Hungarian Agricultural Museum (Magyar Mezogazdasagi Muzeum)

Hungarian Turanism is a diverse phenomenon that revolves around an identification or association of Hungarian history and people with the histories and peoples of Central Asia, Inner Asia or the Ural region. It includes many different conceptions and served as a guiding principle for many political movements. It was most lively in the second half of the 19th century and in the first half of the 20th century. It is related to the concept of Turanism. Hungarian nobiliary historical tradition considered the Turkish peoples the closest relatives of Hungarians. This tradition was preserved in medieval chronicles as early as the 13th century. According to Chronica Hungarorum, the Hungarians are descendants of the Huns, and came from the Asian parts of Scythia, and Turks share this Scythian origin with them. This tradition served as starting point for the scientific research of the ethnogenesis of Hungarian people, which began in the 18th century, in Hungary and abroad. Sándor Kőrösi Csoma traveled to Asia in the strong belief that he could find the kindred of Magyars in Turkestan, amongst the Uyghurs.Before the Hungarian conquest of the Carpathian Basin, the Hungarians were semi-nomadic and their culture was similar to other steppe peoples. Most scientists presume a Uralic homeland for the ancient Hungarian conquerors . The proto-Hungarian tribes lived in the Eurasian forest steppe zone, and so these ancient ancestors of Hungarians and their relationship with other equestrian nomadic peoples has been and still is a topic for research.As a scientific movement, Turanism was concerned with research into Asian cultures in the context of Hungarian history and culture. It was embodied and represented by many scholars who had shared premises , and who arrived at the same or very similar conclusions. Turanism was a driving force in the development of Hungarian social sciences, especially linguistics, archaeology and Orientalism. Political Turanism was born in the 19th century, in response to the growing influence of Pan-Germanism and Pan-Slavism, seen by Hungarians as very dangerous to the nation, and the state of Hungary, because the country had large ethnic German and Slavic populations. This political ideology originated in the work of the Finnish nationalist and linguist Matthias Alexander Castrén, who championed the ideology of Pan-Turanism — the belief in the racial unity and future greatness of the Ural-Altaic peoples. He concluded that the Finns originated in Central Asia and far from being a small, isolated people, they were part of a larger community that included such peoples as the Magyars, the Turks, and the Mongols etc. Political Turanism was a romantic nationalist movement, which stressed the importance of common ancestry and cultural affinity between Hungarians and the peoples of the Caucasus and Inner and Central Asia, such as the Turks, Mongols, Parsi etc. It called for closer collaboration and political alliance between them and Hungary, as a means of securing and furthering shared interests and to counter the threats posed by the policies of the great powers of Europe. The idea for a Turanian brotherhood and collaboration was borrowed from the Pan-Slavic concept of Slavic brotherhood and collaboration.After the First World War, political Turanism played a role in the formation of Hungarian far-right ideologies because of its ethnic nationalist nature. It began to carry anti-Jewish sentiments and tried to show the existence and superiority of a unified Hungarian race. Nonetheless, Andrew C. Janos asserts that Turanism's role in the interwar development of far-right ideologies was negligible.In the communist era after the Second World War, Turanism was portrayed and vilified as an exclusively fascist ideology. Since the fall of communism in 1989 there has been a renewal of interest in Turanism.
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