Hungarians in Constantinople in the mid-19th Century: Socio-Economic Background and Careers. In: Between Empires - Beyond Borders. The Late Ottoman Empire and the Early Republic Era Through the Lens of the Köpe Family. Ed.: Fodor Gábor. Budapest, 2020. 65–85. (original) (raw)

Authorial Self and Modernity as Reflected in Diaries and Memoirs. Three 19th-Century Hungarian Case Studies

Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Social Analysis, 2019

The role of the diaries and memoirs in the process of the conscious self-reflection and their contribution to the emergence of modern individual personalities are well-known facts of the intellectual history. The present paper intends to analyze a special form of the creation of modern individual character; it is the self-creation of the writer as a conscious personality, often with a clearly formulated opinion about her/his own social role. There will be offered several examples from the 19th-century history of the Hungarian intelligentsia. This period is more or less identical with the modernization of the “cultural industry” in Hungary, dominated by the periodicals with their deadlines, fixed lengths of the articles, and professional editing houses on the one hand and the cultural nation building on the other. Concerning the possible social and cultural role of the intelligentsia, it is the moment of the birth of a new type, so-called public intellectual. I will focus on three wr...

Memoirs of a Janissary or Türkish Chronicle

By the 15th century, the Osmanlıs have been on the attack into Southeastern Europe and Bartol Đurđević was not the first, nor last, Christian taken as a slave that would return to Europe to tell his story. As a young man (maybe at about 20 years of age) in 1455, Konstantin Mihailović, with his two brothers, was captured by the Osmanlıs after the battle at Novo Brdo in Kosovo. By 1456, he was a soldier in Sultân Mehmet's army and fought in the siege of Beograd. In 1461 he fought in the siege of Trebizond and then in Walachia and against Vlad Drakul. In 1463, during an attack on the fortress of Zvečaj in Croatia, when it was taken by King Mátyás Hunyadi, Konstantin and a unit of Yeniçeris were captured. After his story was learned, Konstantin was set free and it is speculated that he served in Hungary and then he moved to live in Poland where he wrote his memoirs sometime between 1497 and 1501. This is my translation of parts relevant to Croatian history.

TRAVAUX ET MÉMOIRES | Tome XXV/1 | édité par Marie-Hélène Blanchet & Raúl Estangüi Gómez

TRAVAUX ET MÉMOIRES, 2021

La période dont traite ce volume est encadrée par deux chutes, celle de 1204 et celle de 1453. Ces événements retentissants ont polarisé l’attention des historiens, suscitant des études nombreuses qui sont allées, pour certaines, jusqu’à mettre en doute la pérennité de l’Empire byzantin après 1204, en considérant ces deux siècles et demi comme l’épilogue d’une longue histoire impériale. La prise de Constantinople par les croisés en 1204 a, de fait, ouvert une période marquée par des crises multiples, que la conquête de la capitale en 1261 par la dynastie des Paléologues n’a pas résolues, tandis que d’autres périls se sont surajoutés : rivalités avec d’autres puissances régionales (en Épire, en Bulgarie, en Serbie, dans le Péloponnèse), prosélytisme de l’Église latine d’un côté et conversions à l’islam de l’autre, chute des rendements agricoles, bouleversements démographiques suscités par l’irruption de la peste noire ou l’arrivée de nouvelles populations turques acculées par l’expansion mongole… La conquête ottomane de Constantinople en 1453 a ainsi pu apparaître comme la conséquence logique d’un long processus d’affaiblissement entamé au début du XIIIe siècle.

The Collaborative Illustrated Diaries of Two Preadolescent Boys During the 1956 Revolution (Hungarian Cultural Studies)

Abstract: In this paper, Gergely Kunt analyzes the collaborative diary writing of two preadolescent boys from the period of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, during which they decided to act as reporters and writers to create their own chronicles of the events transpiring between October 1956 and March 1957. Twelve-year-old Gyula Csics and thirteen-year-old János Kovács were close friends and neighbors in a tenement house in Budapest, which resulted in their collaborate project of writing and illustrating their own diaries in an attempt to record the events of the Hungarian Revolution. During this collaborative project, they would read and copy each other’s diaries, which primarily focused on public events, rather than the preadolescents’ private lives. In addition to their handwritten entries, the two boys illustrated their diaries with drawings that depicted street fights or damaged buildings, as well as newspaper clippings and pamphlets, which they had collected during and after the Revolution.

A Merchant, a Spy, an Artist, and a Viennese Coffeehouse Owner: Some Notes on an Armenian Sketchbook-Chronicle Preserved in the National Library of Austria

Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, 2023

This essay is a detailed study of a heretofore largely ignored and extraordinary notebook written by an Armenian merchant, tailor, and late-seventeenth-century artist named Gabriel stored at the Austrian National Library (Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek). Part sketchbook with beautiful illuminations of religious and other landmarks and part chronicle, this notebook destabilizes clear-cut distinctions between travel diary, first-person narrative, chronicle, and a work of "nouveau literacy" in Islamicate Eurasia. This essay probes the multilayered contents of Gabriel's notebook and on the basis of an archival reconstruction of the author's microhistory, it places the author at the center of a complex underground spy ring involved in the 1687 Habsburg reconquest of the Ottoman fortified city of Buda in Hungary.

The Ottoman Sultan’s Albums at Budapest University of Technology and Economics

Turkish Historical Review, 2015

In the nineteenth century, the Ottoman empire’s large-scale development was illustrated by the new medium of photography. Different territories of the empire were photographed and Ignác Alpár, a significant architect of Hungarian Historicism, purchased some of these photographs. Alpár’s interest in oriental art derived from the ideology of Turanism believing that a Hungarian national style could be developed with the use of oriental motifs. One of the photographs (‘Tombs of Mamluks, Cairo’) of the collection provides some evidence of this idea. The essay develops the background and evidence for the Hungarian-oriental relationship at the turn of the nineteenth-twentieth century.