a theory established by a Slovak-Hungarian,

János Sajnovics18 in the mid 18th century, who traveled with Maximillianus Hell to Norway to

observe the transition of Venus, to downgrade the nation.19 On that expedition with Hell,

Sajnovics noticed a linguistic similarity between Hungarian and Lapp languages. Zichy, at first,

was openly against the established Finnish theory, which was promulgated by the Hungarian

Academy of Sciences (MTA). This was the reason why he was greatly isolated in intellectual

circles and received criticism in Hungarian newspapers while on his journey. His speech at the

Casino therefore evoked indifference, criticism and hostility from more serious scholars. Below I

will introduce some of the core problems that Zichy’s scholars were engaged with on the fields

of linguistics, archeology and ethnography. Throughout the essay I will discuss these in greater

detail.20

3. Linguistics
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The history of scholarly Orientalism in the West started with the learnt men of the Middle

Ages, the monks. Monks were originally concerned with the study of Biblical languages such as

Hebrew, Greek and in some cases with Aramaic. Since many of the monks were deeply religious

18
Sajnovics, János, Demonstratio idoma ungarorum et lapponum idem esse (Bloomington: Indiana University,
2000), 105. Sajnovics put the birthplace of the Magyars to Karelia in Finland, which is completely unrealistic.
19
Kontler, Lászlo, Distances celestial and terrestrial Maximilian Hell’s Arctic expedition of 1768-1769: contexts
and responses, 4-5. http://szijarto.web.elte.hu/program/kontler_hell_ms.pdf.
20
Szádecky, Kardoss Lajos, Zichy-expedició Kaukazus, Közép-Ázsia 1895 [The Zichy expedition Caucasus, Central
Asia 1895], (Budapest: Magyar Őstörténeti Kutató és Kiadó, 2000), 16-21.

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 they wanted to follow Jesus’ exemplary life. The only way for them to learn about the true life of

Jesus was through the study of either Greek or Hebrew texts on Jesus. During the slow demise of

the Byzantine Empire many Greek scholars interacted with their Arab neighbors and that is how

the Arabs discovered Aristotle, Plato and many other ancient scholars whose works they

translated into Arabic and wrote commentaries on them. With the Arab takeover of Hispania, the

Europeans in the West came into closer contact with the previously insignificant people of the

desert. The Arab conquerors did not only bring Islam and their armies into Europe but also their

language, Arabic. With the establishment of Al-Andalus, Arab translations of the ancient Greek

works resurfaced in Europe and ignited the study of Arabic amongst the monks. The study of

Arabic by Christians had two motives behind it, one was to translate the Greek classics, and the

other was to etymologically use Arabic to correct the textual mistakes in Bible translations. Up

until the 18th century orientalism remained a primarily textual and ecclesiastical discipline. Then,

with the European colonial expansions from the 19th century and with the discovery of the Indo-

European language family by William Jones and Max Müller, orientalism became more and

more secular although never losing its ecclesiastic side completely. Secularization of orientalism

was no accident, Peter van der Veer in his Imperial Encounters: religion and modernity in India

and Britain (2001) gives a general account of this process. While Al-Andalus greatly contributed

to the beginnings of Orientalism, the process continued in 14th-15th century Italy.

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Textual philology began to develop during the Renaissance in Italy due to the influence

of the Italian scholars who rediscovered ancient Roman and Greek authors. Throughout the

following centuries philology was mostly concerned with Biblical languages. With the

appearance of encyclopedias or large collections of knowledge in multiple volumes, scholars

began to think that universal knowledge could be represented through a single source in this

16
 case, in books. Subsequently, philology helped the development of vocabularies, which were a

path to “discover” the Ur-sprache the language that Adam spoke with God by comparing words

from different languages to find their origin. After the Reformation Bible translations into

vernacular languages further expended the study of language structures. Philology until the first

half of the 19th century was mostly restricted to the study of languages that had a preexisting

written tradition and scholars were occupied with creating language families as well as

identifying proto languages. That is why, for example, Max Müller never had leave Europe to

visit India but could become a renowned scholar of Sanskrit from books alone. This was not the

case for the Hungarians. Those tribes that the Hungarians viewed as kin were people without a

written literary tradition. This meant that the Hungarian scholars had to travel to the people in

order to study their language. Through a more “face-to-face” approach European philologist

developed systems in which they were able to work with none-literary languages in a universal

modus operandi.

For understanding this thesis it is crucial to have a quick overview of the issues

concerning the debate about Finno-Ugric versus Ural Altaic language families since this debate

often comes up in the diaries. Today we speak of two main language groups in Siberia the Finno-

Ugric (Fins, Hungarians, Samoyeds, Estonians etc) and the Altaic (Mongols, Turks, Koreans
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etc). However, this was not always the case. In 1730, Philip Johan von Strahlenberg suggested

that Turkic, Mongol, Finno-Ugric and Caucasian languages were linguistically similar. During

the 18-19th centuries many European scholars agreed with Strahlenberg’s linguistic theory. The

first to give the Siberian and Central Asian languages a name was the Finnish linguist Matthias

Castren (1813-1852) in 1844, who called these languages Uralic; and later Ural Altaic.

Furthermore, Castren also stated that the Finns came from Central Asia where they lived with

17
 Magyars and Turks; this idea was also the founding theory of Turanism. The base for this

linguistic theory was no phantasmagoria but rested on the understanding that all these languages

share similar typological features. For example, all lack genders; all use suffixes (aka

agglutinating) subsequently, all have vowel harmony to make agglutinating possible and word

order in a sentence is almost the same. Since then, scholars have refuted the Ural Altaic theory

saying that these characteristics could have developed regionally or through outside influences.

Still what is the base of the confusion here is that there is no proto Siberian language which all

these languages could be derived from, like Sanskrit is the proto language for the Indo-European

languages. Thus these above mentioned linguistic features, however similar they might be,

cannot always signal kinship between tribes and it is often questionable from which language

certain languages borrowed from and when. While linguistics can offer one approach to the

study of ancient Hungarians, archeology can fill the gap that linguistics cannot.21
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21
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/619019/Ural-Altaic-languages Be as it may, the purpose of this
thesis is not to say the final word in such a heated and complex linguistic debate. However for the future, recent
archeological findings and genetic research could help scholars better understand where could have the Hungarians
migrated from and circa when. For example, National Geographic’s current research of genetic reconstruction of
human migration could be a starting point fro such research as well as further tightening the collaboration between
Hungarian and Russian archeologists. https://genographic.nationalgeographic.com/ (I personally contributed my
DNA for this project).

18
 4. Archeology

Although throughout this thesis I refer to Béla Pósta and Mór Wosinsky as

archeologists,22 in reality there was no modern archeological training in Hungary at the time.

Thus none of them were archeologist in the modern sense; this however does not mean that their

deeds were unscientific. In fact based on their work both of them were regarded as important

archeologist at that period. It was actually Pósta who organized the first systematic archeological

training at the University of Kolozsvár where he trained future archeologists. On the expedition

his aim was to study the kurgan finds of southern Russia on the field as well as in museums.

The kurgans are burial mounds of nomadic warriors; these mounds can be found from the

Great Plains of Hungary to Central Asia. Herodotus in his Histories clearly stated that the

Scythians roamed from the Great Plain of Hungary to the Northern shores of the Black Sea; thus

we know that there are Scythian graves in Hungary. 23 This also means that the Western border of

kurgans is the Danube River. That is why Pósta thought that by studying these he could find

some connection between the ones in Hungary and the ones in Russia. In Hungary the kurgans

are called kunhalom or kuman mound. While it is true that most of kurgans can be found in areas

where the Kumans settled in the 13th century, yet there are some kurgans outside this area as
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well. Moreover, modern archeology shows that kurgans originate from three distinct historical

periods the Bronze Age, the Late Iron Age and from the 6th through the 9th centuries. One

problem with kurgans is that in many instances the kurgans were robbed as soon as the man was

22
That being said, I do not want to make the impression that archeology was not taught in Hungary. Maria Theresa
established schools where one could study basic archeology. Later on József Hampel or Flóris Rómer can be
considered archeologist, but still, modern archeological training only begins in the 20th century in Hungary.
23
Purvis, Andrea L. trans., The Landmark Herodotus: the histories, ed. Strassler, Robert B. (New York: Pantheon
Books, 2007), 301-305.

19
 buried in it and eventually someone else was later buried in the same empty grave. All this

considered, at the turn of the century, it was not a sound idea from Pósta to search the kurgans

for Magyar connections since there was no comparative study done on kurgans between Hungary

and Magna Hungaria.

Another problem that had to be considered by archeologist regarding the conquest period

was that the Hungarians found a multi ethnic Carpathian Basin. The alliance of the Magyar

chiefs created a powerful military machine, which was able to keep the Hungarians dominant

over the locals. However, instead of eradicating the none-Magyar population of Hungary the

Magyars mixed with them and by doing so the conquerors made the ethnic makeup of the region

a bit more heterogeneous. One problem with 19th century archeology is that it wanted to interpret

grave findings as the representations of various national characters. But this approach completely

ignored the multicultural aspect of medieval Hungary. This means that there was a significant

amount of cultural communication and subsequently, cultural borrowing, which excludes the

exclusive nationalist character of the graves.24

Archeology has been playing an important role in supporting or refuting historical

debates regarding what nationality was buried in which grave. In fact only by combining

archeological and linguistic studies can we get a clearer picture of the Hungarian migration
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across Asia. Recent excavations in Russia seem to have confirmed the reports of Julianus from

the 13th century.25 The Dominican monk completed two journeys to Southern Russia in the

1230s. During his first trip he penetrated the steppe as far as the Ural Mountains and there he

supposedly found Magyar-speaking people whom he could talk to although by then the tribes
24
Mende, Balázs ed., Research on the prehistory of the Hungarians: a review; Archeological research on the
conquering Hungarians: a review by Langó Péter (Budapest: Varia Archeologica Hungarica, 2005), 177-179.
25
Lake Ulegi 2013, Bolsije-tigan 1970s-80s. Both of these excavations revealed Hungarian material objects from
the 8-9th centuries.

20
 separated for some 800 years. The area where Julianus “found” 26 Magyars is now generally

referred to as Bashkiria, which is located west of the Ural Mountains.27 It was precisely around

the Ural Mountains where Zichy’s scholars believed they had to carry out their research.

Our fundamental issue is concerned with how to interpret archeological finds. What does

it mean if one finds, for example, a saber in a grave in Hungary and an identical one in a grave

around Kazan? Does this mean cultural connection, kinship or outside influence? Or maybe the

man who is in the grave stole the saber or maybe he bought it or exchanged it with a friend.

Furthermore, material objects can be exchanged and traded through trade routes across long

distances. Subsequently, working with archeological finds from similar periods requires a

speculative approach. Still, contemporary archeological finds from Russia confirmed that

Zichy’s team was on the right path.

5. Ethnography

János Jankó, who was the official ethnographer of the third expedition, tried to find

similarities between the fishing techniques of the Hanti and the Hungarians in Europe. He used

Ottó Herman’s book on Hungarian fishing techniques as a reference book. At the late 19th

century Hungarian ethnologist generally believed that by observing and comparing archaic
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26
The found word has been put into quotation mark above because Julianus’s report has been called into question
recently by Borbála Orbusánszky who argued that his descriptions of the Magyars is extremely vague and misses
information that other travelers having completed such an important discovery would have made. She put forth the
idea that the real mission of Julianus was to spy on the coming Mongols and not to find Hungarians.
http://epa.oszk.hu/00900/00939/00040/text.htm
27
http://www.flagmagazin.hu/bulvarvilag/szenzacios_magyar_leletekre_bukkantak_azsiaban (I have talked to one
scholar who is close to the members of the expedition, and he told me that the local people in the area are convinced
that the graves do belong to Magyar nomads.). In 2013, Russian archeologists requested the assistance of Hungarian
scholars because they found a large gravesite in the Eastern part of the Ural Mountains at Lake Uelgi. Attila Türk
who is leading the delegation from the Pázmány Péter Catholic University stated that the graves were quite possibly
holding 8-9th century Hungarian artifacts but more research is needed. Yet if the graves will yield Magyar objects
the results could change our understanding of Hungarian migration and we might have to think of an ancestral
homeland (if such thing can exists for wandering nomads) closer to Central Asia then to Siberia.

21
 professions (bee keeping, fishing, hunting, animal husbandry etc.) they could prove some sort of

kinship between distant peoples. Of course, in the Hungarian case, which groups were to be

observed was greatly determent by linguistics. This was exactly the methodology or convention

that Jankó sought to follow, which at his time was the apt thing to do.

However, today this kind of research would not be useful for multiple reasons. One, we

know today that such tribes as the Hanti could have migrated from the south, where animal

husbandry or even agriculture was practiced, to northern Siberia where they practiced primitive

fishing and hunting to sustain themselves. We also know that tribes go through crucial lifestyle

changes all over the world due to climate change. Moreover, that similar, even identical, fishing

technique did develop in different parts of the world independently. Ottó Hermann in his book on

Hungarian fishing noted that the Magyars used bones as weight on fishing nets when they

practiced river fishing. This practice, he went on, was completely missing in the German

tradition therefore the Germans had to have adopted it from the Magyars. But if we keep the

argument in mind that the use of fishing methods could develop independently across the globe

then to say that the Hanti used bones weight while fishing is similarly to Hungarian practices

from the Tisza region it does not prove the two people’s relatedness.
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22
 6. The Finnish connection

Since many Finnish scholars will come up periodically in this thesis a short introductory

paragraph is needed here to show how they were related to Hungarian scholars. The 19th century

movement of national romanticism touched not just the nations of Western Europe but the Finns

too. Therefore, to describe “Finnishness” became the main focus of the Finnish nationalist

movement. National romanticism in Finland manifested in Karelianism, which advocated the

idea that the Finns nearest relatives were the Karelians. What further elevated this belief was the

publication of the Kalevala poems in the 1830s. Since the stories in the Kalevala took place in

the region of Karelia, this place became a major focal point of scholarly research and national

romanticism.28

Still, discovering Finnishness required that Finnish culture should be connected to its

related Finno-Ugric cultures abroad. Daniel Europaeus (1820-1884) and Johan Reinhold Asperin

(1845-1920) were groundbreaking archeologist of the time and they supported the theory that the

Finns ancestral homeland was somewhere around the Southern Ural Mountain. Subsequently,

comparative archeological excavations were done between Finland and the Ural Altaic regions.

Accordingly, the Finns dispatched multiple ethnographic, linguistic and archeological

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expeditions into these above-mentioned territories with identical intentions as the Hungarians.29

28
Kerkko, Nordqvist; Oula, Seitsonen, Finnish Archeological Activities in the Present-Day Karelian Republic Until
1944 (Fennoscandia archeologica XXV, 2008), 29.
29
Ibid, 28-31.

23
 7. State of the art

For the purpose of this thesis I am consulting secondary and primary sources on the

Zichy expeditions. There are a handful of secondary sources that deal with either a member of

the expedition or with some minor aspects of it, some are letters some are newspaper articles. For

primary sources there are the eight volumes of scientific studies published by Zichy’s team on

the expeditions. In addition there are diaries by a few members of the team. I am particularly

interested in seeing a dialogue between the diaries and the scientific works; this inquiry can help

reconstruct the intellectual framework of the expeditions. I want to explore the ways in which the

understanding of their fields of science influenced these men. Moreover, I want to understand

what Western intellectual milieu they were working in and how that affected their work.

Furthermore, what scientific methods they utilized or invented in order to complete their

mission. Lastly, how national romanticism influenced their attitude towards the Hanti.

My research did run into difficulties as it was expected. For one, there is no work that

would deal with the entirety of the expeditions in that sense this work will be the first to attempt

to reevaluate Zichy’s undertaking. Second, locating the scientific works published by Zichy’s

team almost ended in failure. Although five out of the eight works were available through
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various sources, three volumes were unreachable because they were not catalogued in the library

of the Ethnographic Museum. It was only by accident that I found all the volumes. Another

shortcoming is the state of Hungarian museum collections. Almost all of Zichy’s material

collection was donated to the National Museum and to the Ethnographic Museum. Yet today

most of his collection is undocumented, lost or stored in various basements. This is of course due

24
 to multiple historical factors of our 20th century history.30 Still, it prevented me from seeing the

materials they brought back from Asia. On a positive note, I believe that my fieldwork in

Mongolia during the summer of 2013 was a great success in as much as it helped me understand

and relate to the hardships in the diaries regarding their travel amongst nomadic people.
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30
There is really no space to go into details about this. But it has to be said that the Romanian occupation of
Budapest between 1919-1920 saw the plundering of Hungary, including the museums. In 1920, after the peace treaty
of Trianon, some museums were relocated to Hungary from the lost territories through the great effort of the
Hungarian staff, like Béla Pósta. Under the Horthy regime there were meager attempts to catalogue the items
brought over. In addition, the senseless siege of Budapest by the Soviet forces dealt another blow to the collections
of Hungarian Museums. During the Communist regime the situation was little better. There is still a lot of work that
needs to be done in this field if we ever want to know what we have and do not have in our museums. Until then the
Zichy collection will remain in its obscure places.

25
 Chapter II. A “Who’s Who” of the expeditions and the intellectual
preparations

1. Introduction

This chapter will introduce the various members of the expeditions also other travelers to

the Orient before Zichy. Moreover I will introduce various Hungarian scholars and critiques who

had an influence on the expeditions. Furthermore, I will discuss below the main theories that

were followed by Zichy’s team. To present these topics, first, I will introduce the main characters

of the expeditions starting with the first of 1895 and then moving on to the third expedition of

1897-99. Then the chapter will turn to the scholars who were on the periphery of the events as

observers of Zichy. Then, I will introduce people who are important Orientalist travelers and

whose works Zichy and his team used as sources. Lastly, finances, modes of transportation and

routes will be discussed. Preparations for the second expedition, which left in the summer of

1896, are little known, thus, it will not be discussed below.31

The main driving force behind the first and second expeditions was to bring back artifacts
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for the 1896 Millennia Exhibition, which was to commemorate the anniversary of the Magyar

conquest of the Carpathian Basin. The collection that Zichy brought home was exhibited at the

church of Jankó’s ethnographic village. The third expedition was a result of the criticisms Jenő

31
The second expedition was a quick run through of the Caucasus by Zichy. During this trip he traveled by train
and horses stopping at the bigger cities and buying up archeological collections from local shops and collectors. It
was this collection that was later documented by Pósta and Jankó. But there are little written records of this
expedition we only know of it through spares references. One such reference is a letter Zichy wrote to his friends
detailing his hunting activities in Kazak lands with archduke Nicholas.

26
 Zichy received from Hungarian scholars most notably from Ottó Herman. For the expedition of

1897-99, Zichy’s goal was to find the ancient homeland of the Magyars.

The expeditions consisted of a small number of prominent and young scholars, recruited

and paid by Zichy. The members of the first expedition were, Jenő Zichy a lawyer and

landowner, Lajos Szádecky-Kardoss, a professor of history from Kolozsvár, Mór Wosinsky,

archeologist and the abbot of Szekszárd, Jakab Csellingerian,32 an Armenian journalist, translator

and a Russian citizen who was living in Budapest, Károly Roslapi, the forest ranger of Zichy and

the orientalist, Gábor Szentkatolnai Bálint. One shortcoming of this enterprise was that after they

returned from the short three-month trip none of them published memoirs or scientific studies.

The reason for this was that they had ideological differences with the idealist Zichy that made

any future work impossible. The disagreements sprang from Zichy’s demand of them writing

scholarly observations that would have made them the laughing stock of the academia. After the

1895 affair Zichy received harsh criticism from prominent scholars in Hungary. These criticisms

upset him so much that he was contemplating not launching a new expedition. However Zichy’s

debates with Ottó Herman in the Budapesti Szemle [Budapest Review] made him change his

mind and instead of giving up hope he chose to make his third expedition more professional and

aligned with scholarly standards of his time. Thus, the third expedition had a completely new
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group, freshly recruited by Zichy. The expedition of 1897-99 was joined by János Jankó, an

ethnographer, Béla Pósta, archeologist, János Pápay, Finno-Ugric linguist, Ernő Csíki, zoologist,

Károly Roslapi, András Léhocky, Zichy’s master of horse and by Count Bánhidy.33 Next, I will

32
Csellingerian’s contribution to the expeditions is little known. I was also unable to find enough information on his
life to write about him in this chapter.
33
Bánhidy’s identity is a mystery; there are no records of his first name. Kissné, Rusvai, Julianna. Pápay József
kéziratos debreceni hagyatéka [The handwritten bequest of József Pápay in Debrecen] Ph.D. diss., (University of
Debrecen, 2005), 23.

27
 turn to Jenő Zichy and Béla Széchenyi because both were good friends and both led significant

expeditions to the Orient albeit for different reasons.

2. Zichy the mastermind and his fellow world traveler Béla Széchenyi

It is hard to get a grip on a life that is so rich with activity in a few pages. Zichy was

involved with a few dozen organizations, he served as a politician, he organized large-scale hunts

on his lands, he founded theaters, museums and scores of institutions and above all, he was an

avid traveler. Zichy was tall with a dark red beard thus he acquired the nickname “The Red

Baron.” He felt deep loyalty to his nation; he was a man of vision and more importantly someone

who was able to admit his mistakes. Zichy’s turbulent political career can shed some light on his

true personality. During the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy party politics required strict party

discipline, this meant that the entire body of the party had to vote together regardless of

individual opinions. But he was not a man to be influenced by a party leader thus when he

disagreed with political decisions he simply quit and moved on. Moreover, he was generous

towards the nation that he held close to his heart; Zichy was not afraid to spend large sums of

money on supporting education, culture, history and industry for the sake of the country and

progress.
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The count was born in Sárszentmihály in 5th July 1837 and died at Meran (Italy) in 26th

December 1906. He belonged to the Szentmihály branch of the family. As the polymath Ottó

Herman, a staunch critic of Zichy and his expeditions, pointed out in an article in the Budapesti

Szemle,34 the Zichy family dated its roots back to the early Middle Ages. As the family records

34
Herman, Ottó. “Gróf Zichy Jenö utazása a Kaukázusban” [The travels of Jenő Zichy in the Caucasus], Budapesti
Szemle, Franklin Társulat, no. 93 (1898): 123-39.

28
 showed in the archives the family was originally called Zajk, but sometime in the XIII century

they changed their name to Zichy, after the settlement of Zich in Somogy County. The family,

having had multiple branches, contributed many great figures to Hungarian history such as

statesmen, artists, reformers, governors and Oriental travelers. The Zichy family became wealthy

over time because throughout the turbulent history of Hungary they always sided with the

Habsburgs in Vienna and for their unwavering loyalty they were often rewarded with lands the

crown has confiscated from troublemakers.35

Zichy first studied law in Berlin then in 1860 he became a judge in Fejér County. From

1861 until his death he served as a politician in the parliament; first in the Deák Party then as an

Independent and lastly as a Freethinker. In 1861 he represented Fejér County’s Bodjáki district,

three times the Elesdi district and then the city of Székesfehérvár. He helped found and finance

the first theater company in Székesfehérvár. Moreover in the same city in 1879 he organized the

first large-scale cultural, industrial and agricultural exhibition. Then in 1884 he was the elected

representative of downtown Budapest, from 1887-96 Bodró and from 1896-1901 Ipolyság

districts. Afterwards he returned to Székesfehérvár between 1901 and 1905. As a representative

in the Parliament he supported the introduction of classes on economics and industry in the

major schools of Hungary.36

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Zichy also traveled to Great Britain where he inspected the drainage systems and the

channels of England. Inspired by what he saw in England he drew up plans and came up with

funds for a massive channel construction in the Alföld in 1876. However, due to the private

interest of the local landlords in the region the plan was never carried out. In 1880 he was
35
Bányai, Balázs; Kovács, Eleonóra ed., A Zichy-expedició [The Zichy-expedition], (Székesfehérvár: Szent István
Király Múzeum, 2013), 11-19.
36
On Zichy’s biography you can see the Magyar Életrajzi Lexicon [Hungarian Biographical Lexicon],
http://mek.oszk.hu/00300/00355/html/ABC17155/17265.htm.

29
 appointed president of the National Industry Association. During this time, he personally

supervised the creation of Schools of Industry in eighty-six cities. In 1896 he had a small

exhibition of his collected “treasures” from the Caucasus and Central Asia that he showed to the

audience in the Millennia Exhibition. Due to the coming Millennia Exhibition, in the 1890s

Zichy became interested in locating the ancestral homeland of the Magyars. I speculate that

Zichy spent the first part of the 1890s in his library reading books on the history of ancient

Hungarians.37

The yearlong duration of the third expedition interfered with his political duties. Thus on

10th March 1898 the Parliament gave him permission to leave for his third expedition to Asia. At

the turn of the century he worked on the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900 where he

organized the Hungarian pavilion that displayed agricultural and hunting themes from Hungary.

In 1901 he built his museum38 on Rózsa Street in Budapest (today the Czech embassy) where he

displayed his Asian exploits; later he became the President of Historical Monuments.39

Throughout his life he has been a member in dozens of organizations in fact too many to be

listed here. Zichy had an active life and in a way he was the embodiment of an enthusiastic

aristocratic patriot who used his wealth to enrich his country culturally and economically.

However, Jenő was not the first Zichy who crossed Asia, two brothers before him Ágost
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(1852-1925) and József set out on a two-year journey in 1875-77, which led them through the

ocean to India, China and Japan. József Zichy (1841-1924) was the first governor of Fiume and a

minister between 1872 and 1875; he has written a long and interesting description of Japan in his

37
Ibid.
38
This was one of the first Oriental museums in Hungary. Fajcsák, Györgyi, Keleti Művészeti Kiállítás [Eastern Art
Exhibition], 202. The museum was open to the public for free three times per week—those were the days.
http://epa.oszk.hu/02100/02120/00034/pdf/ORSZ_BPTM_TBM_34_185.pdf.
39
This is a more detailed source on Zichy from the records of the Hungarian Parliament http://www.ogyk.hu/e-
konyvt/mpgy/alm/al905_10/433.htm.

30
 diary, which is the highlight of his work. Also, they returned to Hungary through Mongolia and

Russia; thus, they became the first organized Hungarian expedition to cross Asia. The account of

their journey is only recently been published, after it was acquired from the archives of

Bratislava (Pozsony), in 2013.40 Interestingly, Zichy makes no mention of this expedition in his

writings. Either he was ignorant of this expedition or –as I assume--he kept it a secret from his

readers out of jealousy. While it is possible that Ágost Zichy did not influence Jenő in

undertaking his quest, his childhood friend the oriental traveler Béla Széchenyi can be singled

out as his feasible example that Zichy wanted to follow. This is evident for me from the fact that

Zichy proposed a similar, but not identical, travel plan as the one that Széchenyi took.

