Introduction

Abstract

In 1900, Hungary appeared to be a confident country. Four years earlier, the Millennium celebrations had paraded Hungarian achievements to the outside world, in fields as diverse as music, the fine arts, ethnography, justice, forestry and public health.¹ The director of the Royal Statistical Office, Jozsef Jekelfalussy, enthusiastically described the exhibition organized for the occasion as “a summary of the results of the development of a [nation over a] thousand years”.² Hungarian officials finally seemed to have succeeded in establishing the myth of national homogeneity, glossing over important differences in language, religion and regional traditions within what was broadly defined as the Kingdom of St Stephen. These officials may have been, according to Lee Congdon, “intoxicated with the heady wine of nationalism”,³ but their confidence was nonetheless largely justified.