De l'honorable ennemi au compagnon de fortune
The 150 years of the close cohabitation with the Ottoman Empire has certainly left numerous traces in the Hungarian culture. With regard to literature, the relative poorness of available documents does not allow us to even to venture in the road of the “Turkish question”. Here we shall study what it...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Centre d'Études Balkaniques
2008-12-01
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| Series: | Cahiers Balkaniques |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://journals.openedition.org/ceb/1531 |
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| Summary: | The 150 years of the close cohabitation with the Ottoman Empire has certainly left numerous traces in the Hungarian culture. With regard to literature, the relative poorness of available documents does not allow us to even to venture in the road of the “Turkish question”. Here we shall study what it appears to be a subject that is fundamental as well as recurring, that of the question of honor and the word given. We shall further analyze these questions this along three axes: personal engagement - political and military - religious conversion, where we find al sorts of topics relating to religion and finally coexistence, which is more complex by itself. The texts illustrating those three different approaches are of a great diversity. Within such corpus we may find slave memoirs, epical songwriting, as well as the equally important XIXth century novels. The image of the Ottoman Empire has been through a considerable transformation over time in Hungary. In the fifteenth century one of the first existing European accounts of the country shows a well regulated regime, with moral values that constitute an example the whole Christian world should probably follow. Around the middle of the sixteenth century though, Hans Dernschwam finds that the empire is full of “ridiculous and vicious eccentricities". At the same time the epic poems of Tinódi show that sultan Suleiman was an enemy feared by the western forces. A century later, the poet Miklós Zrínyi makes a legend out of the same monarch. New voices appear during the XIXth century: Jókai’s romanticism depicts the deep oriental soul, while Tömörkény's realism portraits the little people in particular. In the XXth century, the ottoman element may be represented either as the incarnation of an age-long enemy, or as the people Hungarians are peacefully coexisting. |
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| ISSN: | 0290-7402 2261-4184 |