Zichy and Széchenyi families developed strong ties, Jenő Zichy and Béla traveled

extensively in their youth together in the Balkans and in the Caucasus; therefore their friendship

must have been an important factor in awakening Zichy’s interest in the East. Széchenyi was

born on 3rd February 1837 in Pest and died in 12th December 1918 in Budapest. He was the son

of István Széchenyi41 who was a Hungarian statement and reformer. Béla Széchenyi studied law

at the University of Bonn and the University of Berlin. In the 1850s he extensively traveled in

France, England and hunted with Zichy in the Balkans.42 In the 1860s Széchenyi organized

hunting trips to Africa. Later in 1862, accompanied by Count Gyula Károlyi, he toured the East
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Coast of the United States and Canada; afterwards published a travel account of it. But he is most

known for his Asian expedition of 1877-80 that touched India, Indonesia, the Island of

Hokkaido, China and the borders of Tibet; the linguist Gábor Bálint, Lajos Lóczy a young

40
Dr. Zichy, Mihály. Zichy József utazásai I-II [The travels of József Zichy I-II], (Budapest: OSZK és az Írók
Alapítványa - Széphalom Könyvműhely, 2013).
41
Széchenyi was the builder of the famous Chain Bridge in Budapest that was the first modern bridge to cross the
Danube. István founded the National (Pesti) Casino on 10 th June 1827 where aristocrats could discuss issues related
to national causes, it was here where Zichy read out his ideas on ancient Hungarian history before the first
expedition. In addition, Széchenyi founded the Hungarian Academy of Sciences on 3 rd November 1825.
42
Sadly no records of these adventures are available we only know about them from few references.

31
 geologist and Gusztáv Kreitner a geographer, accompanied Széchenyi on this trip. In 1880

Széchenyi returned with a great geological hoard that was collected by Lóczy, which became the

most valued feat of the expedition. In addition, they collected zoological, anthropological,

botanical and linguistic data for the MTA. The expedition was highly praised by the Academy

and by international organizations. Some twenty scholars published a three-volume work of their

adventure. We can speculate that Zichy in some way wanted to imitate his friend’s

achievements; there is some evidence of this in one of Jankó’s letters where he writes that Zichy

wanted to travel through China, India, Afghanistan and Tibet but soon abandoned the plan once

he realized how long it would take and what it would cost him.43 Next I will introduce the

members of the first expedition, which targeted the Caucasus and Central Asia.

3. Companions for the expedition of 1895

For the linguistic aspect of the expedition Gábor Bálint, by then a well-known orientalist

of his time, was in charge of finding similarities between the Caucasian languages and

Hungarian. His life’s work is a good example of what a linguist did in the 19th century compared

to a philologist. Bálint was born in 1844 at Szentkatolna. He came from a poor Székely gentry

family. In gymnasium he learned Latin, Italian, French and Hebrew. Later he studied Arabic and
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his lifelong fascination with the East was sealed.44 Arabic opened his interest into Turkic

languages, which helped him along to Persian. But already at this stage he noticed that Turkish

43
This is a short biography of Széchenyi. http://terebess.hu/keletkultinfo/lexikon/szechenyibela.html. In addition,
Pesti Hírlap [Pest News] (1898. Jan. 8.) reports on Zichy’s desire to travel through Central Asia (including the
Hindu Kush and Afghanistan). In this sense he was even more ambitious then Széchenyi.
44
György, Lajos, Gábor Bálint emlékezete [The remembrance of Bálint Gábor], (1945), 82-84.
http://adatbank.transindex.ro/html/alcim_pdf6073.pdf.

32
 and Hungarian shared grammatical similarities and in a way he became convinced that the two

languages had to have the same root.45

After graduation he met Ármin Vámbéry who helped him study Ugric and Ottoman

languages. Vámbéry strongly advocated the view that Hungarian belonged to the Turkic

language family in contrary to what the MTA accepted, that Hungarian belonged to the Finno-

Ugric language family. Bálint shared his tutor’s theory and quickly found himself alienated

within circles where Finno-Ugrism was the dominant view.46

On 21st December 1868, Baron József Eötvös (president of the MTA 1866-1871) on the

initiative of János Fogarasi, a lawyer by profession but a strong supporter of philology, called for

a young scholar who would travel to Mongolia and study its languages to see if there was any

relation with Hungarian. This is an interesting point here because it shows that the MTA was not

always hostile to the idea of Hungarian being related to other Asian languages than Finnish.

Vámbéry immediately recommended Bálint, who dully set out in 1st June 1871 to Kazan with

meager 1200 forints per year allowance from Fogarasi and the MTA.47

The plan was to study the three branches of the Altaic family, Tatar, Mongol and

Manchu. After a meandering journey through Russia he arrived to Kazan to find that the famous

Oriental department with its library has been recently relocated to Petersburg. Bálint was given a
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place to stay with a Russian nobleman outside the city next to a Christian Tatar village where he

45
Ibid 85.
46
Ibid. 82-84.
47
Ibid. 87-88.

33
 visited the local school regularly. After four months he was able to write for the school a small

Tatar grammar book before he embarked for his next station, Astrakhan.48

At Astrakhan, where the government recently settled a small number of Mongols, Bálint

implemented the same strategy as before and spent his time at the local school conversing with

the students. He had time to work on a Kalmyk alphabet and dictionary, to translate the poet

Mihály Vörösmarty’s Szózat [sic] into Kalmyk and to write down twenty-five folk songs. In

addition, he recorded over a dozen folk tales, which he even tried to translate into Hungarian.

After staying with the Mongols for seven month he returned to Petersburg. On 21st February

1873 Bálint again left the Baltic Sea on train for the frozen steppes of perennial Mongolia.

Following a perilous journey he arrived to Urgo the religious center of Mongolia.49

In Mongolia, Bálint came under the tutorage of an aged monk, while he stayed with the

Russian consul. He translated Isaac Jacob Schmidt’s German translation of the document of

Geser Khan (1836) into Khalkh. He collected words and sentences, which was important for him

in order to understand the grammar of the Khalkh language. In addition, he carried out some

ethnographic work by observing the local customs of birth, marriage and death. Then, after three

years of absence, he returned to Hungary with rich linguistic materials for the MTA.50

Bálint’s accomplishments were duly noted by the MTA that is why Béla Széchenyi asked
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him in 1877 to join his upcoming expedition to Asia. They planned for a three years journey, but

after a few months Bálint fell ill and had to return to Hungary although in the short time he was

able to study Japanese and the Dravidian languages. He came to the conclusion that the

48
Ibid, 88-89.
49
Ibid, 90-92.
50
Ibid.

34
 Dravidian was closely related to Turanic languages therefore, to Hungarian. 51 Bálint was a

passionate and headstrong man when Pál Hunfalvy expressed his derisive criticism of his

theories he could never forgave the MTA and went to Athens into self imposed exile from 1879-

1890. Finally in 1892 he was able to take his chair of Ural-Altaic studies at the University of

Kolozsvár.52 It was during these trying times when Zichy approached Bálint, who was past his

fiftieth year, to go with him on his expedition to the Caucasus; this was to be his last trip to

Asia.53

The historian of the expedition was Lajos Szádeczky-Kardoss; his job was to record the

great journey through the Caucasus for posterity. Kardoss was born at Pusztafalu in 1859 and

died in Budapest in 1935. He studied in Budapest (1877-79) then in Vienna (1879-81) at the

Institut für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung. Kardoss worked for the University Library in

Budapest from 1882-91. His main interest was Polish-Transylvanian diplomatic relations during

the Ottoman occupation of the Kingdom of Hungary, which established the Transylvanian

Principality as a vassal state to the Porte. Kardoss wrote books on Hun-Székely-Magyar

historical connections, but his more important works were on the history of Transylvania and on

51
Tamulische (Dravidische) Studien. In zwei Teilen. I. Grammatikalischer Teil. II. Lexikalischer Teil.
Separatabdruck aus dem II. Bande des Werkes „Wissenschaftliche Ergebnisse der Reise des Grafen B. Széchenyi in
Ostasien. 1877–1880.” (Budapest).
52
Győrgy, Lajos, 99-104.
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53
Sadly after his death on 26th May 1913, Bálint’s memory fell into oblivion; only a few times did his name emerge
in an academic paper in the 20th century. His life and work re-emerged on the 8th of December 2006 when a hand
full of scholars organized the first Szentkatolnai Bálint Gábor International Conference in Budapest. On the
conference Ágnes Birtalan the chair of Inner Asian studies at Eötvös Lóránt Tudományegyetem (ELTE) and István
Seres orientalist came to the same conclusion about Bálint’s work. Namely, that he used a fundamentally new
method for the study of languages that he developed during his travels in Asia. This meant that instead of being a
textual philologist and relying on the previously written textual evidences of primary sources or other scholars,
Bálint collected words and observed the language of the common people. Another of his achievements was that he
established Mongolian studies in Hungary, even though Budenz and Hunfalvy opposed the “useless study” of a
language with no literature. Bálint was an outstanding figure in the Orientalist movement and his hard work earned
him the respect of Széchenyi Béla and Zichy that is why both choose him as a companion. Even though, Bálint was
more then capable to work in the Caucasus the three-month period was not enough to do linguistic research.
Obrusánszky, Borbála, Szentkatolnai Bálint Gábor Újraértékelése [The revaluation of Szentkatolnai Bálint Gábor],
Magyar Tudomány, no. 3 (2007): 364-5.

35
 Polish-Hungarian relations.54 Moreover, he researched the history of Transylvania and the

Székely people; this brought him into contact with the great mysteries of ancient Hungarian

history. In addition, he helped organize the resettlement of some 4000 Székelys from Bukovina

to Hungary in 1883. In 1895 he accompanied Zichy on his first expedition. Later he conducted

research in the archives of Poland and Romania. It was Pósta who found in these archives many

of the personal correspondences of Péter Apor, Gábor Bethlen and Gáspár Illésházy; all of them

are important figures of Transylvanian history. In 1903 he traveled to the Ottoman Empire and

visited the residence of Imre Thököly (1657-1705) Prince of Transylvania and his wife Ilona

Zrínyi in Izmit where they lived in exile.55

Yet his historical expertise was not the main reason for him to get on the expedition;

rather, that he was an excellent shorthand writer; that is how he became the official scribe of the

expedition. Ironically, he only published one short memoire of the journey in 1898. What we

know about the first expedition comes from his diary. It was through the painstaking efforts of

Pálma Schelken that the diary was deciphered and after twenty years of work made available to

the general public in the year 2000.56

Although a priest, Mór Wosinsky was also an archeologist who was born in Tolna in

1854 into an immigrant Polish family and died at Szekszárd in 1907. He studied at Kalocsa then
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at Pécs where he was made priest in 1877. With the support of the local Count Albert Apponyi,

from 1881 he becomes the parish priest of Lengyel. It was during a trip with Apponyi when

Wosinsky noticed the ruins of a structure in the distance at the outskirts of Lengyel; he

54
Szádecky, Lajos, Báthory István lengyel királlyá választása: 1574-76 [The election of Stephen Bathory to the
Polish throne 1574-76] (Budapest, 1887).
55
On Kardoss’s life see: http://hu.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sz%C3%A1deczky-Kardoss_Lajos.
56
Szádecky, Kardoss Lajos. Zichy-expedició Kaukazus, Közép-Ázsia 1895 [Zichy-expedition Caucasus, Central
Asia 1895] (Budapest: Magyar Őstörténeti Kutató és Kiadó, 2000).

36
 immediately began excavations with the count’s approval and found a large Neolithic settlement.

Thousands of artifacts were unearthed at the site and it soon became necessary to find an

appropriate place to exhibit them. Subsequently, Apponyi founded the Museum of Tolna County,

which today bears Wosinsky’s name. In addition, the Neolithic culture he found was called

“lengyeli culture” after the nearby village. The findings have been published in many European

papers and Wosinsky gained the recognition of Western European scholars. It is possible that

because of his outstanding work with the lengyeli culture that Zichy became interested in the

man and asked him to be his chief archeologist. Next I will turn to the members of Zichy’s most

ambitious expedition.57

4. Companions for the expedition of 1897-99

After the first expedition returned the members of Zichy’s entourage departed without

composing any scientific report of their accomplishments. The intellectual differences estranged

the idealist Zichy and the scholars; thus any future work was sabotaged. Therefore, Zichy had to

find an entirely new crew to write an official scientific publication; Pósta and Jankó composed

the two-volume work as well as they cataloged the archeological and ethnographic collections

that Zichy bought. The problem with their scholarly involvement with this publication was that
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none of them actually knew what they were cataloging. The entire volume is filled with general

references from various European scholars who worked on the Caucasus; subsequently it lacks

57
This is the website for the Wosinsky Museum where you can find a biography of Wosinsky.
http://wmmm.hu/a_muzeum/a_muzeum_tortenete.

37
 original scholarly work.58 But thanks to the criticisms of Ottó Herman, Zichy made his third

journey more professional.

Taking Herman’s criticism to heart Zichy began his search for a new team. During this

search he came to know the twenty-five year old linguist József Pápay (1873-1931)59 who was

the student of the renowned Finno-Ugric theorist Zsigmond Simonyi (1853-1919). The young

pupil was an enthusiastic student and received special attention from his mentor. Pápay early in

his studies became interested in the unfinished works of Antal Reguly. He was more or less

convinced that the closest linguistic links to Hungarian has to be found in Siberia amongst the

Hanti people. During his time as a university student Simony encouraged him to publish his

researches in the Magyar Nyelvőr [Hungarian Language guard], where Simony was the editor. It

is possible that through these publications Zichy noticed the young man. The events related to

Pápay’s acceptance to the expedition are little known. Julianna Rusvai however found a letter

from 1941 to Pápay from his mentor in which Simony writes:

I remember with great pleasure the time when Jenő Zichy stumbled into my office
and asked me if I would recommend you as his travel companion. I was already
convinced by then, that this trip would be of great benefit for our science.60

In the summer of 1897, Pápay was formally asked by Zichy to join his adventure and thus
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Pápay began his preparations to get his passport. Zichy had to pull some strings to postpone

Pápay’s military service by one year. While the prospect of being the official linguist of the

58
Gróf Zichy, Jenő, Kaukázusi és közép Ázsiai utazasái, A Magyar faj vandorlása, A gyüjtemények leírása, vol I-II,
[Travels in the Caucasus and Central Asia, The migration of the Hungarian race, The description of the collections],
(Budapest, Ranschburg Gusztav Kiadas, 1897). Pósta and Jankó both worked on the collections. But I must say that
reading through it is tiresome and almost pointless since it offers a meager scientific contribution.
60
Rusvai Julianna, Simonyi Zsigmond és Pápay József, 486. http://epa.oszk.hu/00100/00188/00045/pdf/130409.pdf.

38
 expedition flattered him, he was especially excited for seizing the moment and traveling to the

Hanti people to further study their language, by doing so, possibly deciphering Reguly’s notes. 61

One of the longer diaries of the expedition comes from János Jankó who was an

ethnographer and anthropologist born in Budapest in 1868 and died at Borszék in 1902. His early

death came as a shock to many among his friends and his passing prevented him from

completing his scientific work on the Zichy expedition. He graduated from the Geography

University in Budapest in 1890, and then began working for the Hungarian National Museum.

Between 1888 and 1889 with the financial help of the Trade and Industrial Chambers he traveled

to North Africa to carry out anthropological studies in Egypt, Tripoli and Tunis. His

anthropological work was later extended into Transylvania, Northern Balaton and the Jászsag.

He also studied the anthropological institutions of England and France in 1890-91. In addition,

he began the systematic description of human remains in the archeological sites of Hungary. He

also organized the Ethnographic Village at the Millennia Exhibition. With the Zichy expedition

he explored the River Ob and Irtysh regions from where he collected and brought back an

important bone and skull collection. His diary regarding his adventure to the Hanti is also an

important document of Zichy’s expedition.62 Jankó was particularly interested in the fishing

techniques of the locals, which he compared to Ottó Herman’s work on Hungarian fishing
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practices.63

Since Wosinsky was unavailable for Zichy, Béla Pósta became his new archeologist who

was excited to travel to Asia to do comparative examination of the kurgans of Southern Russia

61
Ibid.
62
Jankó, János. Utazás osztjákföldre 1898 [Travel to Osztyak land 1898] ed. János Kodolányi Jr. (Budapest:
Néprajzi Múzeum, 2000).
63
Szikossy, Ildikó and Szemőke, Endre. Jankó János (Budapest: Pulszky Társaság, Magyar Múzeumi
Arcképcsarnok), 418–420.

39
 with Hungarian ones.64 Pósta was born in Kecskemét in 1862 and died at Kolozsvár in 1919. He

began his studies at the Pázmány Péter Science Academy as a law student but soon the lectures

of Károly Torma on Roman archeology invoked his attention. From the mid-1880s on he joined

archeological digs in Hungary with the Hungarian National Museum regarding Magyar graves

from the 9-10th centuries. Pósta also made attempts to study the history of not just Hungary but

of Eurasia from an archeological point of view, that is why when Zichy returned from his second

expedition and offered his bought archeological collection for the Museum, it was Pósta who had

the opportunity to catalogue the treasures.65

In a way it can be concluded that Zichy took a much younger team for his third

expedition. These men in fact hoped that they could achieve a great breakthrough for their

careers with this journey. Also we can theorize, knowing Zichy’s niggardly nature that he had

chosen young scholars because they would accept a smaller salary for their work. Not to belittle

their achievements, but it can be said that this team, if given ample time and opportunity, was

more than capable of achieving great discoveries for Hungarian archeology, linguistics and

anthropology.

The emerging middle classes in Budapest were thoroughly entertained by Zichy reports

from his journey which they read in the newspapers and were more than impressed by anything
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the count achieved for the nation, however meager that might have be in the beginning. But as

far as scholarly circles were concerned; he had some serious critiques around Europe and in

Hungary alike. One of his critique was Mór Déchy was a mountaineer who resided in Odessa

and Zichy often stopped at his place en route, Mór who enjoyed an international fame seems to

64
The kurgans are the burial mounds of nomadic horse people and they can be found from the Alföld to Central
Asia.
65
This is the web page of the Béla Pósta Society: http://www.postabela.ro/postabela.html.

40
 have been well connected with intellectual circles.66 Ottó Herman a polymath, ethnographer,

naturalist and a politician who articulated the most constructive criticism of Zichy’s first and

second expedition in the Ethnographia magazine.67 Bernát Munkácsi was an ethnographer,

linguist and member of the MTA. Munkácsi and Károly Pápai traveled together to Russia in

1888. Munkácsi also formulated a short criticism of Zichy in the Ethnographia but it was not as

practical as Herman’s. Munkácsi argued that the town name of Hunib in the Caucasus is not

related to the Huns as Zichy imagined so.68

66
On Mór see: http://www.fsz.bme.hu/mtsz/mhk/csarnok/d/dechy.htm. Mór Déchy was a mountaineer (1851-1917)
who was born and died in Budapest. He studied at Budapest, Temesvár and Vienna. Already in 1869 he took
multiple hiking trips to the Alps; he climbed the Jungfrau (4158m), Monte Rose (4556m), Monte Blanc (4807m) and
many other tops of Central Europe. In the 70s we find him climbing heights all over Europe and North Africa,
because of his achievements he became the member of multiple geographical societies in the West. In 1872 he
helped found the Hungarian Geographical Society. In 1879 along with the Swiss alpinist Alexander Maurer he
visited the grave of Sándor Körösi Csoma in Tibet. In 1884 he married Juliana Steinberg, the daughter of a well to
do merchant in Odessa, where he moved for her and often received Zichy and his entourage. Between 1884 and
1902 he embarked on six climbing excursions to the Caucasus with different mountaineers and geographers from
England and Austro-Hungary. He published multiple books on his adventures, but sadly his personal notes have
mostly been lost during the Second World War.
67
This is the biography of Herman Otto: http://www.hermuz.hu/hom/index.php/hu/2011-07-06-20-20-21/herman-
otto-eletrajz. Otto Herman the polymath, ethnographer, naturalist and politician was born in Breznobánya on 26 th
June 1835 and died in Budapest on 27th December 1914. He began school at the Catholic Gymnasium of Miskolc,
later studied mechanics and worked in Vienna. On his own he started his zoological and botanical education. He
served six years as a soldier in Dalmatia once discharged he worked as a photographer. After leaving the South he
became the taxidermist for the Transylvanian Museum of Kolozsvár; it was here where he began to publish on aves
and araneae. In 1875 he came to Budapest to work for the Hungarian National Museum’s natural sciences
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department. He wrote a three-volume study on the spider faunas of Hungary; in it he published 31 new spider
breeds. Herman also traveled to Scandinavia to observe the life of the local birds and founded multiple associations
that supported wild life in Hungary. His more important works for this thesis was the research into the pastoral life
of Hungary and his lengthy work on Hungarian fishing techniques, the book that Jankó used during the expedition as
reference. At the Millennia Exhibition on 1896 his fishing exhibition was greatly praised by the public.
68
This is a short biography of Munkácsi: http://mek.oszk.hu/00300/00355/html/ABC09732/10839.htm. Bernát
Munkácsi was born in Nagyvárad on 1860 and died in Budapest on 1937. He was an ethnographer, linguist and
member of the Academy. He studied under Budenz and Vámbéry at the Academy, yet he supported Hunfalvy in the
Finno-Turkic War. In 1880 he traveled to the Csángós (a Hungarian minority group in Romania) and studied their
culture and linguistics. Five years later the MTA sent him to the Udmurt people from there he visited the Chuvash
and Voguls in Siberia collecting linguistic data. He edited the Ethnographia magazine, where Zichy and Herman got
into a heated debate, between 1894-1910. In 1910 he became the member of the MTA. Munkácsi concisely trained
himself to decipher the Vogul collection of Reguly. In addition, he collected words from the Udmurt prisoners of
war at Esztergom in 1915.

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 5. Influences on Zichy: a short biography of Orientalist travelers before Zichy

The following travelers are important figures of Hungarian Orientalism and Zichy

frequently mentions their theories. Generally speaking Zichy took the ideas that suited his

imagination from Orientalist scholars in order to justify his expedition and to prove himself

academic in front of scholarly audiences. It is important to take a quick look at these travelers

and their ideas in order to understand what intellectual discourse Zichy was engaged with. Zichy

borrowed ideas especially from János Besse; in fact, it seems to me that his entire theory on

Hungarian migration from Asia to Europe and the location of the ancient homeland came from

this source first and foremost.

János Besse (1765-1841)69 came from a rich landowning family. Between 1791 and 97 he

fought in the armies of the Prince of York and the King of Naples. From 1810 he studied Turkic

and Persian in Paris and became a friend of Alexander von Humboldt. After finishing his studies

he extensively traveled in Europe and the Ottoman Empire. Besse was deeply interested in

Hungarian history. In 1829-30 he set out on a two-year journey to the Crimea and to the

Caucasus to research for the remnants of ancient Hungarians. His most exciting find was the

ruins of two towns/castles called Kis [Little] and Nagy [Great] “Magyari” in the Northern
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Caucasus.70 Besse made drawings of the ruins, which were published in his book. Through these

drawings Zichy was able to imagine and visualize what he might find when he gets to the area.

Since no organized excavation had taken place in the area of Magyari, Zichy hoped that with the

69
On Besse see: http://terebess.hu/keletkultinfo/lexikon/besse.html.
70
Harvard University - Collection Development Department, Widener Library, HCL / Zichy, Jenő. Keleti kutatások
a magyarság eredetének felderítése érdekében történelmi attekintés és észleleteim, tapasztalataim különös tekintettel
expediciom eredményeire [Research in the East concerning the origins of Hungarians, historical overview and my
observations and experiences with special regards to the achievements of my expedition], (Budapest: Hornyánszky;
Leipzig: Hiersemann, 1905), 25.

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 help of Mór Wosinsky--and the permission of the Russian government, which he never received-

-he would be the first to unearth the secrets of the ruins. The other important report of Besse was

that he noticed that the local Tatars called the horse drawn cart madzsari71 therefore; it was the

Hungarians—Zichy concluded--who introduced the cart to this region, which also meant that

they had to have lived in the Northern Caucasus in the past.72 In addition, Besse did some

comparative linguistic research between Hungarian and some of the local languages. It was also

him who noted the Zizi or Zichy--as the count read it--family name in the region, this find served

as the core motivation for Zichy to pursue his phantasmagoria of locating his long lost family

members. In conclusion, Besse believed that the ancestral homeland of the Magyars was in the

Caucasus, a theory enthusiastically shared by Zichy.73 Besse’s travel was published in French

and has not been translated into Hungarian.74

Next to Besse, Ármin Vámbéry (1832-1913) was highly praised by Zichy for his life’s

work and daring spirit. Born to a poor Jewish family, Vámbéry studied Hebrew but after

studying Turkic languages Vámbéry was responsible for starting the so-called “Finno-Turkic

War.” This war battled two ideas, one that Magyar was related to the Finnish language family,

the other that Magyar was related to the Central Asian Turkic languages. For Zichy, Vámbéry’s

linguistic theory was nonsensical and had “no use for anyone in Hungary” but he still respected
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the man’s achievements as a world known traveler.75 By dismissing Vámbéry on linguistic

grounds Zichy clearly made a strong stand for the Finnish connection although his linguistic

71
Ibid, 26.
72
It has to be mentioned here that Besse was not entirely wrong in his assumption because the English, French and
Spanish word for a horse drawn cart is coach, coche, which comes from the Hungarian word kocsi. Thus, it is
possible that the Tatar use of madzsari indicates Magyar influence and the use of this word is not accidental.
73
Kardoss, 275-6.
74
Besse János, Voyage en Krimée au Caucase, en Géorgie, en Arménie, en Asie-Mineure et Constantinople, en 1829
et 1830, pour servir l'histoire de Hongrie, (Paris, 1838).
75
Zichy (1905), 66-67.

43
 theories often changed, as we will see from the diaries. Vámbéry’s “archenemy,” Pál Hunfalvy

also appeared in Zichy’s book.

Pál Hunfalvy (1810-1891) was a politician and ethnographer of German origin. He and

his colleague József Budenz, a German linguist, were ardent supporters of the Finno-Ugric

theory and both came into conflict with Vámbéry and Gábor Bálint. In fact, it was because of the

attacks of Hunfalvy that Bálint left for a self-imposed exile to the Ottoman Empire after he was

rejected from the MTA. Hunfalvy made a major contribution to linguistics by restarting the

works of János Sajnovics and Sámuel Gyarmathi, thus reintroducing the study of Finnish

languages to the Academia. Hunfalvy encouraged the systematization of the Hanti collection left

behind by Reguly, which actually was the project of Pápay in the expedition.76 However,

Hunfalvy was a controversial figure in Hungary. His critiques have pointed out that he only

learned Magyar at a later stage of his life thus it was not his mother tongue; in addition, that

Hunfalvy’s collaborator, Budenz also never learned Hungarian properly. Moreover, that

Hunfalvy was appointed to the MTA during the Bach era (which was introduced to Hungary

after the failed 1848-49 revolution as a counter measure to stop any future upheaval and to “hunt

down” the dangerous elements in Hungarian society) to be the pawn of the Habsburgs. Although

the latter acquisition can be debated, it seems untrue. Nonetheless, Hunfalvy was able to upset
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the Hungarian aristocracy by debasing them to be the offspring of primitive hunter-gatherers

from the swamps of the Ural Mountains to where his mentor Antal Reguly traveled, to study the

closest linguistic relatives of the Magyars the Hantis and Mansis.77

76
Ibid, 90.
77
Hunfalvy biography: http://mek.oszk.hu/00300/00355/html/ABC05727/06648.htm.

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 Antal Reguly was known for his work on the Ural-Altaic languages. In 1839 he left

Hungary for an eight-year journey across Siberia. First he settled in Finland where he learned

Finnish and Lapp then he moved on to Russia where he was delayed and had the opportunity to

study Russian. In 1843 he managed to collect the sum needed for his journey and began his long

trek across the steppe to study the languages of the Udmurts, Bashkirs and Manysik’s. But the

long stay in Russia wore him down and his health was never the same after he returned to

Hungary in 1847. Until his death he traveled Northern Hungary and studied the culture of the

Palóc people78 with Hunfalvy.79 Because he did not understand the language his collection was

in he was unable to begin working on it and his work was left on the shelves of the MTA.

