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Saturday 16 February 2013

Serbia and Hungary


There is an exhibition of Serbian religious art in Hungary currently at the Balassi Institute, Brussels. The opening was held on 13 February; this is an edited text of my remarks. A video version of what I said can be found here or here.


We have been together a long time, Serbs and Hungarians. I did a little research this afternoon to look into the history and there was interaction between the Serbian and Hungarian monarchies from early on, despite the adherence of the one to Byzantium and the other to Rome. As every Hungarian schoolchild knows, or did when I was young, the relief by János Hunyadi of the siege of Nándorfehérvár (Beograd to the Serbs, but it’s the same “white castle”) in 1456 was a key event that halted the northward expansion of the Ottomans for several generations.

The same fate, conquest by the Ottomans overtook us both, though we were fortunate that Hungary was just that bit further to the north and thus at the outer limit of the Ottoman empire’s military capabilities and we were freed from the Ottomans a century and a half sooner. That allowed the kings of Hungary, by then the Hapsburgs, to allow Arsenije III to bring the 37,000 Serbian families to the Vojvodina as refugees. They then became the guardians of the marches, the graničari; their descendants live in Vojvodina to this day.

Some of the Serbs settled in Szentendre, (and in some other towns on the Danube, like Ráckeve) and were active in the water-borne trade on the Danube. The wealth of some of these merchants, the export-import multinationals of the time, was to pay for the religious art that we can see here tonight.

Of course there were unhappy interactions as well, in 1848-1849, and the Second World War brought about the lowest point, with vicious massacres on both sides. The truth about these terrible events is slowly being brought to light by Serbian and Hungarian historians working together.

But the meeting point between Western and Eastern Christianity produced its own complex interactions and mutual influences, which have left their mark on both parties. In sum, Western Christianity has always accepted a multiplicity of forms and complexity as a central features of life. The doctrine of Purgatory meant the acceptance of intermediacy between good and evil, between Heaven and Hell, together with the possibility of redemption. The Reformation meant an end to Catholic Universalism and gave rise to a competitive religious environment. Orthodox Christianity, on the other hand, insisted on the unity of the physical and the metaphysical, the transience of life on this earth, and the role of the collective together with the individual conscience.

The art produced by Western Christianity sought to portray beauty as the gift of God (in the south) and the fragility, emotion, and realism of religious belief (north of the Alps). Protestantism mostly abjured pictorial representation in the religious realm, although it built on the realism and was brought to its peak by Rembrandt. Orthodox art reflected something else. It emphasised the unchanging quality of the sacred, a stillness and relied on two-dimensionality to portray this.

What we can see here tonight is a subtle blend of the Orthodox style touched by elements of the Baroque, in a manner one never finds in Russia in St. Petersburg or Moscow or Pskov. The pictures in this exhibition indicate that these mostly unknown icon painters accepted three-dimensionality and a sense of colour that brings them to within hailing distance of the Western tradition of art, while remaining clearly Orthodox in inspiration. The only parallel I know in art history (and I’m no expert) is the Venetian tradition that lived on until the 17th century, the paintings representing groups of saints in the sacra conversazione depicted by Giovanni Bellini for one, but traces can be found in Titian too.

So my congratulations to the organisers, what they have put on is genuinely a product of the best of Serbian-Hungarian relations.

Sch. Gy.

Sunday 10 February 2013

Kurdish issue in Turkey

A debate was held in the European Parliament on the 6 February to discuss the Turkish-Kurdish dialogue. This is a slightly edited version of my contribution.


The Kurdish problem was built into the Turkish political system from the outset. The Kurdish population of Turkey was denied its political rights as Kurds and as the country modernised, they began to demand changes. The Turkish state, with its strongly centralising tradition, refused and the result was violence, a low-level insurgency that has claimed many lives.

What has changed in the last few years has been the slow shift in the attitude of the Turkish government that is moving, however reluctantly, towards accepting that the suppression of the Kurds doesn’t work. Equally, the emergence of a very extensive autonomy in the Kurdish region of Iraq has shown that the Kurds are perfectly capable of acting as a factor of stability and do not threaten Turkish territorial integrity.

Against this background, it is vital that the Turkish government recognise that without accepting the Kurds as equal citizens, the Turkish state will be scene of ongoing conflict, one that will gravely weaken the chances of sustaining a functioning democracy.

Let there be no illusions about this. The change we are discussing requires a redesign of the Turkish state and citizenship concept, a shift away from the mono-ethnic basis that has marked Turkey since its emergence from the Ottoman Empire. It has to become markedly more tolerant towards those of its citizens who are not ethnically Turks or Sunni Muslim.

But the Kurds too will have to accept that their future lies in Turkey and that they should not dream of restoring the state that was promised them after the First World War by the West (the Treaty of Sèvres). Territorial integrity is a neuralgic point for any state.

That is what the transformation is about and we should not pretend that it will be easy. Giving up bad habits is always hard.

Sch. Gy.