The ABANDONED Eden

by Gábor Margittai

WE HAVE THREE PUZZLING MYTHIC TALES, FOR WHICH I HAVE TRAVELLED AROUND THREE CONTINENTS WITH MY WIFE, ANITA MAJOR. WE HAVE DEVOTED YEARS TO VISIT ETHNIC GROUPS IN TÜRKIYE, KAZAKHSTAN AND EGYPT WHO HAVE FOR CENTURIES BELIEVED THAT THEIR FOREFATHERS ONCE CAME FROM HUNGARY AND ARE RELATED TO HUNGARIANS.

Macars In T Rkiye

During his travels, New York professor Ferenc Ispay received a strange request from a Hungarian member of the Jesuit order in Istanbul, a certain János Vendel: somewhere in Türkiye there is a small village called Macarköy (Magyarfalu, Hungarian village). The teacher had travelled hundreds of kilometres in Asia Minor, but no one had heard of Magyarfalu. He took a journey in the Toros Mountains with a forest ranger, into the nomadic world of the Yörük nomads. “Between Serik and Perge, I visited the newly established winter shelter of the Karakoyunlu tribe (...) The conversation went something like this: Tell the owner that I am Hungarian. We in Hungary know that the Yörüks and the Hungarians are related to each other. (...) The male population of the village sat in dignity at the tables set up in the small square. (...) “All eyes were on me,” recalls Ferenc Ispay of his research trip, “and I pointed to the ground and asked: Macarköy? I get an affirmative answer! Then I point my index finger at my chest and introduce myself: Macar! That is, that I am Hungarian. The brothers stood up one after the other. They surrounded me, stared at me, shook my hand, pulled me to their table. Without any further explanation, they understood the purpose of my visit.”

Magyarabs In Egypt

“Magyar families were the leaders in the villages where our ancestors lived,” said a prominent member of the Hungarian tribe during our visit. “The founders of these families came to Egypt with Sultan Selim. Our ancestor Ibrahim el-Magyar, but we also call him el-Magyarab or el-Magyari, he does the same, was a prominent figure in the Turkish army, and then a leader in charge in Nubia.”

Ibrahim el-Magyar, Abraham, the slave leader, captain of the forgotten garrison. Today, his descendants populate the few villages that remain. According to official figures, there are about 7,000 in total today.

Madjars In Kazakhstan

The third mythic tale takes us to the bottomless depths of Hungarian ancient history. The Kazakh steppe is home to the Madjar tribe of a few thousand people, which owes its existence to a miracle: for decades, the Russian empires of Tsarist and Stalinist Russia destroyed the people of the yurt settlements, shooting children, women helpless old men, and exiling them to the gulag, because the colonisers did not seek assimilation, but extermination. According to another, non-dominant view, this is where the handful of tribes with a kindred consciousness lives and still proudly claim to be Madjar, despite the Soviet terror that erased the past.

In the Torgay basin, the home territory of the Madjar tribe, there have long been stubborn peoples who have fought all invaders, the Mongol Dzungars, the Kalmyks, the Tsarist troops.

The author is a journalist