6. Inspirations: textual sources, theories, ideas that influenced Zichy during the first
expedition

Zichy became interested in the East while he avidly researched his family tree. After

doing some “close reading” of historical texts, before his first expedition, he became convinced

that the Hungarians did not came from the Ural Mountains or Central Asia rather they were a

proto tribe from the Caucasus, moreover, that the remnants of his family could still be found in

the Caucasus under the name Zichianoff, and that they still lived in the area of Zichia. 80 That is
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why he chose this mountainous region as the target of his adventures. Even though members of

the MTA openly criticized his planed route, he was not entirely a phantom chaser; he based his

hopes on the findings of János Besse. In addition, he seems to have done extensive readings of

78
The Palóc people are ethnic Hungarians probably decedents of the Polocy or Pechenegs (Besenyő) or some
Kuman tribes.
79
Reguly biography: http://www.rubicon.hu/magyar/oldalak/1819_julius_11_reguly_antal_szuletese/.
80
Munkácsi, Bernát and Sebestyén, Gyula ed., Ethnográphia, no. IX (1898): 397.

45
 the works of János Orlay, János Jerney and László Berzenczey; all of these men located the

homeland of the Magyars in the vicinity of the Caucasian Mountains.

His sources overall were able to convince Zichy that the Hungarians must have spent a

considerable amount of time in the Volga Basin in fact he believed, they originated from that

region. Therefore, he hoped that by traveling there with his entourage, he would be able to find

proof of Hungarian presence. The count also hoped to use the most up to date research methods

available to him at the time; namely linguistic and anthropological research supported with

archeology. Until the 19th century linguistic research was seldom supported by archeological

findings.81 Therefore, Zichy’s methodology was perfectly acceptable and if carried out properly

and given enough time it could have produced important finds.

His chapter on the “Migration of the Hungarian race” gives us an insight into his ideas

about this shadowy event in history. First of all, Zichy clearly states that he believes that there

has been ample philological research done on the Hungarian languages but these findings were

not quite supported by archeology.82 Prior to the launch of the expedition he visited Berlin and

met Dr. Bestian Adolf an ethnologist who theorized that there is a general psychic unity of

humankind that is responsible for certain elementary ideas common to all peoples.83 Bestian told

him that:
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Les Hiou-Huns sount donc une race a part, qui n’est ni finnoise, ni turque;
et de cette tribu est issue le people Magyar qui a fourni les preuves de sa vitalité
par une exsitance dix fois séculaire.

81
Zichy, 89.
82
Zichy, Jenő. Zichy Jenő gróf Kaukázusi és Közép Ázsiai utazásai, vol. 2, A Magyar faj vándorlása.[The Caucasian
and Central Asian travels of Jenő Zichy, The migration of the Hungarian race], (Budapest: Rauchenburg Gustáv,
1897).
83
On Bastian see: http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/55606/Adolf-Bastian.

46
 Zichy was more than happy to agree that the Magyars are a Hun proto tribe that was pushed out

of from the periphery of China by the Emperor’s armies around 200 BC.84

According to Zichy the Huns then arrived to the Volga Basin (where they met the

Magyars) around 200 AD, which he supports by the idea that there is a settlement in the

Caucasus called Hunivar, which would translate into Hungarian as the “Castle of the Huns.”85

This idea is more or less supported by Strabo (63 BC – 24 AD) the Greek historian and Jordanes

the 6th century Roman historian, although the latter wrote that the Huns lived in the Northwestern

shores of the Black Sea. In contrast, Procopius states that the Huns settled closer to the Caucasus

than to the Ural Mountains, a statement that Hunfalvy found problematic and he accused

Procopius (500-565) of mixing up the dates.86 Moreover, the count believed that every mention

of Ugors, Huns and Turks by Byzantine authors between 457 and 950 are actually references to

the Magyars.87 Then, Zichy explains, using Priscus Rethor (who visited Attila the Hun) and the

Thurócy chronicles (15th century) as sources, how the Bulgarian-Hunnish-Magyar alliance broke

up and how the Bulgarians subsequently stormed Central Europe in the 630s, supported by

Magyar forces. At the same time some Magyars left behind in Circassia and that is the main

reason why Zichy visited the Circassian people, quite naively believing that he could find

Magyars in the region after more after a thousand years.88

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From these sources Zichy concluded that the Magyars lived in the Caucasus for at least

800 years. Moreover, that the Circassians are Zikhs, what he possibly means here is that they are

84
Zichy, Magyar faj, IX.
85
Ibid, XI.
86
Ibid, XVI.
87
Ibid, XXVI.
88
Ibid, XXIV.

47
 related to the Zichy family.89 Also that there are still Magyars in Dagestan and more importantly,

that Georgia and Tiflis could have many Magyar village and family names. Thus collecting

Magyar names in the area was a top priority for Zichy, with this collection he hoped to prove that

the Zichianoff family was in fact the long lost relative of his own Zichy clan. 90 Although he

names all the possible Hungarian related tribes he might find in the region, he does not believe

that he would be able to come up with any useful linguistic date since many of the languages

spoken in the Caucasus might not at all be related to Hungarian; that is why he put his hopes into

the archeological findings.91

The problem with his theory was that he fell into the same trap as many Hungarians

before and after him who tried to tackle the problem of Hungarian tribal migration. The trap was

in the Byzantine sources. The Byzantine emperors imitated the ancient Greek writers when they

reported on neighboring barbarian tribes. This meant that they often used the names given to

these tribes in ancient times; moreover the Byzantine sources often (almost all the time) referred

to different people with the same name. Thus for the Greeks all who came forth from Central

Asia were Turks or Huns but were seldom referred to as Scythians or Onugors let alone as

Magyars. Thus for a researcher it is hard (if not impossible) to find out when do the sources refer

to specific tribes.
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Before Zichy set out on his first expedition, he gave a speech summarizing his theories at

the Országos Casino in front of a scholarly audience in 31st March 1895.92 The Budapesti Hírlap

published his speech but the article generated no response from the MTA. Zichy also wrote

letters to all the organizations he was involved in to request a leave of absence in addition, he
89
Ibid, XXX.
90
Ibid, XXXVII.
91
Ibid, XVL.
92
Kardoss, 16-21.

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 wrote to the MTA and asked for a reference letter for the Geographical Society in St. Petersburg,

which probably could have helped him on his journey to get in touch with scholarly circles

abroad, but only one person replied, Ernő Dániel the minister of commerce. Dániel wished Zichy

a safe journey and provided them with a carriage to transport the crew to the borders of Austro-

Hungary.93

The members of the first expedition prior to departure skimmed through the museums

and libraries of Hungary, but the lack of time prevented them from accomplishing notable

research. If their preparedness for museology, especially regarding Russian museums was a

moot, then their linguistic knowledge of the Caucasian languages was finite at best. It became

obvious that their au fait with Armenian, French and German languages would only go so far in

the Caucasus. Even the command of the Russian language, which none of them had at any

acceptable level, could only offer limited help in such a multi lingual terrain. That is why Zichy

brought along Bálint who already knew the language of the Kabar94 people.95 Wosinsky,

Kardoss, Bálint and Zichy read French or German publications on the Caucasus that were

available in Budapest. However the Russian sources, often written in French, could only be read

locally in Odessa, Tiflis or Moscow thus, the available three month they spent on the road was

hardly sufficient enough to undertake any serious research into these sources.96
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93
Kardoss, 11.
94
The Kabars are related to the Hungarians in as much as, according to legend; when the seven Magyar tribes took
the homeland they brought with them a tribe of Kabars who thus became the 8th tribe. Some linguist thinks that the
Kabars were in fact, Turkic and thus spoke a Turkic language. According to this theory, the Kabars brought the
Turkic loan words into the Hungarian language. However, this theory is highly speculative. However, Besse thought
that the Kabars were related to the Csermisz-Karacsaj people who do speak a form of Turkic.
95
Bálint actually completed his studies of the grammar of the Kabar people previously.
96
Kardoss, 274.

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 7. Inspirations: textual sources, theories, ideas that influenced Zichy during the third
expedition

Many prominent members of the pantheon of Hungarian Orientalism can be found in

Zichy’s sources in the sixth volume of his Third Expedition Report. Zichy heavily relied on

Constantinus Porphyprogeneta97 and other Byzantine writers all of whom extensively wrote

about the migration of nomadic tribes. Many ideas were taken from these works and linked

together in order to help him develop a theory about the history of the Hungarians before their

settling in Europe. Thus his knowledge of the Orient at first was completely textual.

Zichy was clearly able to articulate that Hungarian Orientalism is a movement, and he

now became the newest pioneer of it. Still after three expeditions it is questionable how clearly

he understood the issue surrounding the competing language families within the Hungarian

Orientalist discourse or any other archeological or ethnographic issues. I believe his rejection of

the Turkic linguistic theory of Vámbéry has more to do with his attempt to conform to the known

trend, dictated by the MTA, than with his own personal conviction. His confusion about

linguistics will be visible during the third expedition when Zichy had to be convinced by Jankó

to support his linguistic research among the Siberian tribes and abandon his plan to extend the
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expedition to Mongolia, which Jankó thought was unnecessary. In addition Pápay, a staunch

Finno-Ugrist, also had to persuade Zichy during the expedition to give up his belief in any kind

of Turkic-Hungarian linguistic relationship and focus on the Finno-Ugric language family.

97
Byzantine emperor lived between 905-959 he is most well known for his De administrando imperio and the De
ceremoniis aulae Byzantinae. http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/133971/Constantine-VII-
Porphyrogenitus.

50
 Zichy also had a secondary objective for his third expedition, which can be described as

the most hopeless out of all his convictions and it had to do with the Mongols. Batu, the

grandson of Genghis Khan, led the Mongol invasion of the Kingdom of Hungary in 1241-42.

According to the chronicles that Zichy read the Mongols took important documents from the

King’s Castle. Moreover, the Mongols captured the royal stamp after the battle of Muhi and used

it to issue official edicts that aimed to invite back the already fled population to the countryside.

Thus it was Zichy’s task to travel to Urgo, modern day Ulaanbaatar, and to Peking to find the

stolen property of the Árpád dynasty in the Buddhist monasteries and imperial libraries and bring

them home.98

Zichy did not take into account that first; it is impossible to know how many documents

the Mongols took with them to Asia. Second, the first capital of the Mongols was at Karakorum,

where Ögodei built his capital but abandoned it after forty years and moved to Peking (possibly

taking all the documents he had with him). Karakorum was later attacked by Manchu troops and

completely destroyed in 1388. From its ruins Buddhist monks built Erden Zuu the first Buddhist

center in Mongolia. There is no record that Ögodei ever kept any documents at Urgo. Thus the

success of this plan was highly unlikely, not to mention that Zichy never went to Karakorum. In

light of this I believe that Zichy’s best bet would have been Peking, however the political
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upheaval in China prevented him from visiting the libraries.

The preparations for the third expedition were more thorough and professional. We know

from the letters of Jankó that Zichy wanted to take a route similar to Széchenyi, however when

he realized the time and financial requirements of such journey he backed down. Jankó was sent

to Russia to study the museums and libraries on 19th July 1897; Pósta followed him on the 1st of

98
Ethnographia no. IX, 1898, 182.

51
 September and together they went to Finland to connect with eminent Finno-Ugric scholars.

After Zichy was able to postpone his military service Pápay was dispatched to Russia to began

studying Russian in early December. Before setting out for the third expedition, Zichy asked the

Parliament for a one year leave, which was granted. In return he promised to bring home

valuable archeological collections and information on the life of ancient Hungarians. Zichy also

wrote a farewell letter to the Pesti Hirlap that was published on 8th January 1898.

8. Finances

Zichy financed the three expeditions himself. We can get a fairly good idea of how much

money was spent during the journeys since the diaries are dotted with references to financial

struggles, which can be attributed to Zichy’s niggardly behavior. In fact, it is astonishing to see

how much space has been wasted by the members of the team on writing about their financial

problems en route instead of writing about their inquires. The first expedition cost 60.000 forints

all of which was covered by Zichy.99 We know from Pósta’s diary that on the third expedition

each member got around 300 rubles for a month in addition, Zichy paid their travel expenses.100

This meant that they were only able to spend around 10 rubles per day. Considering the

occasional financial troubles between Zichy and the team I believe they were well paid.
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99
Kardoss, 272.
100
Banner, János, Pósta Béla születésének százados ünnepe 1862-1962 [The hundreds year anniversary of the birth
of Béla Pósta] (Budapest: Muzeumok Rotaüzeme, 1962), 126-131.

52
 9. Space, routes and modes of transport

The Hungarians traveled through a territory far greater than the Austro-Hungarian

Monarchy was at the time. Even the tribes they sought to study on the third expedition lived in

an area almost the size of continental Western Europe. Moreover, they were traveling in a space

which has been thoroughly colonized by the Russians. Therefore, their encounters with the locals

took place in a colonial context. Which meant that the Hungarians were often viewed by the

natives as the colonizers in this case as Russian officers. This fact did not complicate the

expedition but rather it made it easier for them to acquire hospitality. At the same time, the

drawback of this colonial encounter was that the locals kept their distance from the team.

During the first expedition Zichy generally traveled on the main roads either by train or

by cart, given his advanced age, this comes as no surprise. From Hungary the first expedition

took a train to Lemberg, which was then a border city of the Monarchy in Galicia. From

Lemberg there was direct train to the port city of Odessa from where ships ran regularly to the

port of Jalta and to the city of Novorossiysk on the shores of the Caucasus. In the Northern

Caucasus they used horses to get to the villages and between Vladikavaz and Tiflis, the famous

Georgian Military Road, which was constructed by the Russian Army between 1799 and 1876.
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Tiflis was connected by a railway with the oil rich Baku. The Caspian could be crossed on boat

either towards the Central Asian port of Krasnovodsk or to the Volga Delta port of Astrakhan.

Between the 1880s and 1910s the Russians were building railways in a rapid paste in order to

connect the far-flung corners of the Empire. As a result of this need the Trans-Caspian Railway

connected Krasnovodsk and Central Asia, the Trans-Aral Railway crossed Kazakhstan and the

Trans-Siberian reached into the Far East. Because of the relatively good railway system in 1895,

53
 Zichy was able to take the train from Krasnovodsk to Merv, Bukhara and from there to

Samarkand. On the way home the expedition used the train from Novorossiysk to Moscow then

on to St. Petersburg.

The third expedition used the train system between Odessa, Kiev, Moscow and St.

Petersburg. Besides the winter and early spring, when large chunks of ice rush down the Volga,

the river was navigable upstream from Astrakhan. The Trans-Siberian Railway was almost

completed up to the city of Krasnoyarsk on the banks of the River Enisey. From Irkutsk they

took a boat down the River Angara to the Baikal Lake. The Baikal had to be crossed by boat to

the Selenga River that took them down to the Mongolian border. The main trade route between

Siberia and China went from the Selenga to Peking through Urgo. This road had to be crossed by

small Mongolian horses (although at the Chinese border they had to change to Chinese horses).

From Peking Zichy took a ship back to Fiume stopping at major seaports on the way but this part

of the expedition is not documented.

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54
 10. Map of the route of the third expedition

This map depicts Zichy’s third expedition. The black circle below the River Ob is where
Jankó traveled. The black path up to Obdorsk is Pápay’s route.101
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101
http://m.cdn.blog.hu/sz/sziberia-neprajz/image/zichy3terkep.jpg This is the webpage for the
map.

55
 Chapter III. The First Zichy expedition of 1895

This chapter will examine the travel diary of Lajos Szádeczky-Kardoss, who was one of

the five members of the expedition led by Jenő Zichy to the Caucasus and Central Asia in 1895.

For this thesis his diary will be used exclusively to demonstrate how he saw the periphery of the

Romanov Empire and its inhabitants in 1895 when the last Romanov took his throne. The main

focus will be on Kardoss’s description of the Romanov Empire and its periphery in the Caucasus,

which was conquered by Russia in 1864. The expedition lasted from April 30th until the middle

of August. The hastiness of time prevented serious orientalist/scientific work and none of the

members of the expedition published any scientific work about their journey afterwards. This

fact makes the writing of a critical study of the scientific methods used on the expedition nearly

impossible. I will however examine what historical, political and ethnic issues Kardoss mentions

in his work. Moreover, how he saw the historical events that impacted the region and its

inhabitants in the near past. What was Zichy’s team’s relationship to the Romanov Empire?

What were their objectives and did they accomplish them?

Kardoss’s diary has only been published in 2000. The reason for this was that it took two

scholars and almost thirty years to decipher his handwriting. Kardoss used his own shorthand
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codes, which meant that Pálma Schelken had to learn to think as Kardoss once did in order to

modernize the text. Kardoss taught shorthand writing in Transylvania. Since he was a

professional shorthand writer he wrote the entire diary in this style. This style of writing was

useful if the writer intended to decipher his own writings and transfer it into a standard form in

the near future. But since he did not do this, even though Zichy offered him money to publish the

diary, it is hard to tell how well Schelken was able to decode Kardoss’s writing. Consequently,

56
 this diary should not be thought of as the perfect representation of Kardoss’s memoirs. We have

to accept that there are mistakes in the translation even if we can never be sure of those

mistakes.102 Schelken’s published book runs 299 pages; it includes a few of Wosinsky’s

photographs as illustrations, few personal letters by Zichy and news articles from various

Hungarian newspapers that reported on the expedition. In addition, there are reflections on the

history of the Caucasus and on the local people by the editors. The book follows an entry style

narrative. Each entry is titled after either the location or the date. Schelken included photographs

of some pages of the diary these depict the drawings of Kardoss. These drawings have little

artistic value they are more like sketches. Most of them depict landscapes and houses.

1. The travelers and their goals

Besides Kardoss there was Mór Wosinsky the archeologist. However, his archeological

expertise was not needed since the group never received permission from the Russian

government to carry out archeological excavations. Another member was Dr. Gábor Bálint, a

gifted linguist who spoke approximately twelve languages. During the expedition, he was the

only one who was able to communicate with some of the locals who spoke any one of the Turkic

dialects in the Caucasus. Lastly, Jakab Csellingerian, an Armenian from the Caucasus, who
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happened to be in Hungary at the time when the expedition was organized. He became the

personal secretary of Zichy.103

102
Szádecky Kardoss Lajos, Zichy-expedició Kaukazus, Közép-Ázsia 1895 [Zichy expedition, Caucasus, Central
Asia 1895] (Budapest, Magyar Őstörténeti Kutató és Kiadó, 2000), 14. On this page Schelken admits that the
translation of the diary is not perfect.

103
Kardoss, 9.

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 It is important to mention that none of the members knew Russian adequately. Even

Csellingerian who was educated in Armenian in Russian occupied Armenia was not fluent in

Russian. This severe handicap in Russian often led to misspellings or the complete distortion of

local tribe names. Thus it is often unclear to what people or settlements Kardoss refers to. In

addition, some Russian sentences that they heard or tried to learn were mistranslated in the diary.

The expedition basically had four goals first, to find the old cities of Madzsari, which

János Besse refers to in his book. Second, to find Zichys in the Caucasus. Third, to travel to

Central Asia and find out if it was possible for the Magyars to migrate over the desert from

Persia towards the Volga region. Lastly, to buy archeological and ethnographic collections

related to Hungarian culture for the purpose of exhibiting them at the 1896 Millennia Exhibition

in Budapest. The expedition’s method of data collection was as follows.

Kardoss and Bálint were responsible for visiting libraries and museums in order to find

Hungarian material objects. In the Caucasian villages the count personally interviewed the locals

about the history of the region and asked them if they knew about their relationship to the

Hungarians. Wherever they could they recorded the dances and tried to compare it to Hungarian

dances. In addition, they collected songs and often sang Hungarian songs for the locals to prove a

rhythmic and lyrical connection to Hungarian folk songs. The count made Kardoss record as
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many family names as he could to find other the Zichys in the region. It was unexpected, since

the Hungarian Zichy family had no real connection to the region, but they did found a family in

Gori, which was named Zizianowok (Ziczichovili in Georgian). Zichy immediately recognized

them as his long lost relatives from ages past although the rest of the group strongly disagreed

with him based on the fact that familiar sounding names can develop separately in different

58
 regions of the world.104 Lastly, Zichy bought numerous arts and crafts from the locals that he

brought back with him including earth and grass from the supposed homelands of the Magyar

tribes. One of the most valuable outcomes of the expedition is a photo collection that is available

online at the Országos Széchenyi Könyvtár (OSZK); the majority of the pictures were taken by

Wosinsky and they give us a picturesque insight into the folk art of the locals.105

2. The journey to the ancient homeland

Before the official start of the expedition, Zichy sent invitations to all members of the

government and the MTA to come to his departure but nobody replied. In fact their departure

went more or less unnoticed by the public, save a few newspapers that did write about the event.

They left via train from Budapest on April 30th 1895 toward Lemberg. Kardoss confronts the

reader on the first pages of his diary with orientalization of the landscape when he refers to

distant orthodox churches as Chinese pagodas at Lawoczne.106 Moreover, he refers to the lands

over the Carpathians as Poland even though he was traveling in Galicia, which at that time was

part of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and not of Poland.107 In other words, for his imagined

geographical regionalization “Asia” started as soon as he left the Carpathians. And yet, as we

will see later, in the Caucasus Mountains there is also another border of Asia for Kardoss. The
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mental regionalization in his work is the interesting in as much as it helps us understand how

lucid people’s ideas of regional borders were at the time. Kardoss had a strong sense of where

places began or ended. As we saw before when they left Hungary, over the Carpathians there

104
Ibid, 197.
105
http://keptar.oszk.hu/html/kepoldal/index.phtml?id=037390 This is the OSZK webpage for the photographs.
106
Through out this thesis I will write the names of towns and settlements as they appear in the diaries, unless they
are well known cities like Kazan or Odessa. In that case I use their English name.
107
Kardoss, 24.

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 was Poland, then Russia and over the Caucasian Mountains, Asia. What makes this

regionalization interesting is that he never compares the Asian landscapes with Asia. He never

writes, for example, that buildings or landscapes in Central Asia are stereotypically Asian. The

Chinese pagodas only appear for him in Poland. While they were traveling to Moscow, on their

way back, the landscape seemed to him more Asian then the landscape in “Asia.” In addition,

while they were searching for the ancestral lands of the Magyars, he barely made a mental

connection between the Hungarian landscapes and the Caucasian. However, in Russia almost

everything he sees houses, steppe, people and rivers all remind him of Hungary.

The team spent a few days in Lemberg where they visited the local museum searching for

Hungarian material objects but they only found broidery motifs that were clearly Hungarian.108

From the town of Wolocznyska from where they continued their journey to Odessa. Zichy might

have acquired the official invitation of the Czar beforehand in order to be able to travel with little

interference from the officials in the Empire. From the diary it is unclear how or why Zichy was

given the permission. Furthermore, it is not mentioned if it was Alexander III, who died in

November of 1894, who gave the permission for the expedition or his successor Nicholas II. But

since the scientific works published by Zichy about his enterprise are dedicated to Nicholas II, I

assume it was him who gave the permissions.

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The first major stop was the port city of Odessa that offered a spectacular view of the

Black Sea. The city was well organized with large streets and neat little shops. In Odessa they

met Hungarian and Austrian subjects who resided in the city. The day they arrived was the last

day of the official six-month mourning period for the deceased Alexander III. The city rang its

church bells day and night whilst the people put out candles in their windows to show their

108
Ibid, 24.

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 respect. Kardoss describes the trading city of 360.000 residents as a cosmopolitan hub inhabited

by a large Jews population along side of Turks, Greeks, and Russians.109 The majority of the

people dressed in Russian dresses and although it was not mandatory but almost everything was

written in Cyrillic. However, there were ethnic problems under the seemingly peaceful

cosmopolitan surface that a Russian university professor brought to their attention during a

dinner party with Mór Décsy. Professor Borzenkho A.A. informed them of the enormous Muslim

emigration out of the country--according to him--by 1895 over 400.000 left for the Ottoman

Empire and he felt that it was “a travesty” that the Russian government was unable to stop this.

The problem of the Muslim emigration comes up several times in the diary. It was a serious

concern for local governors in the Caucasus how to deal with the depopulated regions.110

The other reoccurring problem for the Russians was the Polish question. Formerly, the

Polish Kingdom was recognized and given relative autonomy in 1815 after the Napoleonic Wars.

However, the Poles were just as troublesome for the Russians as the Hungarians were for the

Habsburgs. After a long and unsuccessful uprising in 1867, the Polish lands were incorporated

into the Empire. The quick loss of independence further deepened the already strained Polish-

Russian ethnic-national relations. Reports of this ongoing conflict reached the ear of Kardoss

too. The gossip in Odessa of the time was about two anti-Polish events that were carried out by
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the governor Zeloni J. (1885-1898). In the diary, Kardoss depicts the governor as a ruthless,

savage man “who calls men dogs and women whores.” The gossip was that not long before the

Zichy expedition’s arrival, for unknown reasons Zeloni arrested fifty Poles and sent them to

Siberia at once. According to Géza Daruváry, who was the son of the Austro-Hungarian

ambassador to the Caucasus, another incident happened when a ship arrived with a Pole on board

109
Ibid, 27.
110
Ibid, 29.

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 to Odessa. As soon as the Pole got off the ship he was detained for twenty-two days until his

alleged crimes could be investigated.111 Hungarians especially during the troublesome 19th

century developed a sympathetic attitude towards the Poles and vice versa. Many Poles fought in

the Hungarian revolutionary army in 1848/1849 and after the Russian general Ivan Paskevich

forced the Magyar forces at Világos to surrender; the Russians became the new enemy in the

national consciousness. Therefore, the mutual dislike of Russians was an ample connecting point

for the two nations. This could be the reason why Kardoss went on in great detail about these

events in the diary. After the expedition’s pleasant stay in Odessa they sailed for the Caucasus

stopping at Sevastopol and Jalta. The massive devastation from the Crimean War of 1856 was

still visible for the naked eye. At the city of Sevastopol they visited the museum that housed the

war memoirs but the meager exhibition left the group unimpressed.112

3. The Caucasus

From the diary we get a significantly different picture when it comes to Kardoss’s

description of the Northern and Southern Caucasus. Kardoss names the dividing line as the

Caucasian mountain itself, which even today separates the Russian Federation from the

independent states in the South. The striking disparity of the two regions shows how the
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adaptability of the Empire’s imperialism played out under various circumstances. When reading

the diary Central Asia, where they only traveled to Bukhara and Samarkand (today Uzbekistan),

also has a completely unique “feeling” to it compared with the Caucasus. Central Asia is

described as backward and desolate.

