What does Trianon mean to Hungarians today?
The Hungarian Research Institute organised a conference as a way to remember the 100th anniversary of the Treaty of Trianon being signed. The presentations touched upon what Trianon means to Hungarians today, as well as what the peace after the World War ended meant regarding Central Europe and Hungary.
The purpose of the conference was to thoroughly present what Trianon meant for the Hungarian society. Not only how the borders and the population were affected, but also the impact the treaty had on culture, religion and military potential, reported InfoStart.
Gábor Horváth-Lugossy, the Director-General of the Hungarian Research Institute said that the Treaty still means a huge loss to the Hungarians in 2020. Trianon is “one of the black days, or a centuries rather, of Hungarian history.
The word loss comes to my mind immediately, or maybe tragedy, which came as a shock to our grandparents, great-grandparents back then. To someone today it may mean what remains, belonging, and a sense of survival, a sort of fight,” Horváth-Lugossy says. He thinks very few could survive the kind of wound that the Kingdom of Hungary and Hungarians sustained that day 100 years ago.
According to the Director-General, the events could have gone differently; it could have been done in a way, which would not have seen Hungary lose such a massive portion of people and territory.
One of the ways would have been for the Viennese court to let the Kingdom of Hungary catch up to itself by natural population growth instead of bringing many different nationalities into the country in the 18th century after the Turkish-Ottoman rule had ended.
“Hungary would have caught up to itself, these colonisations, different nationalities, only gave the disannexing parties an explanation, a right, something to grab onto, to say that really, they are not separating Hungary, they are only taking back their own part from the Kingdom of Hungary,” Horváth-Lugossy explained.
He added, that had the Austrian Hungarian Monarchy stopped staying together sooner, maybe Hungary would not have even been involved in the World War, or at least not the way it was.
Source: infostart.hu