111
Ibid.
112
Ibid, 37-38.

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 The expedition landed in the port of Jekatyerinodar, a town founded by Catherine the

Great in 1792. The small town with its dirt roads and wooden houses was unimpressive for

Kardoss. Here they met the governor, a Cossack named Sergeij Jackevich, who warned them not

to go to the Caucasus for their own safety. Nonetheless Jackevich gave them a Circassian guide

named Agirov Kanamat who already been on diplomatic missions for the Russians to quiet the

obstreperous tribes. Kanamat had to be dressed, fed and paid by the Zichy throughout the

journey and he also served as an interpreter.113

While traveling in the Caucasus the expedition mostly used the Georgian military road,

which was in good shape since the Russians spent a lot of effort to upgrade it.114 Because

Kardoss periodically sent reports back to Hungary for the Vasárnapi Hírlap [Sunday News] and

Budapesti Hírlap [Budapest News], the postal system that used the military road was crucial for

the mission. At the postal stations they were able to change horses, usually a station had between

nine to twelve horses and a small Cossack garrison, which went out to escort Zichy’s group

between stations. Surprisingly, in this periphery of the Empire the postal system worked without

a glitch except for one time when a few weeks of letters got piled up in Tiflis because the

expedition unexpectedly changed course. But most of the time the letters caught up with the

caravan in time.115
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In the Northern Caucasus, the expedition’s main objective was to find the ancient city of

Nagy-Magyari (Karabagh in Armenian). The source for the existence of this town with a

medieval castle came from the writings of János Besse whose work was the main source and

113
Ibid, 46-47.
114
Ibid, 111.
115
Ibid, 74.

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 inspiration for the journey. The Zichy expedition more or less, followed his recorded route.116

The beginning of Kardoss’s diary starts with his notes on Besse’s book;117 unfortunately the

editors decided not to include it in the published version.118 Besse, after carrying out

ethnographic observations, tried to prove—unsuccessfully--that the Dugur, Balkar, Kuljam,

Bingizi and Uruspie tribes were the direct descendants of the Szavárd Magyars who migrated to

the Caucasus from the Volga region sometime in the 8-9th century. Since Besse’s linguistic

attempts were fruitless it is engrossing why Zichy believed that his try would be more fortunate.

Although Besse spoke multiple languages he was not a linguist, thus, he was unable to

scientifically prove that the Magyar language is related to any of the languages of the above-

mentioned tribes.119

4. The towns of Magyari

According to Kardoss there were three towns called Magyari on the Kuma River small,

big and central Magyari. But he could only locate big and small with any certainty. Big Magyari

was then called Karabagh. Since the team received no permission from the Russian government

to perform archeological excavations, when they found the town their hands were tied. To make

matters worse an earthquake destroyed the old castle subsequently, the locals already have
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quarried the stones. In addition there were no ancient Magyars living in town but Armenians,

who moved in around 1839 from the Karabagh region of Armenia--hence the name Karabagh.

116
http://www.magyarormeny.hu/uploads/file/fuzetekfileok/EOGYKE_2012DEC_internetre.pdf On page 37 of this
pdf there is a map for Besse’s route in the Northern Caucasus.
117
Besse, János, Voyage en Krimée au Caucase, en Géorgie, en Arménie, en Asie-Mineure et Constantinople, en
1829 et 1830, pour servir l'histoire de Hongrie, (Paris, 1838).
118
Kardoss, 23.
119
http://terebess.hu/keletkultinfo/lexikon/besse.html This is a good source on Besse’s work. Terebess is an
independent web site containing many original texts on Hungarian Orientalism.

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 Zichy quickly found out after talking with the village elders that the newcomers had no idea that

the town was ever called Madzsari (Magyari), they only knew that there were some Tatar graves

in the graveyard but the Tatars have left some time ago, probably moved out during the great

Muslim exodus. In many villages the newcomers often robbed the graves of the previous

inhabitants.120 The kurgans were clearly visible for Kardoss in both Magyari towns. Zichy was

afraid of the accompanying Cossack cavalry that was not only there to protect them but also to

keep an eye on the team therefore, Zichy secretly went down with Kardoss and Wosinsky to the

banks of the Kuma River with a shovel to dig a little. After finding nothing they decided to buy

broken pottery and bricks from the locals who have found many when they planted grapes in the

hillside. Thus the first objective of the expedition partially failed. Partially, because at least they

got to the town but they were unable to do any scientific work at all.121

5. Social issues in the Caucasus

Kardoss’s geographical description of the Northern Caucasus was grim. The long wars of

the Russian conquest that only ended in 1864 have left a visible mark on the land even after

thirty years. A noteworthy observation by Kardoss is the systematic deforestation of the

landscape by the Cossacks. The reasons for this were possibly military in nature. The Russians
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thought that by deforesting they would be able to limit the spaces where guerillas could hide and

wage war on them. In addition, the landscape was littered with ruined castles. It is hard to tell if

the castles were blown up by the Russian military or simply fallen into disuse over the centuries.

Nonetheless, the castles were a testament to the once thriving Caucasian Kingdoms. By the

120
Kardoss, 162.
121
Ibid, 91-95.

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 1860s in some cases the army took over strategically important fortifications and reinforced them

with Cossack garrisons.

Most of the Russian troops were Cossacks from New Russia. These men were housed not

in barracks but in the villages, often living with local families. After three years of service they

received their own land, which there was plenty of in the Caucasus due to the mass Muslim

migration out of the region.122 The heavy alcohol consumption of the Cossacks was no rumor.

Kardoss mentions multiple accidents when on the road they would see saddled horses wandering

aimlessly, but then a few yards away they would find Cossacks passed out in their own vomit.

Kardoss recorded that the governor passed a law that in the villages, where the Cossacks were

housed, if a resident found a Cossack front of his house intoxicated he have to take him in for the

night otherwise, if the Cossack died, the residents were heavily fined.123 That is why the witty

villagers would go out at night and pull the Cossack front of the fence of a disliked member of

the community. Then, if needed, they would pick up the vomit and place it next to the body, so

that the next morning their neighbors will be fined instead of them for not giving shelter to the

Cossack.

The locals disliked the Cossacks not just because they were alcoholics but also because

they did not work in the factories. In Novorosszijszk, Lajos Ehrtmann the Hungarian manager of
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a cement factory explained to Kardoss that he had to hire Germans, Poles and Tatars to work in

the factory otherwise there would be no workforce available. The reason for this was that in the

1880s ten to fifteen thousand, in the 1890s an additional fifteen thousand Muslims left the region

without being able to sell their lands. The Russian government settled large number of Cossacks

122
Ibid, 87.
123
Ibid, 107.

66
 on the empty lots. However, the laziness of the Cossacks and their unwillingness to engage in

any form of hard physical labor created a labor shortage that had to be remedied by bringing in

Central European workers.124

Besides the indigenous Muslims and Christians a large number of Jews also lived in the

Caucasus. The Caucasian Jews were not Ashkenazi who lived in the Pale of Settlement but of a

local stock. Kardoss only met Jews in one settlement at Jevrejszko-Dzsegutinszkij. The elder of

the village told them that the Empire forcibly settled his parents here in 1846 when many Jewish

villages were uprooted from the mountains to be relocated into the valleys surrounded by

Russian and Circassian villages. In the beginning their synagogue was closed because the Empire

wanted to convert them to Christianity but when this policy failed they were allowed to reopen

their places of worship. It seems that those Jews who were born in the new settlement were not

angry over the relocations since they had no memories of being in another place to which they

could have developed an emotional connection to. The difference between the Odessian Jews

and the Caucasians is striking. Whereas at Odessa, Jews were shopkeepers and merchants, in the

Caucasus they were poor farmers and leather working was the only industry they participated

in.125

In the same Jewish village, Zichy complained to Kardoss that the guide and the Cossack
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guards only took them to Russian villages and avoided the Circassians, where they hoped to find

people of Hungarian ancestry, thus they were sabotaging his mission.126 The possible reason for

this could be that the Russians wanted to avoid hostile regions. In other words, they wanted to

hide the deep ethnic conflicts and anti-Russian sentiment the lurked behind the curtain. For

124
Ibid, 42-43.
125
Ibid, 54-55.
126
Ibid, 55.

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 example in the Kabard region Zichy received additional Cossack cavalry for protection,

although, the count falsly interpreted the guesture as an honorary guard. Whereas, the guesture

was more likely for military protection.127

In the town of Uchkulan, which is located in the Karachay region, we get a description of

the local school. Kardoss often describes with great interest the school system as they travel

through the Caucasus. The Russian government issued an order in 1879 for the region that every

town had to found a school at their own cost. Each family had to pay 1.50 rubles per month for

maintaining the school. The school in Uchkulan was a one-story building. The fifty-eight

students who attended the school were collected from the nine neighboring villages. Although

the population was mostly Karachay, the children were learning Russian and Arabic in school,

since the Karachay language (Turkic) had no extensive written literature to be taught. For the

honor of the guests’ the children sang the Russian anthem, very poorly according to Kardoss.128

The singing of the Russian anthem can be interpreted as another political move to show the

Hungarians that the local population adapted to Russian rule. In the smaller villages where the

families were too poor to build schools; only the wealthier members of the community were able

to afford a teacher that came into the village once a week to educate their kids--this is still the

custom today in many regions in Afghanistan and Pakistan.129

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The Karachay region was important for the Russians for economic reasons. In the

southern part of Karachay lay the Elbrus mines where the Russians mined large quantities of

silver. Zichy was very much interested in seeing the mines, which worried the authorities and

there are muddled writings of searches and checks by the police who was responsible for keeping

127
Ibid, 62.
128
Ibid, 63-65.
129
Mortenson, Greg, Three cups of tea (Penguin Books, 2008).

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 order at the mines. But from the diary it is unclear what actually took place between the team and

the police. The brief description of the mines gave the reader an interesting insight into the socio-

economic life of a mining town. Sergeij Petrovich Pjetuchov, the president of the mine who was

educated in Italy, explained to them that they were getting to the veins by using explosives. Then

the lead was shipped to the Baltic for melting. German and Russian miners worked the mine

since the Karachay men refused to do the hard labor; they preferred to work in agriculture

instead. However, Karachay boys were employed to collect the remnants of the blown up rocks

at the riverside. In addition, the Karachay women worked around the mines as prostitutes, they

offered themselves for 5 rubles (in comparison a train ticket on first-class from Novorussijsk to

Moscow cost 25 rubles). To summarize, we can observe here an entangled socio-economic

system that included child labor, prostitution and a strong gendered/ethnic division of labor,

which could have been common in other parts of the Caucasus too.130

In the end, their search for a Karachay-Magyar ethnic/historical relationship failed.

Albeit Zichy had high hopes for the Karachay because he believed they were also the

descendents of Turkic tribes as the Magyars were. After questioned by the team it turned out that

no Karachay in the villages remembered that his ancestors were once part of the Magyar tribe.

Although Zichy found names that were similar in sound to some Magyar names like one elder
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Karachay, named Mátyás, according to Zichy, but according to Kardoss his name was Macho

and he was a Kabard. The members of the expedition often disagreed with Zichy over how he

interpreted ethnographic findings like Hungarian sounding family names. Mostly, because Zichy

always wanted to find Hungarian objects or words where ever they went. One ethnographic

observation of Kardoss’s was that he noted how the Karachay families put a horse skull on a pole

130
Kardoss, 72-74.

69
 in front of their homes to keep evil spirits away. This tradition according Kardoss was also

common in Hungary mostly in Somogy County. But for Zichy the name Mátyás and the skull on

the pole signaled the connection between the Magyars and the Karachay. Once again Zichy’s

methodological approach shows grave shortcomings because he relied on his romantic

imagination instead on science.131

It is known from medieval chronicles that when the Magyars took the Carpathian Basin a

tribe of Kabars came with them from the shores of the Black Sea as military allies.132 Thus Zichy

pushed his group to go to Kabard villages. Kardoss was convinced that the Kabard language

sounded like Orthodox Jewish--he possibly meant Yiddish, which is closer to old German then to

Turkic--but the structure of the language--for Zichy—was similar to Hungarian. At Kassai-Habal

they found headstones made out of wood that reminded them of the Székely fejfa [grave

totem].133 But once again they failed to establish any significant historical connection.

Truthfully, it was unreasonable of Zichy to think that after a thousand years they could find any

elders in the regions who could remember stories about his tribe’s Magyar past. Since the main

Hungarian tribes have moved away from this region sometime in the 7th or 8th centuries. Those

Hungarians who stayed behind must have assimilated and lost their language a long time ago.
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131
Ibid, 75.
132
Tóth, László, A kavarok (kabarok) katonai és politikai szerepe [The military and political role of the Kabars]
(Hadtörténeti Közlemények, 126/3).
133
Kardoss, 83.

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 6. In the Southern Caucasus

The passage over the Caucasian Mountains was no easy task for the expedition. Icy

roads, avalanches and snowstorms slowed down the caravan. In his imagined geography Kardoss

refers to the other side of the mountain as Asia, he even gave the title “Asia” for his entry of the

passing in his diary.134 On the train to Tiflis the landscape changed drastically. Kardoss writes of

neat villages and trees. Everywhere he looks he sees beautiful gardens and well-tilled lands.

Tiflis is described as clean and European in feel—yet he was traveling in Asia according to his

diary. Two notes are important to mention from Tiflis. First, on June 2nd, they witnessed the

anniversary of the conquest of the Caucasus for which the governor organized a large military

parade in the city and a soup kitchen for the poor--possibly to show the good intensions of the

Russian Army. The Russian Army paraded the streets first then a Georgian division came

performing traditional Georgian songs on pipes. The Georgians watched the parade with little

enthusiasm. They were so much so unenthusiastic that Russian soldiers had to push them to

cheer for the troops. This is an obvious sign of resentment towards the occupation from the

locals. The other event worth mentioning was that the expedition decided to go to the bathhouse

in Tiflis. In the baths, they had a large machine that created a soap bubble so big that it covered
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the person from head to toe. Kardoss was fond of this machine and described the feeling of being

“bubbled” as most pleasant.135

From Tiflis, they took a train to Baku a city important for its oil production. While the

scenery was nicer in Armenia then in the Northern Caucasus, the trains were in worse condition

134
Ibid, 119.
135
Ibid, 127-8.

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 and heavily loaded with passengers. The railroad was the artery of the Caucasus. That is why it

frequently came under attack by vandals. To prevent the local bandits from damaging the

railways the Russians erected watchtowers at the rail stations in addition, military patrolled the

train.136 It seems from the report that the Russian army went through a great deal of trouble to

safeguard the trains and the railway.

7. In Central Asia

From Baku they sailed to Krasznovodszk, then via train up to Samarkand stopping at

Bokhara. In Central Asia the expedition investigated its last objective; if it was possible for the

Magyar tribes to cross the deserts of Central Asia and move towards Europe. If this was the case

then the Hungarians originated from the borders of Persia in Turán—thought Zichy. If they

found that the desert could not be crossed by hundreds of thousands of men and woman, then

they would have to search for the birthplace of the Hungarians further up to the North, on the

great highway of the steppe that was used by countless Asiatic tribes to reach the fertile lands of

Europe over the centuries. In an article to the Budapesti Hírlap written in Bokhara, Kardoss

explains, that according to their findings it was impossible for the tribes to cross the desert from

Persia because there was little availability of water or grazing pasture for animals. Kardoss
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concluded that the Hungarians possibly came from further North. But he was still in doubt about

this because they have found rivers and mountains named after possibly the Magyars. Local

Muslims called them Mazar, [sic] which ironically is also an Arabic word for graveyard or for

the designation of the burial place of a saint—wrote Kardoss.137 Of course this above-mentioned

136
Ibid, 134.
137
Ibid, 145.

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 theory was probably the influence of Zichy’s. Kardoss, being a historian, never truly could have

believed that the familiar sounding word of Mazar actually relates to the Magyars. But since

Kardoss was paid by Zichy to write these reports, he had to write down what the count wanted. I

assume it was this kind of historical disagreements that prevented any future work between the

team and Zichy. Thus in a way the expedition was unable to conclude anything specific about the

Magyar migration in Central Asia.138

Central Asia’s description different from all the other places they went to, except for

Moscow. In a way, his very negative description of Moscow is similar to his mental rejection of

Central Asia. Kardoss found the region unimpressive with endless sand dunes as far as the eye

can see. The extreme heat made them uncomfortable. His description of Central Asia sheds light

to the different social space and the different approach of the Empire toward governing the

region compared with the Caucasus. One notable difference is that on the train they were only

traveling with Russians. The ethnic minorities were pushed to the edge of society and were often

disrespected by the Russians; Kardoss, in fact, comments on this phenomenon multiple times.

For example, he describes a scene at the train station of Kodzh where while a Muslim man

preformed his daily prayer, a Russian soldier stopped by and urinated right next to him.139 A

Russian general on the train explains the situation in Central Asia briefly and it is possible that
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many, especially in the army, shared his view. According to the general, it was a great mistake to

come to Central Asia and “waste so much blood” on conquering the region. Moreover he added

that the Russians had no interest in the region besides that they aimed to use it as a buffer zone

138
Ibid, 253-4.
139
Ibid, 155.

73
 between them and the English and as a road towards the conquest of India. Thus in the general’s

opinion Central Asia had no real use for the Russians besides being a military outpost.140

The expedition returned from Central Asia and traveled through Dagestan towards

Moscow. In Dagestan they visited the village of the Avar Imam Shamil who lead an unsuccessful

and bloody resistance against the Russians between 1830 and 1859. Gunib (Gimry in Russian)

was the locality where Shamil was most active. Kardoss found the entire region still heavily

garrisoned by Cossack troops after more than thirty years of the capture of Shamil.141 When the

expedition got there, possibly to show the might of the army, the Russians were training their

troops out in the open close to the place where Shamil surrendered in 1859 August 29th.

Apparently the sword of Shamil, which he gave over to the Russian general Alexander

Baryatinsky when he surrendered, was in the possession of Zichy’s father who received it as a

gift from Baryatinsky himself.142 The town of Shamil where he spent his last days resisting the

Russians was in ruins; nobody was allowed to settle there. An Avar soldier and his family

occupied Shamil’s house. The man was in the service of the Empire but did not speak a word of

Russian. The heavy military presence in Gunib demonstrates that the Russian Empire was still

afraid of a possible insurrection in the region. Moreover, that the physical occupation of this

place was symbolic inasmuch as it sent a message of a permanent Russian presence for the Avars
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in the region. In addition, Kardoss mentions the influx of Russian settlers into the region and the

forcible dislocation of the natives once again probably for military/security reasons.

From the diary, the reader also gets an insight into what Zichy thought about the Russian

Empire. His view could be characterized as a common negative Western European aristocratic

140
Ibid, 135.
141
Ibid, 167.
142
Ibid, 170.

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 opinion about Russia. The count usually gave his opinions during fancy dinners at some Russian

noble’s palace while being under the influence vodka and wine. I believe that Kardoss recorded

these because he was so embarrassed of the count. For example at a dinner party with Grand

Duke Nicholai Mihalkovich,143 whose father was the viceroy of the Caucasus; Zichy expressed

his critique of the Empire. He complained that the Russians had no Parliament and although it

was a gigantic country, its foundation rested on wooden legs. Furthermore, that the ethnic groups

of the Empire were just as utterly different from the Russians than from each other, thus it was

impossible and unrealistic for the Russians to try to rule everything with force. To which the

duke replied that it always depends on the Emperor how the country is run. The duke added that

only one tenth of the population of the Empire whishes to have a constitution, the rest was fine

with the constitutional arrangements they already had. After Zichy’s criticism Mihalkovich got

angry with the group and never talked to them again, even when they met at a coffee shop the

next day he behaved coldly. Zichy’s and the duke’s dialogue clearly demonstrates the aristocratic

attitude in the two countries, one is criticizing the backwardness, the other aims to keep the

social status quo and display blind obedience to the Emperor.144

8. Return trip
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The expedition returned through Moscow and St. Petersburg to Hungary. Moscow

received long pages of negative description by Kardoss. The town was dull, except for the Red

Square and the Cathedral. He observed multiple street fights and widespread drunkenness.

According to his diary Moscow had a large prostitute workforce that entertained the middle and

143
I assume this is the grand duke that Zichy went on hunting trips during his second expedition in 1896.
144
Kardoss, 200-1.

75
 upper class men who spent a fortune on keeping these women around. St. Petersburg’s

description was more positive. The city had a “civilized” European feel to it completely the

opposite from Moscow’s. Sadly, after Petersburg the diary is unreadable and their journey for the

reader ends there.145

In conclusion, this chapter aimed at showing the aspects of the Zichy expedition that was

directly related to the Romanov Empire and its periphery. As this chapter demonstrated the

scientific goals of the expedition were never fully realized. In fact, there was no conclusive study

written by the members about the expedition because Zichy wanted them to write things they did

not felt comfortable writing as scholars. For example, it is clear from Kardoss’s articles and the

diary that what he wrote in the reports to the newspapers were not entirely what he believed to be

the truth about the Magyar migration in Central Asia, rather it was what Zichy wanted him to

report. Besides the intellectual conflicts between the participants of the expedition and the

critical attitude of the MTA towards them, the diary provides a great source for the description of

the Empire and the ethnic-Empire relations in the periphery. Although the Russians made an

attempt to hide the ethnic problems from the expedition it can be concluded that all the major

historical problems such as war damages, education, mass migration, vandalism, military

occupation and religious differences were visible for Kardoss, and the expedition members were
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quite conscious of them.

Furthermore, the diary gives a clear picture about the geographical-social differences in

the Northern Caucasus versus the South and Central Asia. While on the one hand the different

Imperial political approaches to these regions show the willingness of the Empire to adapt to the

varying regional differences. On the other hand, it can be seen how the Russians were viewed as

145
Ibid, 226-38.

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 invaders and how the Russians often disrespected the local tribes and cultures. In other words,

there was nothing liberating or glorious about the Russian conquest of these regions. It is

questionable to see just from this diary what benefit, besides the railroad, the Russian occupation

brought to the region. That being said, the complexity of tribal relations, the deep-seated

historical animosity of the ethnic groups and the natural desire for independence amongst the

peoples of the Caucasus presented a severe problem for the Russians who tried to unify the

region. In fact the same ethnic problems remained to be the issue throughout the Soviet period to

this day.

Concerning the history of the Hungarian tribes, the expedition revealed little. Even with

the relatively large number of archeological items bought by Zichy, he still felt the need to return

the next year and collect more materials, which shows that even he was not satisfied with the

outcome of the expedition. In a way, the hasty preparations for the expedition resulted in a lost

opportunity to methodologically study Caucasian ethnography. That being said, Zichy’s efforts

were not completely fruitless in as much as they reignited a scholarly interest in the Caucasus in

Hungary. Furthermore, parts of the collection he brought back were exhibited at the Millennia

Exhibition then donated for the Hungarian Ethnographic Museum. But one important outcome of

the trip was that Wosinsky got in touch with the Russian archeologist Alexander Spitsin who
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began his work on researching the archeological connection between 9th century steppe materials

from the Carpathian to Russia.146

146
Langó, 208.

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 Chapter IV. The third expedition: Béla Pósta and the beginnings of
Hungarian comparative archeology

As in the previous chapters I have pointed out, the story of Zichy’s second expedition is

little known. Therefore, chapters IV-VI will deal with Zichy’s third expedition from 1897-99.

These chapters will give an account of the expedition based on diaries and scientific publications

organized under the topics of archeology, ethnography and linguistics. This chapter will

specifically deal with archeology. First, I will further expand on national romanticism. Then a

description of Pósta’s short diary will follow. But due to the fact that the surviving parts of the

diary only deal with events from Finland to Astrakhan; and have no references to Pósta’s

research in Siberia, this chapter’s analysis of the diary will have little to say on archeology.

Nonetheless, the diary is a good source of the team’s troublesome relationship with Zichy. After

the analysis of the diary the chapter will turn to Pósta’s scientific publication, which will shed

light on his methodological approach to comparative archeology. Regarding the scientific

publication I will focus on his theory of Iron Age cultural influences in Eastern Europe. And on

the conclusions he drew from his study with the Zichy expedition relating to Hungarian

migration across Asia.

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 1. Archeology and national romanticism

In Europe, the late 18th and the early 19th century saw the emergence of national

romanticism.147 National romanticism influenced not just the arts like paintings or architecture

but also historiography. The European nobility and the growing urban inteligencia began to

search for a means to understand the socio-economic problems of modernity with the help of

romanticism. This historiographical search resulted in the view that the ancient past was more

glorious and stable then the present, due to the heroes of the past, whose individual sacrifice and

bravery led to the foundation of modern nation states. Subsequently, such heroic tales as Beowulf

(1820), the Kalevala (1835) or in Hungary, Mihály Vörösmarty’s Zalán futása [sic] (1825)

became immensely popular with the public. Moreover, due to the influence of nationalist minded

archeologists, national romanticism found its way into archeology.148

But following national romanticism led to a serious methodological fallacy in European

archeology. National romanticism led to the belief that ethnicities buried themselves separately

from other ethnicities according to their national affiliation. One of the first presenters of

national romanticism in Eastern European archeology was the Czech Slavophil, Josef Dobrovsky

who identified medieval ethnic Slavic graves in 1786.149 This approach was problematic because
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it ignored the fact that the common people were buried in mass graves and only the elite were

buried alone. Another issue that confronted the archeologists was the territorial space in which

graves were found. In the nationalist imagination, the graves had to be located within the regions

147
Craig, Edward, ed.; Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy vol. 8 (London: Routledge, 1998), 348-351.
148
In July 1834, in the vicinity of Ladánybene, three shepherds found graves of ancient Hungarians. Miklós
Jankóvich cataloged their finding, thus he began the research into the conquest period of Hungary. (See in Langó,
193.).
149
Langó, 195.

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 of what the nationalist imagined to be the borders of their nation’s territory in order to justify

their claims to those lands.150

At first Hungarian archeologists compared and cataloged finds of ancient Magyar graves

within the Carpathian Basin. It was the archeologist Flóris Rómer (1815-1889) who first

suggested in 1870 that his colleagues should look outside this region and study the finds of the

Russian archeologists as well, since the Magyars known to have lived in the territories that the

Romanovs ruled.151 Béla Pósta in this sense followed Rómer’s advice and became a pioneer in

comparative archeology. Pósta’s classification of Eastern grave finds became the standard

system for decades in archeology.152 One point has to be made however, regarding the time

frame for the migration period. In the Carpathian Basin the pagan burial customs of the Magyars

spent until the 12th century. By the second half of the 1100s, Magyars began to bury their dead

around Christian churches. Therefore in Hungary, the time frame for Magyar pagan burials was

around 300 years while in Russia this period was significantly longer. This means that detecting

cultural changes with the pagan burials in Russia requires a more complex approach.153

Pósta followed the positivist methods, which meant that he wanted to create a scientific

method with which he could catalogue and work with his finds. One of his advantages was that

he knew Russian, unlike many of his Hungarian colleagues. Thus he was able read contemporary
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Russian works on archeology. Knowing Russian was an important skill for someone who wanted

150
For example modern Jewish archeologist go through a great deal to unearth Jewish material objects in Israel to
disprove Palestinian claims to the Holy Lands. In an article by Ella Shohat titeled Taboo memories and diasporic
visions she writes: The role of archeology in Israeli culture, it should be pointed out, has been crucial in disinterring
remnants of the biblical past of Palestine, at times enlisted in the political effort to demonstrate a historical right to
the “land of Israel.” Quoted from Burke, 372. I found History Channel’s TV show Naked Archeologist a good
example of this process.
151
Langó, 200.
152
Ibid, 208-209.
153
Ibid, 188.

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 to work on comparative archeology between Hungary and Russia. To better understand what

Pósta’s aim was I would like to quote the Hungarian archeologist Péter Langó:

Pósta tried to find the models of the pre-conquest

Hungarian materials with retrospective arguments—and steppe
analogues from other periods. However, already the starting point
was incorrect: in his opinion, the Hungarians came from the
steppe, so their whole material culture should be traceable back to
the cultures of the steppe; at the same time, certain remains—
regardless of the place and time of their manufacture—can be
compared to early Hungarian finds, since the earliest known
homeland of the Hungarians was in the steppe, and their material
culture emerged there as well. Thus the material discovered
confirms the presence of the Hungarians in the steppe, since
comparable antiquities (or decorative motifs) were found in both
areas.154
This passage sums up in a basic argument Pósta’s methodological approach that is visible

throughout his published scientific work. The problem here is precisely that Pósta, regarding the

Hungarian material finds; often disregarded the notion that finds in Western Russia could have

developed independently or could have been borrowed. In other words, finding an identical

flower motif in a grave in Hungary that clearly belongs to the Conquest Period (9th-10th

centuries) and in a grave in Kazan, for example, does not mean that both graves held Hungarians.

Furthermore, if a typical sword design is present in graves from, let’s say, the Ural Mountains to

the Danube, it does not mean that it had to originate from the Ural Mountains. It only means that
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that is the most eastern area where that design can be found. Above I wanted to follow up on

romanticism and Pósta’s approach so that in the subsequent subchapters it is clearer what Pósta

was doing in Russia. Below I will turn to the description of the diary that will, first and foremost,

shed light on the personal issues between the team and Zichy.

154
Ibid, 209.

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 2. The diary of Béla Pósta

Pósta’s archeology student János Banner published the remnants of the diary in 1962 on

the hundredth year anniversary of his teacher’s birth. The diary contains short entries and little

narrative. The publication has no maps, pictures or additional information save the short

introduction by the editor. The diary entries began in St. Petersburg and suddenly ended in

Czariczin. We know that this was not the only diary that Pósta was working on; in fact it seems

that this was his secondary diary. We have multiple references in this diary that he was in the

process of writing a main diary parallel to this one; sadly that one is completely lost to us.

Moreover, Pósta had a number of pan pals, his wife, the archeologist József Hampel, Minister

Gyula Wlassics and Zichy. During the Soviet conquest of Hungary in 1944-45 these letters and

parts of the diary were destroyed. Today only three letters survived that he wrote to Hample, all

others including the seventy-seven letters he wrote to his wife are lost. In spite of this great loss,

the remaining materials give the account of seventy days on a hundred and forty-five pages.155

Pósta’s involvement with the expedition lasted from September 1st 1897 to August 31st 1898. He

originally planned to do preliminary studies in Russia for a year before the expedition departed

from Tiflis; but in the end he only stayed seven months.

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The diary starts in St. Petersburg with an intellectual parley between the linguist Emil

Setälä, Arvid Neovius, Urje Hirn and Pósta. The three Finnish scholars were expressing their

strong criticism of Zichy and the expedition. Setälä was particularly opposed the work of Bernát

Munkácsi who, according to him had no training in linguistics and only focused on the similar

155
Banner, János; Pósta Béla születésének százados ünnepe, 1862-1962 [The hundred year anniversary of the birth
of Béla Pósta (Budapest: Múzeumok Rotaüzeme, 1962), 43-44.

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 sounds in language. Furthermore, Setälä showed a letter to Pósta from professor Kunik156 in

which he criticized Zichy for his lack of understanding ethnography and history. Kunik proposed

that the count “should get a beating” for disagreeing with Hunfalvy’s Finno-Ugric theory—

which he did disagree with on the first expedition. In addition Kunik wrote that archeology said

nothing of the Magyars yet. It is possible that Kunik referred to Russian archeology, which in

this context makes sense since no Russian archeologist had searched for Hungarian grave

materials in Russia since they were familiar with Magyar finds in Hungary.157

According to the same entry in the diary the above-mentioned group was also debating

Gothic tribal history. The Goths were important for Pósta’s theory because, as it is articulated at

multiple points in his scientific publication, he believed that first; the Finn-Ugors came into

contact with the Germanic tribes in the region of European Russia. Therefore, he attributed

sword designs in the graves of the Avar-Magyar area to German influence. The Turkic influence,

he thought, came later when the Huns pushed the Turks out of their homeland thus mixing them

with Magyars. We can see this as the testament of his belief that the Magyars somehow lived in a

cultural bubble for millennia until they were encircled by Germans-Slavs-Turks and the contact

with these peoples is what shaped what a Hungarian is today.158

While from this scholarly debate we can see the hostility against the Zichy expedition
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from academic circles in Russia, there were some supporters too. On the event when Pósta and

Jankó went to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Finnish National Theater, professor Donner

O. admitted to Pósta that in fact there has been a great enthusiasm about the Zichy expedition in

Russia. He explained that although the Finnish and Russian scholars would never admit it in
156
A.A. Kunik (1814-1899) librarian of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He was also a pen-pal of Reguly.
157
Banner, 45-6.
158
Pósta Béla, Régészeti tanulmányok az Oroszföldön III. kötet, [Archeological studies in Russia vol. III] (Budapest,
1905).

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 front of Zichy’s team they were in fact excited about the expedition which, according to Donner,

has “poured fresh water” into the “still” Siberian research.159

The next noteworthy event dates from October 18th when accompanied by Henrik Heikel

(1808-1867), Pósta and Jankó set out for Finland from Petersburg to visit the Stone Age

Paivaniemi gravesite. Jankó’s was to photograph the excursion, while Pósta was supposed to

examine the graves--although Heikel vehemently opposed the idea that Jankó should publish his

sketches and photos.160 Heikel was known for his work on the Stone Age settlements of

Tavastland. Pósta suggests to him that he should use a comparative methodology of Stone Age

finds between East and West. This is of course the methodology that Pósta was using regarding

the Hungarian Iron and Bronze Age cultures.161 But it nonetheless shows that the comparative

approach regarding the Stone Age was not widespread in Finland. The reason for this was that

the Finnish scholars believed that Finns left their ancestral homeland after the Stone Age

therefore their efforts were only directed towards comparative finds from the Metal Ages.162

After returning to Russia, Pósta retired to museums and libraries where he studied

Russian language as well as read publications on the kurgans of Southern Russia. He also had

time to do a short comparative study of cooper tools from East and West of the Urals. Moreover,

based on his research in St. Petersburg he concluded that the Persian-Sassanid art (indás in
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Hungarian) on the Nagyszenmiklós treasure, which was found in 1799, came from the

Armenians.163 After he finished his work in the Baltic region he set out for the Black Sea. On

route in the city of Rumjankov, Pósta met the Russian archeologist G. D. Filimonov who handed

159
Ibid, 47-49.
160
Ibid, 58-9. The Finnish scholars opposed the idea that a Hungarian—a foreigner—should publish their findings
possibly out of their nationalist pride.
161
Ibid, 54-58.
162
Nordqvist, 29.
163
Ibid, 59-60.

84
 him archeological and numismatic publications in exchange for the publications of the

Hungarian National Museum. He searched for books to buy on archeology in the bookshops but

he only found the works he already read in Petersburg.164

On March 18th Pósta arrived in Odessa. On the train station Jankó and Csiki waited for

him and together they stopped at the house of Mór Décsy; Zichy and Bánhidy were already

there. During their meeting Zichy proudly proclaimed that he bought a new Scythian kurgan

collection for 400 rubles—but Pósta writes it only cost him 120 rubles. Zichy never told the real

price he paid for anything during the expeditions he always exaggerated the price to show to his

team what a great financial sacrifice he was making for them. This collection mostly included

pressed golden plates. Zichy also got in town a few bronze objects from a trader named Ilija

Miranovich Nagyel. In addition he bought another collection of Scythian gold from a trader

named Maurocordat, who asked Zichy for 400 rubles only, because he believed that many of the

objects were fake, but the count bought it anyway. This just shows that Zichy preferred to buy

from collectors instead of financing long-term archeological digs.165

At Décsy’s dinnertable they discussed the state of archeological trade in Russia; Pósta

learned from the Russian guests that in the Romanov Empire archeological finds had to be

presented to the Commissariat, then it had to be bought back from the office and sold on the
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market for profit. To avoid bureaucracy, diggers usually took their finds abroad without ever

reporting it. Therefore, according to Pósta, the best archeological finds were not in Russia but in

private collections across Western Europe. Moreover, he found out about another problem

namely that the Cossacks often robbed kurgans in the Volga delta during spring when the rivers

164
Ibid, 72.
165
Ibid, 73-75.

85
 washed out the graves. Bureaucracy and thievery plagued archeology in Russia both factors

Pósta had to include into his calculations if he wanted carry out his research. But the seemingly

calm dinner party soon took an unexpected turn when Décsy turned the table on Zichy.166

3. Mór Décsy the stanch critique of Zichy

I want to give a detailed account of Décsy’s criticism of Zichy because they are important

in understanding what some of the arguments were against Zichy’s expedition in Russia.

Furthermore, because a significant part of the diary deals with the various intellectual conflicts

between the team members, Zichy and outsiders like Décsy. After the dinner was over Zichy

retired and Décsy pulled the Hungarian scholars into his study for a secret discussion. As Pósta

writes, during this secret meeting, Décsy showed them a letter from a German professor who

impulsively criticized the expedition and Zichy. Décsy specifically told the team that he already

has written a letter to minister Wlassics asking him not to finance the expedition any further. The

failure of this enterprise, which he saw inevitable, will shed a negative light on Hungarian

science at large in Europe, he said. Décsy encouraged the group to “save their skins” and leave

Zichy while they still could in order to protect their scientific reputation.167

In my opinion, Décsy based his opinions on his experience with Zichy during his first
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expedition when the team arrived unprepared not even knowing the terrain on which they were

to travel on. His negativity was an insult not just to Zichy, but to the members of the expedition

as well, who spent a considerable amount of time preparing for this journey. Not to mention that

the team did accomplish groundbreaking scholarly work on their respective fields in the end. Of

166
Ibid, 75-78.
167
Ibid, 73-75.

86
 course one could argue that Décsy draw the right conclusions from the first expedition, but even

he must have known that Zichy came much more prepared this time. Nonetheless, I exemplified

this event in order to show, in connection with the events in the Baltic with Setälä, what a

negative international atmosphere they had to conduct their work in.

Furthermore, I believe that Décsy was in some way obsessed with Zichy. According to

the diary on multiple occasions he expressed his negative views on Zichy after their first

meeting. Every time the team met him for dinner he could only talk about the count. Décsy

mentioned at one point that Franz Joseph offered the title of prime minister to Zichy twice, but

he refused--out of his vanity.168 The only good thing he had to say about Zichy was his planned

route across Asia, which he agreed with. Yet, the constant Zichy topics at dinner by the end

annoyed even Pósta, which is evident from the diary. The reason I dwelt on this issue because I

think Décsy’s pessimistic attitude had some role in deepening the wedge between the team and

Zichy and his negativity prepared the groundwork for the upcoming personal conflicts, which

manifested in Tiflis.169

4. Into the Caucasus

The boat trip across the Black Sea had some highlights. For starters the boat they
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embarked on arrived with a dead man on board; this made the superstitious Jankó nervous

because he interpreted this as a bad omen for the expedition.170 They visited the museums and

churches of Sebastopol and Jalta. During this excursion on the Crimea Pósta observed that many

of Zichy’s Caucasian collection, which he cataloged, were mass produced items and the count

168
Ibid, 84.
169
Ibid, 84.
170
Ibid,85.

87
 could have brought them right there. At the museum of Kerch, Pósta made twenty-three

drawings of the exhibited items.171

In Tiflis on March 30th the team ran into the Finnish archeologist-ethnographer A. O.

Heikel (1851-1924) who was leading an expedition into Central Asia and Mongolia. The

expedition consisted of Baron Munk and Donner who was the son of the president of the

archeological committee of Helsingfors. Their objective was to study ancient Turkic writings in

Turkestan along the river Karakon. These writings were usually written on stone poles, which

can be found all the way to Mongolia. I assume that Heikel was a Turanist who believed that the

Finns, Magyars and Turks all coexisted together in Central Asia in the past. When Zichy heard

that they are going to Karakon he misunderstood it for Karakorum and gave the Finns a long

speech about Mongolia, but the Finns could not understand him because of their poor German.

Pósta criticized Zichy’s attitude towards he Finns; because previously Zichy called them fish fat

eaters behind their backs but now he welcomed them as brothers.172 Meaning, that brothers form

the same nation, it is probable that by this time the count began to accept the Finno-Ugric theory

albeit slowly and that is why he related positively towards the Finns.

Since Zichy has already visited Georgia on multiple occasions he truly felt at home and

was not in a rush to move on. He made contact with his “ancestors” the Cicianovs or Zichys of
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whom he met during the first expedition. The long lost family member was in fact a drunkard

and a penniless noble man who possibly put himself into everlasting debt to entertain Zichy.

Pósta disagreed with the count’s ideas about the Hungarian-Georgian brotherhood, which Zichy

often proclaimed to his host. Pósta, after a terribly dull hunting excursion, told his intoxicated

171
Ibid, 85-95.
172
Ibid, 102-110.

88
 hosts not to believe anything Zichy tells them about their common Magyar-Georgian ancestry

because was all rubbish.173 For days Pósta and Jankó had to follow the “Zichy family” around

Georgia. First they visited the ruined village of Uplis-zicse, which already have been visited by

the French traveler Dubois de Montpereux who wrote that Huns used to live in the settlement.174

He based this on his observation that there was no Christian church on the site; of course this was

enough for the count to convince him that Uplis-zics was a Hun-Magyar settlement in the past.

Zichy also noted the “zics” in Uplis-zics, which sounded like Zichy therefore there had to be

some Magyar connection in the region for him. In the vicinity they stopped by the home of an

Armenian family and Pápay asked them the names of the objects in their home. These were in

fact the way in which Zichy had conducted linguistic research during the first expedition.

Zichy’s idea of archeological research was visiting ruins, the linguistic research had to be

conducted in a rush on an “ask then tell” bases. No wonder that at this point Pósta had had

enough of the expedition. He writes with great despair that the expedition as of that point was a

failure and they were only wasting time with Zichy. Pósta summed up his sorrow by rightfully

noting that he was not a Georgian archeologist and Pápay was not a Caucasian linguist.

Therefore, they had no business in the region.175

5. Conflict with Zichy

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In fact the growing frustration between the scholars and Zichy has been brewing for some

time. Already back in March 21st the team made plans to lock horns with the count. Pósta, Jankó

and Pápay planned to invite Zichy for a talk during which they would let him speak his mind

173
Ibid, 118-121.
174
Dubois de Montpereux, Voyage Autour Du Caucase V5 (1843).
175
Banner, 111-118.

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 about going to China, then they would present their plan, which would be different from his,

namely to go to the Hanti without him. Then they would ask him for 10.000 rubles per head and

if he refuses threaten him to pack their bags and return to Hungary.176

Subsequently, on April 1st they executed the first phase of their plan in Tiflis when they

each gave a report to Zichy about their scientific work thus far. Pósta emphasized that Zichy

should forget about going to Mongolia and Karakorum also he should not waste time on

Bashkiria; these places required long years of organized excavations. They should instead focus

on ancient Turkic stone inscriptions—the ones that Heinke was after—and on kurgans. And if

they had the time they should visit more museums. The reason why Pósta pushed for museums is

that they took pictures of the exhibited material with Jankó and in Hungary the Russian

collections were largely unknown. We know from the diary that often times the pictures did not

develop correctly; in other instances Jankó would forget to bring the photo camera. Taking

photos was an advanced level of research of the time, when few scholars could afford such a

device. Nonetheless, Pósta clearly articulated his scholarly view when he said that the Magyars

always lived under either Finn or Turkic influence. Therefore, the team should study areas where

this contact zone existed and not Mongolia or China as Zichy wished.177

The next lecturer was Jankó who explained to Zichy that he must focus on fishing
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practices since that has been the most thoroughly studied archaic profession in comparative

ethnography. He was referring to Ottó Herman’s book on Hungarian fishing, which he carried

with him as reference book. Jankó included in his proposal to study the bigger rivers and their

inhabitants in the region—he possibly meant the Volga, Ob and Ural Rivers. One of the

176
Ibid, 82-83.
177
Ibid, 102-111.

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 problems Jankó faced was that Russians were planning to pass a law, which would ban

indigenous fishing practices in those regions.178 Furthermore, he called Zichy’s attention to Hanti

shamanic practices, which had to be further observed. At the end Pápay reasoned that the study

of the Hanti people and their language had to be top priority since they were the closest relatives

of the Magyars. They mutually agreed that if Zichy wanted to go to China he should do it

without them and let them roam Siberia on their own. When Zichy angrily stormed out of the

room the first phase of their plan was complete.179

But the troubles were far from over. The next phase of their plan was to get money from

the count. By April Pósta ran out of money. This was in some way due to the fact that he and

Jankó had to support Pápay whose valet was already empty in Odessa. Thus Pósta had no choice

but to beg Zichy for money. The money ordeal with Zichy that lasted for an entire day is greatly

detailed in the diary, but does not have to be presented here. In the end Pósta got 1000 rubles, the

rest of the team 300 rubles per month;180 Zichy also agreed to allow them to conduct their

research on their own, whilst he would continue with Csíki and Bánhidy to China. Since before

they embarked on their journey with great fanfare Zichy promised to the Parliament that he

would bring back the stolen documents of the Árpáds from China; Pósta rightly mentions that the

count had no way out of his Chinese adventure.181 In other words Zichy’s reputation had to be
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preserved and of course he was not the man to sit around in mosquito-infested swamps in a

teepee whilst Jankó deciphers Hanti bear songs.

The constant financial troubles and Zichy’s vanity was only one side of the coin. An even

greater problem for the team was that the count only agreed to buy ethnographic or archeological
178
Ibid, 140-141.
179
Ibid, 102-111.
180
Ibid, 126-131.
181
Ibid, 121-124. Mongolia was under Chinese until 1911.

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 collections that he thought valuable. Oftentimes Jankó wanted to buy fishing hooks and nets

from the locals, to use it for comparison to similar items back home, but he could never get

Zichy to buy it for him. During the dinner party back in Odessa when Zichy showed the team his

Scythian collections it is evident from the diary that the count did not even cared to consult with

Pósta on what he was buying. As I have showed before, to acquire money from Zichy for travel

was a serious and time-consuming ordeal. For example when Pósta wished to visit Saratov where

there were over 600 kurgans, Zichy refused to give him money for the travel. Thus, Zichy’s

niggardly behavior had drawbacks for the expedition.182

The last pages of the diary are concerned with the events after they left Tiflis. The team

took the train to Baku where they visited Zoroastrian temples; the same drill as during the first

expedition. From the oil rich port the team sailed for Astrakhan where they argued some more

with Zichy about finances, meanwhile Jankó collected some fishing tools from local fishermen.

Soon after this entry Pósta’s narrative cuts off. The last few notes are testaments to his growing

frustration with Zichy and the whole expedition. While the narration ends here we know that

Pósta continued to travel with Zichy all the way to Minusinsk. On the way he was able to visit

and study the museums of the municipal towns. His most significant finds were in the museum

of Minusinsk where he was able to identify the Siberian influence on Hungarian material culture.
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After his work in the museum he decided that he has found enough material to work on and

returned home to Hungary. Therefore, now I will turn to the description of his scientific

publication.

182
Ibid, 141-144.

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 6. Pósta’s archeological report

Pósta’s main achievements with the Zichy expedition were that he indentified the cultures

in Siberia that directly influenced the ancient Hungarian saber, saber sheath and stirrup; located

the most Eastern mark of Avar cultural expansion and he was able to distinguish, to some degree,

Hunnish material objects in Eastern Europe from the surrounding Sarmatian, Scythian and other

nomadic cultures.183

Pósta outlined the motivation for his work in his publication Archeological studies in

Russia. In the introduction he argued for the need to conduct comparative archeology. He stated

that comparative archeology had an easy task in Europe since European Iron Age material

cultures can be originated from the La Tene culture. On the other hand, the Hungarian Iron Age

culture came from the East. Thus it is in the East where Hungarian archeologist had to find

evidence to which they could compare Iron Age finds to. In addition, he emphasized the problem

with the Hungarian finds from the migratory period (600 AD-900 AD). Namely, that they were

only the representations of a metamorphosed culture. The metamorphosis was caused by

Western influences, which affected the Magyars already on the steppe before they reached the

Carpathians. In order to understand and see this transformation Pósta had to go and follow the
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path of the migrating Magyars on land and study the archeological sites of Russia. He thought

that by doing so he could go back to the ancient homeland where he can find the purest form of

Hungarian Iron Age material culture. As we can see this idea of finding a pure material culture

was imbedded in national romanticism. Yet to achieve his goal he had to study the Russian

183
http://www.postabela.ro/ This is the website of the Pósta Society.

93
 literature on this topic, which was virtually unavailable in Hungary, and the German scientific

publications were only partially up to date on Russian archeology.184

Since due to the shortness of the expedition Pósta’s main goal was to study Russian

literature and museums moreover, to lay the foundations for future Hungarian-Russian

archeological research. Whilst during the first expedition they were not allowed to dig, this time

Pósta was able to work on the kurgans of Sarepita and Tomsk.185 On the trip he used as reference

József Hampel’s A honfoglalás kor hazai emlékei [Memories of the conquest period at home],

(Budapest, 1900).186 This book was published for the millennium and it contained all of the

archeological data on the conquest period from Hungary. Much of Pósta’s scientific work is a

constant reference and argument with Hampel’s publication. Pósta’s study comes in two parts.

The first is the description of various Russian finds like the Bjelmeri, Krasinsky, Istecky,

Zagebiny, Vorobejovi and Sanyibai. These finds according to him were directly related to

Magyar material culture. In addition, he reports on his own digs in Sarepita. These finds

generally came from West of the Ural Mountains around the Don and the Volga Rivers. That is

the space where Julianus and Greek historians like Jordanes have put the homeland of the

Magyars. The second part of his study deals with the Avar and Sarmatian-Hun-Iazyges cultures.

One pillar of Pósta’s theory was to differentiate between two distinct cultural spheres of
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influence on Eastern Europe. The first is what he calls the Finno-Germanic, which influenced the

Northern parts of Eastern Europe; at this region Finno-Ugric tribes came into contact with

German, mostly Goth tribes. Due to the limited cultural contact zones, the North retained some

form of originality for a longer period then the South. The other culture is the Turan-Germanic,
184
Pósta Béla, Régészeti tanulmányok az Oroszföldön III. kötet, [Archeological studies in Russia vol. III] (Budapest,
1905), 1-4.
185
Ibid, 6-8.
186
Ibid, 9.

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 which is located in the Southern part of Eastern Europe. The Southern culture is more complex,

according to him, because it was influenced by Indian, Persian as well as by Greco-Roman arts.

The cultural exchange between the North and the South was severed by the Avar conquest,

according to Pósta.187 In light of this theory of cultural spheres Pósta examined burial customs,

saber designs, arrowhead types and stirrups. I will show in the following paragraphs what

conclusions he draws from these finds.

First he examined burial customs. Pósta argues that in Hungary the conquest period

graves held bodies that were not burned and buried facing to the East.188 From this he concluded

that Hungarians had to have buried their ancestors unburned in the steppe. However, in Russia he

only saw burned bodies. He attributed this to the Finno-Germanic influence and argued that by

cataloging to what extent can we find burned bodies we can draw the borders of this culture in

Siberia. For Pósta this meant that the Finno-Ugors probably did not burn the dead rather they

took over this practice from the surrounding German tribes.189

Second, Pósta writes in great detail about swords, sabers and arrowheads. It is important

to clarify that there is a difference between a sword and a saber. A sword is longer than a saber

with a straight blade with sharp edges. This type of weapon is widespread in Europe and was

used by the early Europeans. The saber on the other hand, is shorter with a curved blade and
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handle, and usually has one sharp edge. The use of saber is more typical to ancient Hungarian

and other steppe warriors. The saber has been generally thought in the 19th century to originate

from Persia, but Pósta argued that it could have developed independently in Siberia due to

187
Ibid, 149-150.
188
Ibid, 11.
189
Ibid, 38-39.

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 Chinese and Indian influences.190 Pósta moreover, found a two-edged sword in Yekaterinburg

that he identified as the proto-Siberian sword, which was the proto type for the Hungarian

saber.191 Pósta observed not just the shape of the saber but also the sheath and the two arches that

helped secure it to the warrior’s belt. He used various images of steppe warriors and the

Kamennaja stone figures to show that the type of saber and sheath design, which he identified as

proto-Hungarian, was in fact the dominant weapon in Southern Russia and in the Orkhon Valley

of Mongolia.192

Third, Pósta was able to identify the earliest type of the conquest period Hungarian

arrowheads in Siberia. Since there are multiple variations of arrowheads across Hungary his

conclusion should not be taken final on the issue. But he did find bone arrowheads that had a

depressed spine, which had iron counterparts in Hungarian graves.193 In addition, Pósta found

that the S-shaped bronze bridle in Siberia is similar to the Scythian and Avar bridles and that this

design was in use in the South until the 3rd century.194 The Magyars on the other hand used a

round shaped bridle, which pushed out the S-shaped design over time.195 Another important find

was regarding the belt bag [tarsolylemez] decorations. The tarsoly was used to hold fire-making

tools. These bags were delicately decorated with tribal motives. In Hungary graves were rich

with such finds, however, in Russia there were none. Pósta only found one grave from the Kuban
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region that had a tarsoly decoration that was related to Hungarian ones.196

190
Ibid, 126.
191
Ibid, 96-111.
192
Ibid, 112-115.
193
Ibid, 202-203.
194
Ibid, 211.
195
Ibid, 212-213.
196
Ibid, 301-2.

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 All these objects mentioned above were in either the Hermitage museum in St. Petersburg

or in museums of provincial capitals. Pósta’s publication has 340 drawings and photographs of

these items. Only at two sites was he allowed to dig and actually “find” something authentic both

were located around the possible homeland of the Magyars. Thus they were relevant for the

expedition. On the lands of Count Nesselrode197 he opened up two kurgans. Sadly, all have been

robbed; thus, few material objects remained.198 Amongst what remained was a pony snaffle with

a design that showed similarities with snaffle designs from Magyar graves in Hungarian. But this

does not mean that Nesselrode’s kurgans were the resting places of Hungarians.199

Lastly, the most important finds of Pósta’s, regarding Hungarians, came from the region

of Minusinsk. The area around of Minusinsk was known for being rich in kurgans. In 1895 the

Russian archeologist Adrianov unearthed two kinds of stirrups at the town of Dza-Tas. The first

kind had an opening made in the iron through which the stirrup was connected to the saddle. The

second kind was made out of a single iron piece, which was bent on the top to make a hole for

the leather to connect to the saddle. Adrianov, who had no knowledge of Hungarian

archeological finds, did not recognize the importance of this find; but Pósta did. Across Hungary,

but for this case in Szentendre, kurgans yielded a rich harvest of stirrups from the Avar period.

These Avar stirrups were identical to the ones found by Adrianov. Moreover, Pósta was able to
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conclude from other finds in Southern Russia that the Avars moved out of the Kama region and

spent little time in Southern Russia, where a different stirrup design was used. He based this

claim on the fact that in Hungary the Avar type stirrup flourished, in Southern Russia the other

German-Hun type survived suggesting it was little influenced by the swift Avar migration.

197
He was probably a relative of Karl Nesselrode the famous Russian diplomat. Karl is also known for inventing the
Nesselrode ice pudding.
198
Pósta, 225.
199
Ibid, 238.

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 Moreover, Pósta gave the borders of Avar influence: in the West the Oka River and in the East

Minusinsk.200 This also meant for him that the Avars were situated between the Finno-Germanic

and the Turan-Germanic cultures and that their movement into Hungary severed the link between

the two cultures.201

The last part of the archeological study deals with Sarmatian-Hun-Iazyges material

objects. Although Pósta demonstrated the Pontus influence on the Sarmatian culture in Hungary;

I chose not to deal with this issue since it does not relate directly to the question of ancient

Hungarian migration. All things considered Pósta was able to carry out ground breaking research

in the field of archeology. No Hungarian archeologist before him went through the material

objects of the Russian museums with such thoroughness. His good relationship with the Russian

colleagues on the expedition was a stepping-stone in laying the foundation for further

cooperation. While Pósta was busy in Minusinsk his fellow team members Jankó and Pápay

were on their way to the Hanti. The next two chapters will deal with their diaries and scientific

publications.
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200
Ibid, 332-33.
201
Ibid, 327-28.

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 Chapter V. The third expedition: János Jankó and Hanti ethnology

The previous chapter detailed the beginnings of Zichy’s third expedition through Pósta’s

eye; moreover, it introduced national romanticism and its influence on 19th century archeology.

Since Pósta’s diary ends in Astrakhan this chapter will continue the narrative of the expedition

with the diary of János Jankó. In this chapter we will further see the manifestation of national

romanticism in the ethnographic work of Jankó. First, I will examine Jankó’s diary and then his

scientific publication. Regarding the diary I will highlight his method of data collection, his

relationship with the Hanti and his personal reflections on Hungarian sciences. I will juxtapose

his scientific publication with the works of Ottó Herman and Bernát Munkácsi on Hungarian

fishing.

In Hungary biological anthropology started in 1878 when Flóris Rómer and Ferenc

Pulszky founded the Hungarian Society of Archeology and Biological Anthropology. 202 Gyula

Farkas writes on the origin of the society that:

The main trigger behind the emergence of the biological study of Hungarians was the
World Exhibition in Paris in 1878. When Aurél Török saw skulls of robbers and murderers
shown under the label “Real Hungarian types” at the anthropological exhibition and
complained about this at Broca, he received the following reply: “Well, you, noble Hungarians,
protesting here, can you only talk? Here only facts may be brought forward. Don’t you find it
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worthwhile to study your own race?203

Then Farkas continues that this event led to the proposal by Török to establish serious

anthropological studies in Hungarian universities, however, his proposals were only fully

202
Mende, Biological Anthropology/Human Biology and the pre history of the Hungarians by Gyula Farkas, 11.
203
Ibid.

99
 realized seventy years later.204 This is the background story to understand why Jankó spent time

collecting skulls and comparing human remains in Hungary with remains from the ancient

homeland because this was the leading methodology of comparative biological anthropology of

the time.

János Jankó’s work deserves attention because he got engaged with an indigenous

Siberian culture that was on the verge of disappearance and, because he died two years after the

expedition subsequently this trip was his last contribution to Hungarian ethnography. In

accordance with the contract he signed with Zichy he had two main objectives: to study the

Hanti-Hungarian kinship and to shed light on the origin of Hungarian fishing practices. 205 Jankó,

based on Ottó Herman’s work on Hungarian fishing, focused his main research on three material

objects that were present in Hungarian ethnography that he hoped to find in Siberian: the tobacco

leaf shaped oar, two speared harpoons and fishing net weights made of bone. Accordingly, the

diary often mentions references to these objects. On the trip Jankó collected fishing tools,

traditional dresses, human bones, skulls and wrote down tribal legends.

In this chapter I will discuss in greater detail some parts of the diary to show the

methodological approach of Jankó’s towards the Hanti, which I would call contradictory and

highly unethical. As I will show in this chapter Jankó’s personality went through a mild
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metamorphosis from a positivist to an impudent scientist. Yet, while he took with one hand, he

gave back with the other. He wrote with great respect of his subjects, he often emphasized and

204
Ibid. Of course it is not entirely true that anthtopological studies were only established in the 1950s. In fact,
Török became a prominent teacher in Hungary and Jankó frequently attended his lectures. Moreover, Török
collected skulls from Hungarian gravesites in order to observe the difference between Mongolid skulls and Europid.
But still according to Gyula Gyenis ethnography was still behind anthropology in the 19 th century. In light of this
Jankó’s criticism of the insufficient ethnographic education in Hungary, in his diary, is understandable. Mende, 33-
38.
205
Jankó, János, A Magyar halászat eredete I. kötet, [The origins of Hungarian fishing vol. I] (Budapest, 1900), 13.

100
 sympathized with their struggle against the Russians. Jankó also paid them well and in one

instance he even saved a Hanti family from starvation. Jankó’s behavioral dichotomy is one of

his most intriguing characteristics and I have found this aspect of his downplayed in secondary

literature. Gerő Csinády writes little on this issue in, furthermore, Rusvai also only briefly

addresses this issue in her dissertation.206

1. Description of the diary

After Jankó’s untimely passing the diary became the property of his widow. A scholar

borrowed the diary from her on December 29th 1903. Afterwards the diary changed hands often

until it landed in the archives of the Ethnographic Museum in 1954. It was János Kodolányi Jr.

who decided to work through the diary and finish its final version that was published in the year

2000. The original diary consisted of two separate books that Jankó wrote during the voyage.

Some of the pages were missing; some were crossed over by the author. Also there are a few

pages of the diary that were written by pencil and they seem to be the work of someone else then

Jankó. Kodolányi’s publication runs four hundred pages, but the diary itself is around two

hundred. The book includes some of Jankó’s photographs, his drawings, and his letters—

although the letters he wrote to his wife are lost—his anthropological measurements, a small
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Hanti207-Hungarian dictionary by Márta Csepregi and the lists of the items Jankó bought for the

Ethnographic Museum from Russia. The diary starts in Tiflis, sadly the Finnish ordeal is

206
Rusvai, Julianna, Pápay József kéziratos Debreceni hagyatéka [The handwritten bequest of József Pápay at
Debrecen], (DE Bölcsészettudományi Kar, 2005), 36.
Csinády, Gerő, Zichy Jenő oroszországi és kínai expedicióinak története új megvilágításban [Zichy Jenő’s Russian
and Chinese expedition in a new light], (Budapest: Akadémia Kiadó, 1963).
207
Ostyak is the name given to the Hanti by the Russians, although Jankó refers to them as Osztjaks, I would rather
use their original name, which in English would be Khanti but I will write it as Hanti. Moreover, the Vogul people
(also known as the Mansi) are linguisticualy related to the Hanti.

101
 missing, but at least Pósta’s diary fills in that gap of the story. Jankó wrote in Hungarian but

often-used Russian and in a few instances German. The diary is written with dated entries, each

also notes the location. The entries are fairly long loaded with his personal reflections often

going into great detail about specific events.208

We learn from his scientific publication that Jankó traveled from Budapest to Berlin and

from Stettin to Helsinki.209 In Helsinki he spent three months in studying various museums; then

he traveled to St. Petersburg where he spent another three months in museums. During this time

he came into contact with various scholars and familiarized himself with the achievements of

multiple Russian expeditions to the East and their scientific reports that were little known in

Europe of the time like the Baer-Danilevskii expedition of 1852. Jankó was impressed with the

amount of cataloged material on fishing in the Russian archives. He thought that the Russian

archival collections were more thorough then Herman’s work on Hungarian fishing.210 From the

Baltic, after his preliminary research was done he traveled to the shores of the Black Sea to meet

Zichy.

2. From Tiflis to the Hanti

As we know from Pósta’s diary the group agreed to meet Zichy in Tiflis so that each
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could give a report on their preliminary research. The first passage of the diary that remains for

us starts in Tiflis and sheds more light on Zichy’s plan to recover the Árpád documents from

China. We learn from Jankó that Zichy consulted with Chinese officials in Berlin about the

208
János Jankó, Utazás osztjákföldre 1898 [Travel to Ostyak land], edited by János Kodolányi Jr., (Budapest:
Néprajzi Múzeum, 2000), 7-9.
209
Jankó, 15.
210
Ibid, 22.

102
 matter and asked their advice on how to contact the Emperor of China. The German interpreters

advised him that he should award the cross of the St. Stephen Order to the Emperor and write

him a letter about his request, this way he will surely be let into the archives. 211 However the

Boxer Rebellion, which broke out when Zichy arrived to Peking, stopped Zichy from meeting

the Emperor and forced him to leave the country.212

The Volga Delta was the first important stop for Jankó because of the active fishing

industry in Astrakhan. Every year thousands of workers would come from the countryside to

work as seasonal fishermen before the hard winter set in.213 Despite the good work opportunities

fishing was a dangerous job, especially in the summer time when thousands died from malaria in

the mosquito infested villages. Whilst there, Jankó was able to arrange short trips to fifteen

nearby settlements and observe the fishermen in action. He visited five to six villages a day as

well as the Museum of Astrakhan.214 Jankó observed the widespread use of tobacco leaf shaped

oars by the fishermen in the region.215 These oars were identical to the ones used by Hungarian

fishermen in Szeged. Ottó Herman noted this design in his book A Magyar Halászat Könyve

(1887), which Jankó used as a reference book throughout the trip.216 Jankó looked for this leaf

shaped oar design because Herman believed that this design was originally Magyar, which

influenced the region of the Volga, thus wherever this design was in use there was the possibility
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that Magyars lived in that region in the past. Of course this approach was shaky since it ignored

211
Kodolányi, 35.
212
Zichy, Jenő. Keleti kutatások a magyarság eredetének felderítése érdekében történelmi attekintés és észleleteim,
tapasztalataim különös tekintettel expediciom eredményeire VI. kötet [Research in the East concerning the origins of
Hungarians, historical overview and my observations and experiences with special regards to the achievements of
my expedition vol. VI], (Budapest: Hornyánszky; Leipzig: Hiersemann, 1905), 260-264.
213
Kodolányi, 53.
214
Ibid, 44.
215
Ibid, 42, 52.
216
Herman, Ottó, A Magyar Halászat Könyve [The book of Hungarian fishing], (Budapest:
K. M. Természettudományi Társulat, 1887).

103
 that this oar design could have develop independently in different regions and identical material

objects do not necessarily signal kinship. His plan to study fishing practices became restricted

when Jankó realized that fishing became less important as they traveled up the River Volga

where the locals practiced either animal husbandry or farming.217

Their next major stop was Uralsk where he specifically went to meet the Russian

ethnographer N. Borodin to acquire his book on fishing. When they met N. Borodin gave him his

book on fishing in the Ural region, in exchange, Jankó let him read Herman’s book. Borodin

helped Jankó by enlightening him about what ethnographic materials he could find in the Ural

region. Borodin explained to him that tobacco leaf shaped oar was unknown there. Moreover,

there was no evidence that tribes used bones as weight on nets in river fishing. Herman put forth

the idea that it was the Hungarians who introduced bone weights for river fishing into the

Carpathian Basin. Therefore Jankó wanted to find evidence of this practice. In addition, Jankó

was looking for two speared harpoons, which Herman identified as Hungarian, but in this region

there were only three, four and five speared harpoons.218

Jankó’s first ethnographic work began on the lands of Count Nesselrode where Pósta did

his archeological excavation. While Pósta and Zichy were opening kurgans, Jankó left with an

interpreter to visit Csuvas (Chuvash) villages. The Csuvas people219 were thought by
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contemporary ethnographers to be related to Magyars; accordingly, Jankó writes with great

enthusiasm that he will finally meet his “countrymen.” In the first village he found an old Csuvas

man and immediately questioned him. The set of questions he used were his more or less

217
Kodolányi, 70.
218
Ibid, 76-78.
219
The Chuvash language belongs to the Altaic branch of the Turkic language. But originally it was thought to be
related to the Uralic languages, and only distantly to Turkic.
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/117441/Chuvash-language.

104
 standard repertoire that he reused over and over again. These were designed to find out if local

men knew about their relationship to Magyars or not.

I recreated the dialogue in order to demonstrate the methodology he used to get

information and to show the kinds of answers he received:

Jankó: Where did your people come from?

Csuvas: From Kazan, two hundred years ago with five families.
Jankó: Who lived here when your family arrived?
Csuvas: Kalmuks.
Jankó: How many people do you know of?
Csuvas: That is stupid question since there are only seventy-seven languages in the world.
Jankó: What do you know of the Magyars?
Csuvas: I only heard about the Magyars from soldiers who fought against them in 1849.
Jankó: Tell me about your pagan customs and songs.220

Studying indigenous pagan rituals were a part of Jankó’s objective. Ethnographers in Hungary

knew that ancient Magyars practiced shamanism. Therefore finding connections with Siberian

shamanic practices was important in order to rediscover the pagan Magyar culture. But asking

around about shamanic practices was risky. The Russian government prohibited pagan rituals

and anyone caught doing sacrifices were tried by the local courts. The Hanti were especially

afraid of admitting to practicing pagan rituals even when Jankó saw the signs on trees or noticed

the blood of sacrificed animals.221 Moreover, since he did not publish his scientific book on the

Hanti culture these references in the diary are the only sources we have on what he might have
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written about.

220
Kodolányi, 80. Községéről sokat tudott, azt mondja a falu lakói mintegy 2oo évvel ezelött Kazánból jöttek…a
hagyomány szerint valamikor vagy az 5. nemzedék (visszafelé számítva) idejében voltak itt kalmükök, de hogy
ezekkel mi dolguk volt, arra nem tudott felelni. Kérdésemre miféle népeket ismer, kijelenteté, hogy ezt ostobaság
kérdezni, mert 77 nyelv van a világon, és ő nem tudhatja, kik beszélik azokat…A magyarokat csak a katonáktól
ismeri “akik ott verkedtek” (1849-ben)... Áttérve a mythológiára ebből az öreg kevesebbet vallott...
221
Ibid, 80-84.

105
 Russification was an even great problem for Jankó’s research then shy Hantis. Every

place he visited showed signs of Russian culture. The houses were built after Russian style, the

material objects in the homes were mass produced Russian products. The dresses people wore

were made in Russian textile factories. In very few places Jankó was able to buy old women

dresses that were made by the locals following a traditional style. But traditional men’s dress was

nonexistent. Russification in part was due to the fact that most Hanti men married Russian

women and over time they lost their mother tongue because they would only converse in Russian

at home.

After leaving Nesselrode’s residence they passed through Kazan where Jankó visited the

local museum and made drawings of over a hundred objects, but the museum was largely useless

for him since nothing was cataloged in it. Yet he noticed the model of a Cseremisz (Mari) home

with the decorative Székely gate that showed similarities to Hungarian culture. But Jankó wrote

that the Cseremisz and Mordvin cultures already have been thoroughly studied by Alex

Heikel.222 At Perm he found the best Russian Museum, as he put it. The museum was rich in

Vogul and Hanti materials; here he finally found a two-speared “Magyar” harpoon. Perm was

also the last European city they visited.

Imagined geography is also present in Jankó’s writing. He locates the borders of Europe
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at Yekaterinburg. Although the Russians had a sign before the city signaling the border between

east and west, which made this an easy choice for Jankó; nonetheless, he distinctively calls

Yekaterinburg the first Asian city he enters. For comparison I would like to point out that for

Kardoss during the first expedition the Southern Caucasus was already Asia. But for Jankó what

was Asia for Kardoss was still a part of Europe. In this sense I would argue that Jankó was

222
Ibid, 88-89.

106
 following the generally accepted views on the borders of Europe. While Kardoss was more

imaginative in this respect.223

3. Jankó’s personal reflections on Hungarian science

Jankó on multiple times expressed his strong criticism of Hungary and of the current state

of Hungarian sciences. Here I will summarize his views on previous Hungarian expeditions, then

his criticism of the MTA and Hungary; and lastly, his opinion about the current expedition. He

noted in his diary that Hungarian Orientalism started with Sajnovics’s study in Lapland, which is

a sound starting point. Jankó then turned to Reguly, who was the most noteworthy linguist to

follow up on Sajnovics’s work. But according to Jankó, Reguly’s work was unavailable to the

wider European scholarly public. It is unclear why he states this since Reguly wrote his diary in

German therefore many European scholars could have read his work. Jankó had a negative

opinion of Munkácsi who according to Jankó drained the MTA purse to take multiple trips to

Siberia but returned with no ethnographic data and his linguistic collection only made people

hate linguistics and it failed to generate interest for Munkácsi’s work. Furthermore, Munkácsi’s

partner Károly Pápai, according to Jankó, only was able to make headway but not to do any

serious scientific work since he barely spoke Russian and knew nothing of Hungarian
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ethnography. Papái was still in his mid-twenties when he set out for Russia to visit the Ob region

and died a couple of years after, at the age of thirty-one. Ironically, Jankó also died a few years

after he returned from the Hanti. Since Jankó has done extensive ethnographic research in

Hungary, as his preparation for the ethnographic village at the Millennia Exhibition, I believe he

viewed himself more knowledgeable about ethnography then Pápai. Subsequently, he writes,

223
Ibid, 104.

107
 thanks to these men’s failures the Hungarians lost their advantage in the field and the Finns

armed with Setälä’s school formed the spearhead of the movement. And now it was Jankó’s time

to make his mark on the field but he did not know how.224

Jankó thought that the Hungarian academic situation was pointless, not because of the

lack of money or the lack of time for expeditions but because of personal scholarly conflicts.

Jankó here referred to his exhausting arguments with Ottó Herman, and in fact it upset him

greatly that the latter did not support him but rather criticized him in Hungarian scholarly

magazines. Moreover, Jankó blamed the MTA for the neglected state of ethnography in

Hungary. He named three reasons for this situation. First, the MTA only recognized

anthropology as a serious science instead of ethnography. Here we have to understand what the

difference between anthropology and ethnography is. According to Tim Ingold: anthropology is

to seek a generous, comparative but nevertheless critical understanding of human being and

knowing in the one world we all inhabit. The objective of ethnography is to describe the lives of

people other than ourselves, with an accuracy and sensitivity honed by detailed observation and

prolonged first-hand experience.225 In this since Jankó was an ethnographer. Second, he argued

that there was no organized ethnographic education in Hungary, which was true. And lastly, the

only newspaper that was supposed to inform the public about ethnography, the Ethnographia,
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was filled with articles on linguistics.226 Although his last claims can be debated—not all articles

in Ethnographia dealt with linguistics—he did make a noteworthy observation regarding the

state of the art by recognizing that American scholars were soon to take the lead in scientific

research because the Americans could finance their scholars and publish their finds worldwide.

224
Ibid, 106-108.
225
http://proc.britac.ac.uk/tfiles/154p069.pdf. p. 69. Ingold is a fellow of the British Academy.
226
Kodolányi, 21.

108
 Here he referred to the Smithsonian Institute that was hiring scholars to work for years in

Russian Universities and to the Bureau of Ethnology (est. 1879). Both of these institutions

clearly had an advantage over the Hungarians.227

In light of these arguments Jankó was especially worried about Pápay’s research since at

the same time Kustaa F. Karjalainen set out for his Hanti expedition that was to last for two

years. Jankó rightly raised the question what could Pápay accomplish in five months that

Karjalainen cannot in two years with ample money and the help of Setälä? Subsequently, Jankó

was worried that there will be no one to follow up on his work in Hungary after him. Giving the

fact that he died a few years after he wrote this and his diary was only published in 2000 this was

a peculiar observation.

4. Jankó and the Hanti

Jankó’s stay with the Hanti lasted for three months from July until September. Amongst

the Hanti, Jankó carried out thorough ethnographic research. However, I found the ways in

which it was done questionable, in some cases even disturbing. It is clear from the diaries that

generally, the Hanti lived a primitive lifestyle and their tribe was on the verge of extinction. They

know little of the world at large. Russians represented for them the rest of the world as well as a
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superior “race” that ruled over them. For the average Hanti every visitor from the West was

considered to be Russian. Jankó was no exception from this rule no matter how hard he wanted

to find a “brotherly” connection with these people. They never accepted him as their own.

Whenever he appeared at a village they viewed him as a Russian Imperial officer whose bidding

they had to do. In other words, the Hanti answered his questions followed him around, showed
227
Ibid, 106-108.

109
 him their houses and their graves out of fear not because they were glad that their long lost

Magyar relative came back to save their culture for posterity.

Throughout the diary we can observe the change in power dynamics between the scientist

and his “subjects.” I believe that Jankó started his adventure from a more settled state of mind

and originally he aimed to work amongst the Hanti with respect for their culture. But as he

realized that his subjects do not trust him and as the hardships of the trip began to take its toll on

his health he developed a mild form of megalomania. Moreover, he slowly began to dislike his

subjects, which actually led him to stop the excursion and return to civilization. Although

scholars who worked on Jankó cite his poor health as the main reason for his return, based on the

diary I believe that it had to do with his disgust with the Hanti, which I will demonstrate later.

The most disturbing act of Jankó’s was grave robbery, which he did in order to collect

anthropological data. The dead for the Hanti, as in many cultures around the world, were never

truly dead. Thus the Hanti treated the dead with the outmost respect. One of the most important

collections that Jankó brought back to Hungary was a large hoard of Hanti skulls and bones; all

of them were taken out of graves that he or his Russian helpers opened up. Jankó in some ways

was aware of his ill behavior but still carried on with his mission. He robbed almost every grave

along the river Demjanka, Juganok and Salum. Next I will turn to Jankó’s perspective on his
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journey.

110
 5. Journey to the Hanti lands

Jankó left from Tobolsk by a small boat with five Russians and headed up the Irtysh

towards Demjanskoje, which was the southern border of Hanti settlements.228 Between the two

cities only Russians and Tatars lived. They arrived to Demjanskoje on July 10, 1898. Since there

were no Hanti living in town Jankó relied on the Russian official to fetch Hantis for him. Soon

the Russians brought in ten Hanti for Jankó. On his first meeting with the Hanti, Jankó sat in the

main hall of a hotel where they shepherded the ten subjects. Jankó offered them tea and

chocolate for the children, in return, the kids knelt before him and kissed his shoes. Then he took

them outside and photographed them whilst he measured their bodies. From Jankó’s writing it is

telling how ignorant the Hanti were about what was taking place; that they only let him touch

them because they feared that he was there to measure them for military service and that he

asked them personal questions in order to extract higher taxes from them. The Hanti thought that

by not complying with his demands they would surely be drafted into the army. 229

The next day the Russian official gathered ten new Hanti for Jankó. In Hanti culture

women had to veil their heads and it was inappropriate for strangers to touch them, as Jankó was

well aware of this since he recorded this tradition in his diary. 230 Thus in order to measure them,
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including their breasts, the Russians told the women that Jankó was a doctor and he had the right

to touch them and ask them about their sexual practices as well as their menstrual cycles. After

228
Ibid, 113-114.
229
Ibid, 119-120.
230
Olson, James, S., ed. An ethnographical dictionary of the Russian and Soviet Empires (London: Greenwood
Press, 1994), 377-380. Women in Hanti society was thought of as temptations for other man thus they had to veil
themselves. Moreover, they were viewed as the defilers of the household therefore; they were restricted to separate
living qouaters from men. In light of this, I believe that Jankó was seriously pushing the Hanti cultural norms when
he was doing his anthropological measurements.

111
 he was done measuring them Jankó paid them for their services and let them go. Indeed

throughout the trip he paid the Hanti for everything they did for him—except for the skulls—but

the Hanti were not accustomed to such treatment by the Russians and Jankó noted that his

behavior was confusing for them. Of course the Hanti men quickly used up the money in local

pubs thus their families saw little benefit from their work. 231 Jankó only measured people under

the age of 60, for what reason I could not find out.232

From Demjanskoje he left with two Hanti and six Russian helpers that he hired in town,

one of them was called Nikolai Tailakov. Their first stop up river was Nikolai’s yurt. Here

Jankó, after realizing that everything looked Russian, headed for the forest to find Hanti graves.

Nikolai was forced by Jankó to show him where the graves were, and since it was Jankó who

paid him, Nikolai had to comply. After some tracking in the forest they arrived to the graves of

Nikolai’s family. The poor Hanti broke down in tears and begged Jankó not to disturb his

parents’ graves and instead he showed him the graves of other villagers that were unrelated to

him. Jankó learned from this incident; later on he changed tactics. When he would arrive to

village he would ask the elders to show him the graves then he would send them back so they

would not see the deed being done. Moreover, he paid his Russians 25 kopek for each skull they

unearthed to motivate them.233 From these grave finds he concluded that the Hanti also buried
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their dead facing the East just as the Hungarians did.234 Furthermore, he decided not to disturb

fresh graves, which otherwise he would have done in a heartbeat but I believe that he knew that

digging up the dead with still living relatives around would greatly upset the families in question.

231
Kodolányi, 119-120.
232
Ibid, 128.
233
Ibid, 126.
234
Ibid, 123-124.

112
 The first leg of his trip in Hanti lands led him down the River Demjanka as far as yurt

Chingiskij. Although Jankó refers to the places he visited as yurts they were not yurts. Instead

they were small wooden houses that stood on pillars with a door on the front and one small

window; most homes had no windows at all. These houses he identified as purely Hanti homes,

however few Hanti actually lived in them since the majority resided in Russian style homes.

Why did Jankó choose to call small villages—often no more than a hand full of families lived in

them—yurts is unclear. The diary has multiple instances when Jankó spends a great amount of

time writing and drawing down every parameter of these homes; he was particularly interested in

seeing traditional fireplaces. But to his disappointment he only found one traditional Hanti

fireplace.235

6. Ancient traditions and Gods

Recording Hanti pagan traditions and their Gods was the side project of Jankó’s. On

these topics the diary gives us an insight into the culture and tradition of the Hanti. Before I

discuss this topic I would like to point out once again that the Hanti mistrusted Jankó and often

they lied to him or played ignorant on certain cultural issues. I also believe that in some cases

they made up folk tales just to satisfy his curiosity. I believe this to be the case because the Hanti
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he meets are already more or less Russified and baptized. Few of them spoke their native

language even less were familiar with their ancestors’ pagan culture.

The Hanti had a pantheon of Gods some of which Jankó was able to record although the

spelling he uses in the diary, even for the same God, often differs yet the similarity is clearly

visible between the names, thus I believe that these Gods were consistent across the Hanti
235
Ibid, 137-139, 166-168.

113
 settlements. The main God was Torum in addition there were the God of the Earth Szar, God of

Water Jinkiki, God of thunder Pajiki, God of Rain Jirt, God of the Forest Vontjik and there was

the Chuvash God of the Wind Szil, which is similar to the Hungarian word szél for wind.

Furthermore, Jankó heard the tale of Szulaxan the Hanti giant who fought Javan the Samoyed

hero.236

There are some additional valuable observations made by Jankó. First of all he recorded

multiple tamgas. The tamgas are the signature drawings of various Hanti families with which

they signed official Russian documents when the Russians colonized them. No Hanti in the

region of the time knew the meaning of the tamgas since they have not used them in decades,

luckily the Russian officials recorded their meaning in the late 18th century and Jankó was able to

copy them down from official documents.237

Bears were significant figures in Hanti mythology. Majority of the songs recorded by

Reguly and translated by Pápay were bear-songs. The Hanti believed that bears were humans and

that they understood human speech. The Hantis in Siberia were known to be the people who

spoke the language of the bears. This belief is evident in some of the hunt themed bear-songs.

During hunting the Hanti hunters would talk to the bear; especially if the bear was hiding in a

cave he had to be convinced to come out. If the hunters would kill a bear they would take it back
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to the village and dress up the bear according to its gender. Then they would seat the bear at the

head of the table and celebrate with the dead bear for three days during which period the Hanti

danced the bear-dance. Jankó had the chance to witness the bear-dance in two occasions but by

his time few Hanti knew how to dance it.238 Some body parts of the bear were reused for special

236
Ibid, 127, 166.
237
Ibid, 137.
238
Ibid, 191-192.

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 purposes. The baculum of the bear for example, was used to make arrowheads, which when fired

would never miss the target, at least according to the Hanti.239

Important information he gathered concerned embroidery motifs. Decorative motifs on

clothing usually had specific meanings behind it. For example the Shipibo tribe of South

America still makes embroidery that is actual songs and can be sang if one could read the motifs.

Similarly, embroidery had meaning for the Hanti too. Women used three colors for decoration;

red for woman, blue for men and black, which meaning none knew.240 In the village of Jugan he

found a woman who was familiar with all of the motifs. Jankó drew down the various pictures;

they usually represented animals in different positions for example: lying fish, horse head or

snake and so on.241 These finds regarding the motifs were especially significant because the rapid

expansion of the standard industrial textiles relentlessly replaced indigenous arts.

7. Jankó’s method of data collection

The following incident occurred around the end of the trip. I would like to bring this up

here in some detail in order to demonstrate how Jankó’s megalomania manifested itself and how

his attitude towards the Hanti has evolved over time. It all started when, somewhere in the

vicinity of Surgut, the crew he was traveling with expressed their wish to return to their families.
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Thus Jankó hired a new crew to take him up the River Ob. The four new men were local to the

region, in this most northeastern leg of his trip Jankó believed that he would meet less

assimilated Hanti since they were farther from Russian settlements. He soon learned from his

men that they took the job not because they wanted to take him up river but because their

239
Ibid, 142-144, 186.
240
Ibid, 141-142.
241
Ibid, 176.

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 families were starving. Moreover, the men were afraid to leave their families behind in such

times of need, but they probably followed Jankó for two reasons. They believed him to be a

Russian officer and second he had food. At first Jankó did not believe the starvation story he

heard but when they took him to their yurt the truth hit him:

It was a terrible site, men came before me with starved faces, I stepped inside the
yurt, the old blind men set with parched face, in the corner set the women the two
child were sleeping; on the table there was tea made of some dried leaves.242
It turned out they were without food and gunpowder for twenty days, the men were unable to

catch any fish and they had no money to buy flour, Jankó did arrive at a desperate hour.

Despite of the desperate situation he still wanted to go forward, the next settlement he

wanted to reach was Larnomkin which was a weeklong return trip from his current location. The

Hanti informed him that there were no other yurts to supply fresh recruits between them and

Larnomkin. Jankó had to turn the situation around so he could benefit from it and so he did. First

he feed the family, gave them gunpowder and sent the men to hunt immediately. After they were

fed, mostly with sugar cubes, Jankó set his plan in motion. He “caught,” as he put it, one of the

hunters and interrogated him about graves nearby. The Hanti, like all others before him, was

afraid to show the graves because it was the site where his family was buried. But he could not

refuse a “Russian officer” who just fed his family; Jankó was well aware of this fact. Soon they
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took the boat and found the graves. In order for the Hanti not to be disturbed by what was to

follow, he sent him back to the yurt. The grave robbery plan was complete. Next Jankó crossed

another line while still exploiting his savior status with these starving people. Previously on the

expedition, women refused to take their veils off their heads in front of Jankó when he

242
Kodolányi, 204. Rettenetes kép volt ez; a férfiak kiéhezett arczczal jöttek elém, beléptem a házba, az öreg vak
elaszott arczczal ült, az asszonyok egy sarokban kuporogtak, a két gyermek aludt, s az asztalon szárított levélből
csáj.

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 photographed them. Jankó was not even able to photograph the trousers women wore under their

skirts. But now he had the upper hand and he used the situation to his full advantage. He

photographed women without their veil. More importantly, he was shown tribal tattoos on one of

the woman’s arm and back, which means she had to undress for him to show the ink.243

This event was just a taste of what was to come. The next incident with the Hanti reached

the zenith of his megalomania when Jankó did not pretend to be a sensitive scholar or a savior

anymore rather he used brute force to enforce his will. At the settlement of Kaikov, he writes: …

I decided to take 10 skulls no matter what…244 Accordingly, he used a Russian chinovnik—

minor official--to gather the Hanti before him. Jankó asked if anyone would show him the

graves, but as was expected everyone walked away. Jankó’s patience has ran out, he grabbed his

gun and ordered the chinovnik to pull one of the man back …he took his hat off and stood before

me shaking…245 Jankó recorded their dialog in which he fully embodied the role of a chinovnik

and used his “imagined powers” to force the poor fellow to do his bidding. At the graves the

usual drill was enacted, he paid the Hanti and sent him back. However, in this case he took more

than just human remains.

The Hanti had a special custom that kept the dead spirits around the graveyard and

stopped the ghosts from going into the village to hunt them. They believed that when someone
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came down with body ache it was because he was hugged at night by the dead. To avoid sickness

they would make sweaters to dress up small trees around the graveyard. This way, I assume, they

tricked the spirits into believing that the dressed trees were live humans. At first Jankó did not

understood the meaning of these but he thought it wise to steel it anyway and ask questions later.
243
Ibid, 203-206.
244
Ibid, 212. ...elhatároztam, hogy innen 1o koponyát viszek akárhogyan is.
245
Ibid, 213. A jegyzőnek erre megmondtam, vezessen elő egy osztjákot; széles gallérjánál fogva húzott ki egy
öreget, aki remegve kalap levéve allt meg elöttem.

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 He got Nikiforov his Russian helper, to hide the stolen goods and sneak them into the boat

without the locals seeing it. Meanwhile Jankó returned to the village to distract the Hanti by

making a delicious meal for his crew and giving his hosts vodka.246

When Jankó learned the meaning of the dressed trees, after much interrogation and

threatening, he called it his most important find because he noted a connection here with the

Hungarian’s belief of lidérc [incubus]. In Hungarian there is the saying that one can have

lidércnyomás, which translates to ghost pressure. I think Jankó referred to this phenomena and

possibly thought that the pressure can be attributed to the Hanti’s idea of being hugged by the

spirit and thus being under pressure. This way he indentified an important cultural connection.247

The last disturbing story of the expedition took place on the Juga River. By that time he

had been on the move for months, his health already began to fail him, diarrhea, body ache,

headaches and insomnia tormented him on a daily bases. Meanwhile his growing dislike of the

Hanti’s grew.

There is no bath in Jugan…the people are dirty, ugly the anthropological

research is the greatest sacrifice I make…they smell terribly…the last few times
my humble Hantis disgusted me when I observed their bodies, they were so dirty
and smelly…248
At last he could not go on and turned the boat around.
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246
Ibid, 212-124.
247
Ibid, 214.
248
Ibid, 215-216. A Jugánban már nincs fürdő…az antrop. Kutatás a legnagyobb áldozat amit hozok…az utolsó
időkben már rettenetesen undorodtam jámbor osztjákjaim testi megvizsgálásátol, oly piszkosak és büdösek voltak…

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 8. Scientific publication

Jankó returned to Budapest on October 22, 1898 and soon turned his attention to

organizing his finds; sadly he only had time before he died to finish his first volume, which dealt

with fishing, his second volume would have been on the Hanti culture. The two main sources he

worked with on the Hungarian side were Herman’s book on fishing and Munkácsi’s work on

Magyar folk fishing. Munkácsi’s short book was important in as much as it followed up on

Herman’s work by looking at Hungarian words on fishing and more or less conclusively

identified the loan words regarding fishing in Hungarian from other languages. His work thus

was more philological then ethnographic. Both Herman and Munkácsi concluded that fishing

was the most important archaic profession of the Magyars; thus Munkácsi wrote that the ancient

homeland had to be located around major rivers.249

Jankó disagreed with both of them and concluded that fishing was not the main archaic

profession of Hungarians and that they came from a lake country and not from rivers. He argued

that since Hungarians have borrowed scores of words regarding fishing from Turkic and Slavic

languages this borrowing primarily meant that they were not fishermen otherwise they would

have used their own words and had no need to borrow. Moreover he wrote that the Slavic loan
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words on fishing came into Hungarian when the Magyars were enslaving Slavs in Southern

Russia. It was evident for him that these Slavs fished for their Hungarian masters while the

Magyars continued animal husbandry. Subsequently, it was the Slavs who were fishermen and

practiced this as their archaic profession; the Magyars on the other hand were hunters. While the

249
Munkácsi, Bernát, A magyar népies halszát műnyelve [The technical vocabulary of Hungarian folk fishing],
(Budapest, 1893), 2-3.

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 Magyars and the Hanti lived together, before their separation due to the Hun invasion, it was

hunting that supported Magyar families and fishing was practiced meagerly. One of his

supporting arguments was the known use of fishing arrowheads by the Magyars, which meant

that Magyars shot at the fish in the lakes or rivers with arrows just as if they were hunting for

larger mammals. In other words Magyars adopted hunting to fishing.250

In Jankó’s opinion he had to clear up Herman’s work especially his material collection

that related to Eastern influences on Magyar fishing objects because Herman was largely

ignorant of the Eastern material objects. Herman’s ideas on the Eastern influence on fishing in

the Carpathian derived from the 1880 Berlin International Fishing Exhibition’s catalogue; which

Jankó taught was less than sufficient for making the conclusions that Herman did.251 Regarding

the origin of the three material objects that I mentioned in the beginning of this chapter Jankó

stated that the two speared harpoon was Turkic, the leaf shaped oar was Magyar and the bone

weight was German since he found these weights in Finland amongst Swedish finds.252 In

addition he judged the origin of almost all the objects given in Herman’s book.

Jankó’s methodology to make these judgment calls was questionable although it was

acceptable in his time. He combined comparative ethnography with Munkácsi’s linguistic work.

In practice this meant that he strictly looked at material objects and the origin of their name in
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Hungarian. For example the word harpoon [szigony in Hungarian], he concluded based on

Munkácsi, was a Turkic loanword. This meant that the Magyars first used the two-speared

harpoon in a region where they first came under Turkic influence. Thus the ancient Hungarians

250
Jankó, 599-606.
251
Ibid, 14.
252
Ibid, 578, 581.

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 did not invent this object. Of course this kind of reasoning had its pit falls as Ottó Herman

pointed out.253

9. Conclusion

The same year Jankó finished his scientific study Herman was quick to formulate his

criticism of it. He accused Jankó of plagiarizing his and Munkácsi’s work thus his original work

only made up 3/10 of the publication despite of this fact, Jankó did nothing but criticized both of

his “mentors.” Moreover, Herman argued that the problem with young Hungarian scholars of the

time was that they believed, just as Jankó argued, that the Magyars never invented anything they

only borrowed from other cultures. Herman disagreed passionately with this narrow-minded

contemptuousness and upheld the view that the Magyars were capable of inventing their own

traditional practices just as the Slavs or Germans did. Lastly, he critiqued Jankó’s meager

attempt to located the borders of the ancient homeland—which Jankó put to Western Russia—by

observing the use of Slavic and Hungarian fish names. Herman’s criticism was devastating and

in some instances uncalled for. It was exactly this kind of scholarly behavior that Jankó

complained about in his diary, which according to him held back Hungarian science. Still, I

believe Herman’s observations regarding some of Jankó’s conclusions were sound. Sadly, both
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were unable to give each other the credit they deserved.254

In this chapter I wanted to show that the diary reveals a stark transition from a man who

is searching for his lost countrymen; to a ruthless scientist who is willing to cross any line in

order to achieve his goals, even if that meant disrespecting the culture of those he felt so

253
Ibid, 41, 478.
254
Budapesti Szemle [Budapest Review] 104. szám [edition] (1900), 176-194.

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 passionately about in the beginning. Jankó and his fellow Finnish scholars were amongst the last

to visit the region from Europe for such ethnographic studies. The Soviet revolution quickly

closed the country and collaboration between Hungarian and Russian scholars came to a halt. It

is precisely due to this political change that his work is so important because it gives us the last

glimpse into the life of an ancient indigenous Siberian culture. As we saw even by the late 19 th

century the Hanti culture was on the event horizon. Lastly, since he never published his second

volume on Hanti ethnography his diary is the only source of information on what he might have

written.
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 Chapter VI. Pápay and the Reguly collection

This chapter will deal with József Pápay’s work amongst the Hanti at the shores of the

Arctic Ocean. His primary objective was to find Hantis who could decipher the heroic songs

recorded by Antal Reguly. However, Pápay received from Budapest only four of Reguly’s songs

close to the end of his trip. What he had with him was Munkácsi’s Vogul songs, which were sang

to Munkácsi in the South in a different dialect then what was spoken in the Northern Ob where

Pápay spent most of his time. Despite the lack of time to work with the Reguly collection he was

still able to decipher them with the help local singers. Pápay also recorded Hanti songs and folk

tales on his own adding more to what Reguly and Munkácsi collected. One of his most valuable

observations was witnessing the Hanti sword dance and an animal sacrifice. How he came to

decipher the songs and how he was able to be present in a pagan sacrifice I will show in this

chapter.

In terms of linguistics the third expedition yielded a rich harvest. Sadly his early death

prevented him from finishing his work on his collection. Only a few publications of his on the

Hanti were published after the expedition. This was due to the fact that during the 19th century,

linguistics went through rapid changes in methodology. This meant that from the dawn of the
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century succeeding generations of philologists and linguists often could not use the methods

utilized by their teachers because these methods outdated in a rapid pace. This was also the

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 situation for Pápay. By the time he finished his work on the Hanti collection his vowel system

based on Munkácsi was obsolete.255

Regarding the members of the expedition Hungarian secondary literature is most

abundant on Pápay.256 His handwritten diary however is still unpublished, the first part of it can

be found in the archives of the Protestant College of Debrecen the second part in the libraries of

Budapest in the Bibliotheca Pápayensis collection. It is evident from the diary that he did not

spent as much time on detailing his everyday life as Jankó did possibly because he was too busy

editing his linguistic collections.

1. Work in St. Petersburg and Helsinki

Rusvai writes that Pápay left Hungary during the winter of 1897 for St. Petersburg where

he stayed for almost four month. The plan was to study Russian and get in contact with Finnish

and Russian linguists. In Petersburg he was welcomed by Pósta and Jankó, both of them were

already there with their families. Pápay spent time visiting museums although that was not his

main aim; he thought that mastering Russian, however difficult it was, had to be his focus during

his short stay. He took Russian lessons from his English landlord named Marchal for thirty

rubles. While taking Russian, Pápay was busy working on the Samoyed and Hanti languages.
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During his short stay in Petersburg his frustration with the Russian language grew. It is fair to

255
Rusvai, Julianna, Pápay József kéziratos Debreceni hagyatéka [The handwritten bequest of József Pápay at
Debrecen], (DE Bölcsészettudományi Kar, 2005), 169. I am referring to identifying suffixes and assigning
diacritical marks for vowels; which is crucial in Finno-Ugric languages where the intonation defines the meaning of
a word. During this time Setälä was working tirelessly on developing a standardized system for the phonetic system
of the Finno-Ugric languages. Papp, István, Leíró Magyar hangtan [Hungarian phonetics] (Budapest, 1966), 31-34.
256
Just to name a few authors who wrote on Pápay: Fazekas Jenő (1934), Csűry Bálint (1935), Csinády Gerő (1962),
Bakró-Nagy Marianne (1973), etc.

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 point out here that the idea that one could master Russian in a few months got the better of

him.257

While working in Petersburg a heated debate developed between the scholars and Zichy

on where to go for fieldwork and how long this should take. Pápay, as it was expected, wanted to

leave for the city of Tobolsk as soon as it was possible and not waste time on leisure trips with

the count. Yet for the team it was still unsure if the count would begin the expedition since back

in Hungary Zichy was receiving such negative feedback from various newspapers that it greatly

upset him and for a while he considered calling it off. Zichy was particularly upset about the fact

that the MTA never considered discussing his plans at any of their scholarly meetings. Even

more troubling for Pápay was the growing dislike between Pósta and Jankó. The latter two spent

considerable time together on this trip creating their own personal bubble of conflict that I think

left Pápay on the periphery of their relationship.258

From Petersburg Pápay went to Helsinki (Helsingfors) where he met with the most

eminent Finnish scholars like Emil Setälä, Heikki Paasonen, Kustaa F. Karjalainen, rjö

Wichmann, Julius Mikkola and Otto Donner.259 In Tobolsk he reconnected with Karjalainen who

spent four years studying the Hanti between 1898 and 1902. The two scholars spent three weeks

together working in museums and comparing notes; Karjalainen left a great impression on
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Pápay. In my opinion, we can observe here the shortcoming of the Zichy expedition, namely the

lack of time. Whereas Karjalainen spent two years mastering Russian, Pápay had less than three

months. This just shows that the Finnish scholars were able to conduct research on a completely

different scale than the Hungarian scholars. This was on the one hand due to better financing on

257
Rusvai, 48.
258
Ibid, 23, 49.
259
Ibid, 91.

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 the other due to the fact that Finland was under Russian rule therefore traveling to Siberia was

easier for the Finns. Since the journey from Odessa to Astrakhan has been detailed in the diaries

of Pósta and Jankó there is no need here to repeat the story. Pápay left the group in Tiflis on the

day when Jankó’s diary starts to visit the Hanti, thus Pápay had a headway compared to the rest

of the group.

2. Trip to Obdorsk

After leaving the team in Tiflis, Pápay stayed three weeks in the city of Kazan, which

was the first place where he could begin his research. At Kazan he met two Finno-Ugric scholars

Nikolaevich Smirnoff and Feodorovich Katanov. In town Pápay bought books on the Bashkir,

Tatar and Chuvash languages, which he mailed back to Hungary for the MTA. Furthermore,

Pápay met pagan Chuvash people in the vicinity of Kazan. As much as he tried he could not get

any information out of them regarding their pagan believes. From his first encounters with the

indigenous people Pápay had to realize, as Jankó did, that the locals were thoroughly russified

moreover, that the pagans were afraid to share their religious secrets with an outsider.260

After a weeklong journey from Kazan, Pápay arrived at Tobolsk where he met

Karjailainen with whom he worked together for three weeks in the local Bibliotheca Sibrica;
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while still being considerably ahead of the team.261 That is why it came as great surprise for him

when he accidently ran into Zichy in Tobolsk on June 30th. The truth was that Pápay, according

260
Pápay, József, Nyelvészeti tanulmány utam az északi Osztjákok födljén [My linguistic study in the lands of the
eastern Osztyaks] (Budapest, Budapesti Szemle, 345. szam [publication] 1905), 6-8.
261
Ibid, 9.

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 to the schedule, should have been with the Hanti already but he was wasting precious time in

Tobolsk, unable to find a boat to take him up river.262

Finally on July 1st his boat arrived and in the middle of the night he left city up river. On

board he met his first live Hanti. His name was Ivan Jevdakimovics, a Russified local. 263 Ivan

was on board with his family to help navigate the captain of the ship. Pápay observed every

move of this family with great enthusiasm. But he soon became disappointed when he realized

that few Hanti lived on this leg of the river. Unable to meet Hantis he occupied himself with

making drawings of the landscape from the boat.264 At Berjozov he was welcomed by the chief

of police who showed him around in town and provided a room for him to stay in. The next day

he received a Russian guide who spoke Hanti, together they visited Hanti homes in the slums of

the town but they found only one family at home. They entered this family’s room where two

women were weaving textiles. Pápay got the younger women to answer his questions regarding

the names of certain objects in the room. But the other older woman was less then welcoming

thus Pápay decided to avoid conflict and left.265 Pápay wanted to continue up North as soon as it

was possible but he needed an interpreter for his journey. After a few days he found a Russian

named Kokulin Andrejevich who spoke some Hanti. In the meantime he also had a boat made in

which he continued his journey. The diary has spares references to what took place up river since
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he was busy recording the Hanti songs his two shipmates were constantly singing for him. 266

Although Pápay wanted to decipher the Hanti songs of Reguly he was unable to attain a

copy from the MTA beforehand thus with great delay they sent after him four heroic songs. He

262
Rusvai, 33-334, 51.
263
Pápay, 10-11.
264
Rusvai, 52.
265
Pápay,14.
266
Rusvai, 53.

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 only had Munkácsi’s Vogul songs that he read out for the Voguls he met. 267 His trip to Obdorsk

was lest then fruitful since few Hanti lived in the region and those he did find were hostile

towards him and avoided contact as much as they could. The only noteworthy achievement was

that he met an aged Vogul named Urtipenkov who told him a few folk tales. A few days later he

reached a deserted village where he was able to find only one Hanti called Siberov Vaska 268 who

stayed behind whilst the rest of the villagers were out on their hunting grounds. Pápay spent ten

days with him and worked the men tirelessly. Vaska told tales, sang songs and explained the

names of material objects in the camp. But even this wok had its setbacks. Vaska would often get

tiered or irritated by Pápay thus it was unpleasant to work with him in the end Vaska literary ran

away from him never to be heard from again.269

3. Life in Obdorsk

Obdorsk was built over a Hanti fortress on the Northern end of the Ob and served as an

important trade hub for the region. An Orthodox mission and traders ruled the town side by side,

and as was expected their relationship was far from serene. Pápay often found himself in the

midst of internal struggles and he indeed felt uneasy at Obdorsk since no one was particularly

happy having him there. But it was the Hantis who were at the receiving end of the stick in town.
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The priests were there to convert them and by doing so destroying their ancient way of life while

the traders in town ruthlessly exploited the locals for their own commercial interest. On top of

this arrived Pápay to harass them with his questions and snoop around their homes. No wonder

267
Pápay, 16.
268
Ibid, 20.
269
Rusvai, 54.

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 the Hantis were suspicious of him at first and it was with great sacrifice that he was able to

convince them to let down their guards.

At first it was difficult for Pápay to find someone in town who would be able to help him

with the songs. This was due to the successful Russification that left few locals knowing their

mother tongue. Another problem was that most Hanti only returned in late September form their

fishing grounds. Even then, they were useless since the Hanti return was marked by the arrival of

large quantities of vodka and weeks of drunkenness. It was the first sign of relief when around

mid October, Sobrin Andrej arrived who was the Hanti helper of August Ahlqvist. Pápay

immediately hired him but Sobrin’s alcohol addiction made the work nearly impossible.

Moreover, his health began to fail him; in addition by January he grew homesick as he realized

that most of the expedition was already back in Hungary. But his work was far from over.270

Luckily for Pápay he found a Hanti named Muchrin who tried to help him decipher the

Munkácsi songs. Muchrin had an outstanding knowledge of folk songs but he had little interest

and patience in helping Pápay thus the work became tiresome over time still, he had no other

options but to rely on his more or less sober source. Finally he embarked on his mission to visit

the Hanti in their nomadic settlements. He bought a sledge with four reindeers and dressed up in

animal skin just as the Hanti did to protect himself from the cold and with Muchrin and Sobrin
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he headed out for the frozen lands of Siberia. I would argue that his act of dressing up as a Hanti

could be connected to romanticism. In a way he wanted to become the people he was observing,

his romantic spirit wanted to transform into a Hanti. It is interesting to put him in contrast with

Jankó who never dressed up as a Hanti but rather took on the role of a Russian officer. Between

270
Pápay, 22.

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 the two scholars we can see that one was drawn to humble romanticism the other to mild

authoritarianism.271

4. First trip to the Hanti

His stay with the Hanti lasted for three weeks. During this time he traveled from one

encampment to the next. At first the locals received him with suspicion but after a while they got

used to this Hungarian dressed in animal fur. He returned to Obdorsk on November 4th to learn

that the Hanti of Vulpasli were in the midst of their seven-day pagan sacrificial celebration.

Without resting he immediately embarked to find them and observe their pagan ritual. He was

particularly interested in the famous Hanti sword dance that has been recorded previously by

Russians from secondary sources, yet no foreigner who witnessed it ever wrote about the dance.

The trip to Vulpasil was slow and we can imagine the horror of the Hanti guides leading Pápay.

According to Pápay’s report the guides most certainly believed that he was going there as a

Russian chinovnik to punish them for practicing pagan rituals.272

5. Hanti Pagan Festival

When he finally reached the yurt, which was actually more like a teepee, he found thirty
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men and women inside. Muchrin, who Pápay called Péter, had a hard time convincing the Hanti

that Pápay was there as a friend and he meant them no harm. Still the locals were far from happy

to see him and decided to keep him in the teepee as much as they could. The celebration had two

parts to it the animal sacrifice that took place at a separate teepee and the dancing. After a few

271
Rusvai, 61-62.
272
Pápay, 24.

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 hours of him trying to get his female “captors” drunk on vodka, men arrived to perform the

sword dance.273

Men who stood in two lines with swords in their hands did the dance. Between them

came the shaman, in this case a female, with two hammers in her hand, which she slammed

together occasionally and in response the men yelled hay!, and swung their swords in the air.

This went on for thirsty minutes. Next came a “theatrical act” when two men, one dressed as a

women, entered the tent and performed a comedy accompanied by dance and songs. These two

acts then repeated each other until three in the morning.274

On the morrow after much deliberation the Hanti allowed Pápay to observe their

sacrifice, which took place in two phases. First they brought two young white reindeers. The

animals were taken next to a black sledge that was turned upside down and was covered with

sacrificial blood. The men built a large fire next to it then they strangled the two animals whilst

holding burnt trousers over their heads. Strangely, the Hanti did not cook the meat but eat the

reindeers raw. To celebrate their sacrifice the men held various physical games.275

The next phase took place inside the idol tent, which was specifically erected to house the

Gods. The Gods were usually made of wood with a silver face cover and they were dressed in

traditional dresses. Inside the dress people stuffed their offerings to the Gods. When the
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Christians arrived in 1712 to spread the word of universal love and toleration their first act was

to burn every wooden idol they found. Luckily, the cornered Hanti were able to hide a few idols

273
Ibid, 25.
274
Ibid, 26.
275
Ibid, 27.

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 in the woods. Ever since that time the Gods had to be brought in for the celebration from the

woods and after they had to be returned.276

The sacrifice went as follows, first the men killed the animal outside then they brought in

the dead animal. All who entered the tent had to bow three times before the God then sit around

the fire. After presenting the animal to the God they handed out parts of it to each other. At the

same time two wizards entered the tent with a log in their hands. The wizards chanted for a while

then they threw their logs on the fire. Soon they created such unbearable heat that Pápay was

sweating from it. The night ended with more sword dance and festivities.277 Pápay’s description

of these events is important because he witnessed firsthand such a secretive ritual and actually

lived to write about them.

6. Trip to Poluj

The next day Pápay returned to Obdorsk to record his experience. He noted with

enthusiasms that now that he attended a sacrifice the Hanti were more helpful; possibly because

they began to trust him. His next trip took him to the Poluj stream to visit families he already

knew from Obdorsk. With Muchrin on his side he stayed for one week with the family of Mada

who was the caretaker of the idols in the region. Pápay was able to record many tales about the
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Gods, even one about the history of Mada’s tribe. This was identical to the story of Hunor and

Magyar, which tells the tale of how these brothers chased a deer until they arrived to their new

276
Ibid, 29.
277
Ibid, 28-29. I witnessed similar pagan practice in Mongolia during the annual Naadam festival.

132
 homeland. Sadly, the singer in the village was not fond of Pápay and never sang for him. Still, it

was a productive week for Pápay.278

By January 14th the Reguly copies have reached him thanks to his professor Simonyi, and

he found a Hanti named Selimov Mikolka who was known to be the best singer in the region.

Yet even he could not understand Reguly’s songs. It was a painstaking effort from Pápay to

break up the continuous notes of Reguly. Day and night they set together and sang, meanwhile

Pápay was afraid when will Mikolka stand up and leave him. During the same month Puris a

pagan singer arrived to town for the Christmas festivities. Between Pápay, Mikolka and Puris the

work became an ego competition of “who knew more” about folk songs. Until May 29 th Pápay

tirelessly worked on the Reguly material putting his own work on the side, while he often fell ill

with fever.

7. Solving the riddle with Kirikori

However, since the Reguly collection came from the Berjozov region in the south where

the Hanti spoke with a different dialect in order to crack the songs he had to travel there to find

the same tribes that Reguly worked with. As Pápay hoped, this trip was short and became a great

success. Next to the River Little Ob, Pápay became acquainted with a family that had a nephew
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who was the son of a shaman and a great singer. The young man was called Kirikori and when

he arrived to meet Pápay they immediately signed a contract that stated the Kirikori will stay

with Pápay in Berjozov for two month and will work with him on the Reguly songs.279

278
Ibid, 30-32.
279
Ibid, 37.

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 Kirikori knew many heroic songs besides; he knew and understood every aspect of

animal sacrifices. However, Reguly’s songs, although they came from Kirikori’s dialect, were

mostly concerned with the bear-cult, which the singer was not as familiar with. This problem

was solved when Pápay was introduced to Mikiskin Vaska who was an expert on bear songs

from the Kasam region. The work between the two singers soon became a competition about folk

songs. Every day they came up with new songs and tales to entertain Pápay. Yet the fun did not

last as long as the contract stated. After a month or so Kirikori became irreversibly homesick,

thus he packed up and left. Urtipenkov who spoke Vogul and Hanti replaced Kirikori. With his

help Pápay was able to decipher Munkácsi’s Vogul songs.280 By this time it was already June in

1899 and Pápay’s health was in a limbo. Fearing that his vitality will not support him much

longer he decided to return to Budapest.

8. The scientific publication

Pápay’s scientific report appeared as the fifth volume of the Zichy expedition in 1905.

The publication has two parts, first Pápay discusses the life of Reguly in great detail; the second

part is his corrections of Reguly’s songs with parallel German translation. Pápay described

Reguly as a linguist who saw the connection between Hungarian and Turkic languages but this
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only proved for him that the Magyars were Asians and not what language family they belonged

to.281 Reguly used the theory of the German linguist Karl Friedrich Becker, which Pápay thought

was outdated by his time that is why he chose to rely on Setälä’s system. In Russia, Reguly was

helped by a local Hanti named Baktjar who told him folk tales and songs but he also relied on the

280
Ibid, 39-41.
281
Pápay, József, Az Osztják népköltési gyűjtemény V. kötet [The collection of Osztyak folk poetry V. volume]
(Budapest, 1905), xii-xiii.

134
 local priests for dictionaries and translations. In this way he combined linguistics and philology.

During his trip Reguly wrote down bear songs and witnessed the sacrifice of a horse. 282 The

reason why Pápay decided to visit the Hanti because Reguly was unable to finish his work with

them and Pápay sought to continue in his footsteps. In this sense as the chapter showed, Pápay

not just continued in his footsteps he also went further then Reguly ever did.

Considering the hardships he encountered Pápay did an outstanding work amongst the

Hanti. Not just that he was able to decipher Reguly’s and some of Munkácsi’s heroic songs but

he collected a large collection of new tales and songs on his own. Up until the achievements of

Pápay, Finnish and Hungarian efforts to systematize the language of the Hanti were in vain

although both nations’ scholars have collected songs amongst the Hanti. But the fact that Pápay

went to the Hanti, which Hunfalvy did not do, and he lived long enough, unlike Reguly, helped

him achieve his goal. The Zichy expedition gained him recognition in Hungarian academic

circles as the man who deciphered the Reguly songs.

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282
Ibid, xxiii-liii.

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 Chapter VII. Conclusions to the Thesis

In this concluding chapter I will first give some additional information on the scientific

publications. Then I will discuss the aftermath for the scholars after they returned from Asia.

Additionally, I will write on the MTA’s relationship with Zichy and lastly I will conclude this

thesis by turning back to Hungarian Orientalism and Romanticism.

1. Brief conclusion on the scientific publications

The scientific publications came out between 1900 and 1905 in six volumes. The first

was Jankó’s unfinished work on fishing that is missing its second part due to his early death. The

second was Ernő Csiki’s zoological studies; the third and fourth is Pósta’s archeological

publication. The fifth was Pápay’s Hanti poetry and the last one was Zichy’s personal

observations. In addition, the first expedition’s scientific work was published in two volumes. In

the next two paragraphs I would like to briefly summarize Csiki’s zoological work because he

did not receive a separate chapter in this thesis due to the fact that he did not write a diary. Yet,

without mentioning Csiki this work would be incomplete.

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At the outset of the third expedition Zichy was asked by minister Gyula Wlassics to take

Csiki for the sake of zoology. With the help of an extensive international team Csiki catalogued

2532 species out of which 167 were previously unknown. Thirteen of the new species were

named after Zichy like the Aphodius Zichyi and the Limnetis Zichyi but Csiki and Pósta also got

their names taken by some crawling creatures in Siberia. Yet we do not know why Csiki did not

name any of the new animals after Jankó or Pápay maybe he disliked them so much that he did

136
 not deem them worthy of such honors. When they finished the publication Zichy gave the entire

zoological collection to the Hungarian National Museum.283

In his scientific publication Csiki, just like all the other members of the expedition,

complained about the shortness of time that was allocated for his work. Moreover, weather was

seldom on his side. In Southern Russia heavy snowfall, in Tiflis long rainy days prevented him

from work. Astrakhan and Kazan were the first stops where he was able to catch bugs; some of

the interesting bugs were eating a dead porcupine when he found them. On route he visited the

zoological exhibitions of every major town he passed through. About the exhibitions he

concluded that the vast majority of the exhibited bugs were from collections brought in from

Germany and had little to do with local wildlife. Hunting was one part of their methodology for

collecting animals, Zichy was particularly eager to kill bears in Siberia but they never found any.

Csiki acquired much of the zoological collection when the ships stopped to pick up firewood, an

operation that only took a few hours. Thus, the richest harvest was gained in Mongolia where

they traveled on horseback and Csiki had time to roam the steppe without a strict timeframe. The

large zoological collection was another notable feat of the expedition.284

2. Aftermath for the scholars

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After Zichy’s team returned from Asia, the MTA and the public applauded their

achievements and as a show of gratitude Zichy became the member of the Hungarian Academy

of Science (1899) and of the Geographical Society. The city of Budapest also named a street

after him in the VI District behind the Basilica to commemorate his achievements for the

283
Ernő, Csiki, Zichy Jenő gróf harmadik Ázsiai utazásának állatani eredményei, ed. Dr. Horvath Géza [The
zoological achievements of count Jenő Zichy’s third Asian expedition], (Budapest, 1901), i-xi.
284
Ibid, xii-xli, xx-xxix.

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 country. Kardoss from 1891-1919 taught at the University of Kolozsvár and after the Romanian

takeover of Transylvania he helped relocate the university to Budapest where he was a professor

of Hungarian history until 1911. Pósta in 1899 became the chair of archeology at the University

of Kolozsvár where he trained the new generations of Hungarian archeologists. Pápay after the

expedition began his long struggle with his ailing health. It took him many years to organize his

collection from the Zichy expedition. Meanwhile he became the member of the Ethnographic

Society and finally the chair of Finno-Ugric studies at the Protestant College of Debrecen until

his death.

As I tried to show in the thesis the Zichy expeditions were scientifically a complex

undertaking. On the one hand they stirred up controversy with the first and second expeditions in

scientific circles from Budapest to St. Petersburg; on the other, the third expedition was a

groundbreaking enterprise with benefit to Hungarian sciences. I would argue that besides the

team’s scientific work the most important achievement of theirs was to start a dialogue between

Finnish, Russian and Hungarian scholars. Zichy understood the need for comparative research

between East and West and supported this idea to the best of his abilities. Moreover, Zichy

proposed the establishment of a scientific organization or a committee that would only deal with

Hungarian Orientalism, which never came into existence but this idea shows that he was truly a
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visionary.285

285
Zichy, VI. volume, 87.

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 3. MTA’s relationship with Zichy

At the start, the negative reception of Zichy’s quest, the indifference of the MTA and

other scholarly circles in Hungary handicapped him. I believe with less negative criticism and

with more constructive advice and support even greater feats could have been achieved. The

major problem with the MTA in my opinion was in the essence of what the institution stood for

namely; that the institution itself embodied what the standard European scientific trends were at

the time. The MTA became the representative of Western sciences in Hungary. In this respect

the MTA had to conform to a European scientific norm, which they were seldom willing to

change for idealists like Zichy. This is evident during the first expedition when Zichy was

devoted to the Turkic linguistic theory and searched for the ancestors of the Magyars in the

Caucasus where the MTA thought it was not possible to find any trace of them; hence, he

received no help from them. The situation changed little with his announcement of his third

expedition. In fact, Zichy had to prove for the MTA with the outcome of his last expedition that

he can carry out scientific work, which the MTA thought worthy of acknowledgment and only

when he returned did he received their full backing.

During the 19th century the fields of archeology, linguistics, anthropology and
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ethnography was changing constantly. Zichy’s scholars’ constant struggles with the MTA can be

contributed to the fact that they individually were searching for their own ways in which they

could influence their fields of science. But this search for a new methodology was frequently

called into question by the authority on science, the MTA; for example, by Ottó Herman who

disagreed with many of Jankó’s ethnographic conclusions. Still Pósta’s comparative

archeological work from Minusinsk defined Hungarian archeology for decades, Pápay’s

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 linguistic data helped decipher the Reguly songs and Jankó collected significant ethnographic

data from the Hanti.286

The knowledge these scholars produced were important for Hungarian science. All of

them served as mediators of knowledge for the public and the scholarly audiences back in

Hungary. Jankó’s and Pápay’s Hanti collections were intended to inform the Hungarians about

the mythology of their ancestors, yet this attempt never fully materialized since few Hungarians

today actually know about Hanti mythology. The reason for this is that, especially in the 19 th

century, the Hantis were not viewed as a desirable ancestor compared to Attila the Hun who

embodied national romanticism more so then the Hanti God Torum.

4. Hungarian Orientalism and Romanticism

Géza Staud wrote that the idea of individual freedom was an important aspect of

Romanticism.287 For Orientalism this idea meant that the Hungarians imagined their Oriental kin

as free individuals untouched by modernity. The diaries of Pápay and Jankó although never

explicitly stated, have suggested to me that both of these men arrived to Asia with a sense of

romanticism towards their subjects of study. I believe they subconsciously hoped to find the

Siberian tribes in a state of enlightened purity and harmony with life. In other words they were
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searching for the “natural man” which was often found by Europeans in America amongst Native

American tribes. However, the reality they encountered could not have been further from their

romantic ideas.

286
Langó, 208-209.
287
Staud, Orientalizmus.

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 Both Jankó and Pápay were shocked by the poverty, ignorance, alcoholism, indifference,

starvation and primitiveness they encountered amongst the tribes. Both scholars viewed

Russification as a negative phenomenon because they operated under the romantic assumption

that modernity (Russification) was destroying the pure and free spirit of the natives. Their work

amongst the tribes, accordingly, became a self-appointed rescue mission. Both justified their acts

like grave robbery or intruding into communal sacrifices as “good deeds” because they were

saving whatever pureness was still left in these indigenous cultures, no matter how much it upset

the Hanti. Theoretically, in the spirit of national romanticism, if we would transplant this issue to

Hungary, then I would argue that they were saving the freedom and pureness of Hungarian

culture, which was damaged with the failed revolution of 1848-49 and was still in a crisis at the

turn of the century. I believe these scholars unconsciously projected the Hanti’s struggle against

the Russians as the Hungarians struggle against the Germans and Slavs back in Europe, thus,

transplanted the socio-cultural crisis of 19th century Hungary to Siberia. This transplanting of the

national struggle is evident in some of Jankó’s letters where he writes with great urgency on

doing research amongst the Finno-Ugric tribes before they disappear completely due to Russian

pressure. Following this line of thought, Jankó praised the Finns for resisting Russification and

for creating their own national revival. Jankó wrote in a letter to Wlassics that:
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…this nation [the Finns] is bound together by the strongest national feeling and
they are nurtured through their efforts to cultivate national culture in order to
save them from foreign influences even when surrounded by the most autocratic
empire in Europe [Romanov].288
In another letter Jankó wrote:

The national question here manifests itself in a cultural struggle in this struggle
the German, Estonian, Latvian, Livonian and Lithuanian stand against the
288
Kodolányi, 23, …e népet a legerősebb nemzeti érzés tartja össze s a legmagasabb nemzeti művelődés táplálja és
óvja meg a külső befolyásoktól még Európa legautokratább birodalmának keretében is.

141
 Russians…these national cultures fight a life and death struggle against the
cultural doctrines of Russian church and schools…289
These quotes are testaments to his awareness of this cultural struggle that every minority in the

Empire were engaged in against the Russians. The Hantis, due to their low birth rate, were

particularly sensitive to this and in his opinion were endangered by Russification. Jankó could

have never come to this conclusion without traveling to these regions and observing this for

himself.

In fact I agree with Staud’s notion that Hungarian national romanticism manifested itself

in the fullest sense in orientalism more specifically in Oriental travel. Orientalism in literature,

music or architecture can only give partial fulfillment for the romantic men. In orientalist

expeditions the free spirit wrapped in romantic ideas can come out and explore the far corners of

the earth to confront itself with a distant but reachable illusion. With expeditions there is a

physical journey that can be undertaken and completed; there is a way of escaping the present

and visiting the past in person. Thus the romantic idea of travel to the Orient can be fully realized

even if the romantic illusion leads to disillusion in the end. To illustrate Jankó’s romantic

tendecy I quote from a letter where he writes about his departure from the Hanti:

I left my small boat and stepped on the steamship, I felt like I woke from a
beautiful dream when the last island disappeared over the horizon…tears ran
down my face…and my soul cried out for my small boat I wanted to be back in the
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wilderness with my loyal, honest, fair, naive, childish Hanti...Its over! Its over! I
have to return to reality...290
As many thinkers have stated from Buddha to Sándor Márai: It is not the road that

matters but the journey. This romantic idea of travel, this psychological longing for distant lands
289
Ibid, 31-32. A nemzetiségi kérdés itt kultúrák kűzdelme, melyben a német, észt, lett, lív és litván áll az oroszszal
szemben…nemzeti művelődések vívnak élet halál harcot az orosz egyház és iskola által képviselt művelődéssel…
290
Ibid, 226. Elhagytam csolnakomat s a gőzhajóra léptem, úgy érezem, mintha egy gyönyörű álomból ébredtem
volna fel s mikor eltünt a láthatáron az utolsó ismert sziget is…könnyek tólultak szemembe s feledve minden
fáradalmat, lelkem visszasírt kicsiny csolnakomra, bevágytam a vadonba az én hű, becsületes, őszinte,
tisztességtudó, naív, gyermekes osztjákjaim közé…Vége! Vége! Vissza kell térnem a reális életbe...

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 what I believe drove Zichy and his men. Be as it may, the Zichy expeditions were an important

milestone in Hungarian Orientalism. Although the members of the expeditions were in a constant

battle with the idealist Zichy without his willingness to organize and pay for the expeditions

none of them would have been able to travel to Asia on their own and make their mark on

Hungarian science.

From a historical perspective the expeditions have two angles. Firstly, they were a

continuation of a nationalist romantic tradition that reached its zenith in the 19th century. But

even this Hungarian Orientalist tradition by the time of these expeditions has been through a

transition. Expeditions during the first half of the century, like the János Jerney, Besse or Orlay

undertakings, were deeply imbedded in romanticism. By the second half of the century

expeditions and individual searches for the ancient homeland became more and more scientific

and less romantic in their approach; in many ways due to the MTA. Secondly, the Zichy

expeditions closed the book on such enterprises in Hungarian history. The First World War and

the subsequent collapse of the monarchies of Eastern Europe and their empires fundamentally

restructured Hungary. The lunching of such adventures as Zichy’s became problematic due to the

rise of multiple new borders and totalitarian governments.

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143
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Obrusánszky, Borbála, Szentkatolnai Bálint Gábor Újraértékelése [The revaluation of Szentkatolnai Bálint Gábor].
Magyar Tudomány, no. 3 (2007).

Olson, James, S., ed. An ethnographical dictionary of the Russian and Soviet Empires. London: Greenwood Press,
1994.

Papp, István, Leíró Magyar hangtan [Hungarian phonetics]. Budapest, 1966.

Rusvai, Julianna, Pápay József kéziratos Debreceni hagyatéka [The handwritten bequest of József Pápay at
Debrecen]. DE Bölcsészettudományi Kar, 2005.

Said, Edward, Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1994.

Schimmelpenninck, David, van der Oye, Russian Orientalism. London: Yale University Press, 2010.

Szendrei László, A Turánizmus [Turanism]. Gödöllő, Attraktor, 2010.

Szikossy, Ildikó and Szemőke, Endre; Jankó János. Budapest: Pulszky Társaság, Magyar Múzeumi Arcképcsarnok.

Tóth, László, A kavarok (kabarok) katonai és politikai szerepe [The military and political role of the Kabars].
Hadtörténeti Közlemények, 126/3.

Veer, Peter van der, Imperial Encounters: religion and modernity in India and Britain. New Jersey, Princeton
University Press, 2001.

Zichy, Mihály. Zichy József utazásai I-II [The travels of József Zichy I-II]. Budapest: OSZK és az Írók Alapítványa
- Széphalom Könyvműhely, 2013.

Online Sources:
Adolf Bastian’s biography.
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/55606/Adolf-Bastian.

Antal Reguly’s biography.

http://www.rubicon.hu/magyar/oldalak/1819_julius_11_reguly_antal_szuletese/.

Béla Pósta Society.

http://www.postabela.ro/postabela.html.
CEU eTD Collection

Béla Széchenyi’s Terebess biography.

http://terebess.hu/keletkultinfo/lexikon/szechenyibela.html

Bernáth Munkácsi’s biography.

http://mek.oszk.hu/00300/00355/html/ABC09732/10839.htm

Borbála, Obrusánszky. “Megtalálata-e a magyarokat Juliánus barát?” [Did friar Julianus found Hungarians].
http://epa.oszk.hu/00900/00939/00040/text.htm

Constantine, Porphyrogenitus. “De administrando imperio” and the “De ceremoniis aulae Byzantinae.”
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/133971/Constantine-VII-Porphyrogenitus.

Fajcsák, Györgyi. ”Keleti Művészeti Kiállítás” [Eastern Art Exhibition].

http://epa.oszk.hu/02100/02120/00034/pdf/ORSZ_BPTM_TBM_34_185.pdf

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 György, Lajos. “Gábor Bálint emlékezete” [The remembrance of Bálint Gábor], (1945), 82-84.
http://adatbank.transindex.ro/html/alcim_pdf6073.pdf.

Herman Ottó Museum’s web page on Herman’s biography.

http://www.hermuz.hu/hom/index.php/hu/2011-07-06-20-20-21/herman-otto-eletrajz

János Besse’s life this is the Terebess web page.

http://terebess.hu/keletkultinfo/lexikon/besse.html.

Kontler, László. “Distances celestial and terrestrial Maximilian Hell’s Arctic expedition of 1768-1769: contexts and
responses.”
http://szijarto.web.elte.hu/program/kontler_hell_ms.pdf.

Magyar Életrajzi Lexicon [Hungarian Biographical Lexicon].

http://mek.oszk.hu/00300/00355/html/ABC17155/17265.htm

Map of the third expedition.

http://m.cdn.blog.hu/sz/sziberia-neprajz/image/zichy3terkep.jpg

Mór Décsy biography.

http://www.fsz.bme.hu/mtsz/mhk/csarnok/d/dechy.htm.

National Geographic’s web page for the genome project.

https://genographic.nationalgeographic.com/

Pál Hunfalvy’s biography.

http://mek.oszk.hu/00300/00355/html/ABC05727/06648.htm.

Rusvai Julianna. “Simonyi Zsigmond és Pápay József.”

http://epa.oszk.hu/00100/00188/00045/pdf/130409.pdf.

Staud, Géza. “Az orientalismus a Magyar Romantikában” [Orientalism in Hungarian Romanticism] (1931).
http://mek.oszk.hu/01300/01385/html/.

This is an article on the archeological finds from Lake Uleg 2013.

http://www.flagmagazin.hu/bulvarvilag/szenzacios_magyar_leletekre_bukkantak_azsiaban

Wosinsky’s biography from the Wosinsky Mór Museum’s website.

http://wmmm.hu/a_muzeum/a_muzeum_tortenete.

Zichy Jenő’s biography from the records of the Hungarian Parliament.

http://www.ogyk.hu/e-konyvt/mpgy/alm/al905_10/433.htm
CEU eTD Collection

This is the OSZK webpage for the photographs from the first expedition.
http://keptar.oszk.hu/html/kepoldal/index.phtml?id=037390

On page 37 of this pdf there is a map for Besse’s route in the Northern Caucasus.
http://www.magyarormeny.hu/uploads/file/fuzetekfileok/EOGYKE_2012DEC_internetre.pdf

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 Appendix
Since many names appear in the thesis in this appendix you can find the majority of the persons I
refere to in my text.

Agirov Kanamat: Circassian guide of Zichy during the first expedition.

Alex Heikel (1851-1924): Finnish archeologist and ethnographer who led multiple expeditions to
Siberia and Central Asia.
Árpád (845-907): Leader of the Magyar tribal confederation, which took the Carpathian Basin
and the founder of the Árpád dynasty.
Arvid Neovius (1861-1916): Finnish philosophist.
August Ahlqvist (1829-1889): Finnish poet, Finno-Ugric linguist who contributed greatly to the
reformation of the Finnish language.
Baron Loránt Eötvös: Head of the MTA between 1889-1905.
Béla Lukács (1847-1901): Member of the Parliament, minister of transport and commerce during
the Millenia Exhibition.
Bestian Adolf (1826-1905): German polymath known for his contributions to ethnography and
anthropology.
Edward Said (1935-2003): Palestinian-American literary theorist who is most known for his
criticim of orientalism in a postcolonial context.
Emil Setälä (1864-1935): Finnish politician and linguist, he was the embassador to Hungary
between the World Wars.
Ernest Renan (1823-1892): French philologist, philosopher, religious scholar and intellectual.
Ernő Dániel (1843-1923): Minister of Commerce under the Bánffy government. He played a
CEU eTD Collection

major role in organizing the Millenia Exhibition.

Flóris Rómer (1815-1889): Hungarian archeologist and art historian.
Friar Julianus: Between 1235 and 1237 he made two journes to Asia where he located the
possible ancient homeland of the Magyars.
Friar Otto: Between 1231 and 1234 Otto made trips to the Caucasus to baptize Hungarian tribes
in the region.
General Alexander Baryatinsky (1814-1879): From 1856 governor of the Caucasus. He pacified
the gurellas form the mountains and defeated Imam Shamil.

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 Géza Staud (1906-1988): Hungarian theather critique.
Grand Duke Nicholai Mihalkovich (1859-1914): A politicly liberal member of the Romanov
family. He stayed extensively on his lands in Georgia, where he often entertained Zichy.
Gustave Radde (1831-1903): German naturalist and mountaineer. He explored the Caucasus and
settled in Tiflis where he ran the Caucasian Museum where Zichy’s team often worked.
Gyula László (1910-1998): Hungarian historian and archeologist who worked on the dual-
conquest theory.
Gyula Wlassics (1852-1937): Hungarian politician, Minister of Religion and Education 1895-
1903.
Imam Shamil (1797-1871): Avar revolutionary leader in the Caucasus. Defeated at the Battle of
Ghunib in 1859 by the Russian forces.
Issac Jacob Schmidt (1779-1847): Lived in Russia specialized in Mongolian and Tibetian
languagues. Translated the Bible into Kalmyk.
István Kiszely (1932-2012): Hungarian anthropologist.
Jankó János’ and József Pápay’s Hanti and Mansi helpers: Nikiforov, Urtipenkov, Siberov
Vaska, Sobrin Andrej, Muchurin, Selimov Mikolka, Kirikori, Mikskin Vaska, Baktjar.
János Jerney (1800-1855): In 1844-1845 he traveled to Southern Russia and located the two pre-
conquest territioires of the Hungarian tribes known as Levédia and Etelköz.
János Orlay (1770-1829): Hungarian doctor who lived in Odessa. In 1819 he traveld the
Caucasus to find the ancient homeland of the Hungarians.
János Sajnovics (1733-1785): Hungarian philologist who belonged to the Jesuit order. He was
the first Hungarian to write an extensive study on the relationship between Lapp and Hungarian
languages.
Johan Reinhold Asperin (1845-1920): Finnish entomologist traveled to Karelia, Siberia and
Central Asia.
Josef Dobrovsky (1753-1829): Czech philologist, historian and archeologist.
CEU eTD Collection

József Hampel (1849-1913): Hungarian archeologist advocated comparative archeological work

between Russia and Hungary. Pósta’s work had a great influence on him.
Károly Pápai (1861-1893): Finno-Ugrist linguist who accompanied Munkácsi to the Hantis in
1888.
Károly Torma (1829-1897): Hungarian archeologist known for his work on Roman archeology
in Hungary.
Kokulin Andrejevich: Jankó’s Russian helper who spoke Hanti.

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 Kunik A. A. (1814-1899): Russian philologist, historian and ethnographer. He articulated the
theory that the early Rus state structure had Normann influence. He also maintained an active
friendship with Antal Reguly.
Kustaa F. Karjalainen (1871-1919): Finnish linguist and ethnographer.
László Berzenczey (1820-1884): Politician who after the failed 1849 revolution immigrated to
the USA. From San Francisco he traveled to China to find the birthplace of the Magyars in Asia
but he could not go past Hong Kong. He fought in the Crimean Wars then a few years later
traveled through Siberia to Mongolia and to India in search of Hungarians.
Mathias Castren (1813-1852): Finnish linguist and ethnologist. He and Budenz founded Finno-
Ugric philology. Castren made several trips to Lappland, Karelia and Sibera.
Max Müller (1823-1900): German linguist who translated the Vedas into English, well known
scholar of Sanskrit and Indology.
Maximillianus Hell (1720-1792): Jesuit priest and astronomer who observed the transition of
Venus in the Kingdom of Denmark-Norway with Sajnovics.
Nicholas II. (1868-1918): The last Romanov Tsar on the throne. Zichy traveled Russia during his
reign.
Otto Donner (1835-1909): Finnish linguist and politician expert on Sanskrit but also studied
Finno-Ugric languages.
Palóczi Horváth (1908-1973): Hungarian writer known for his reportings on the rise of Nazism
in Europe.
Péter Langó: Contemporary Hungarian archeologist specializes in the conquest and Árpád
periods.
Philip Johan von Strahlenberg (1676-1747): Geographer, cartographis who worked Russia.
Studied the Mongol tribes and wrote a German-Kalmyk dictionary.
Sergeij Jackevich: Governor of Yekaterinodar.
Silvestre de Sacy (1758-1838): French linguist and orientalist.
CEU eTD Collection

William Jones (1746-1794): British lawyer and philologist who studied the relationship between
Greek, Latin and Sanskrit languages.
Zeloni Alexseyevich: Governor of Odessa between 1885-1898.
Zsigmond Simonyi (1853-1919): Finno-Ugrist linguist and the teacher of Pápay.

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