It is a special honor to compile this festschrift for its dedicatee, Professor István Vásáry. While both editors and several of the contributors to the volume were his students at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, in one way or another the entire international field of Turkic and Central Asian Studies at large is beholden to his scholarship. There are few scholars whose expertise spans as many fields as Vásáry. The sheer breadth of his work is overwhelming, as it ranges from Turkic and Hungarian historical and comparative linguistics to Mongol history, medieval East European history, Central European intellectual history, runology, numismatics, etc., just to mention the most prominent. These diverse fields are organically intertwined with his personal and intellectual development. To us, who have the luck to know him personally or have even worked with him, he is a mentor and intellectual model, and a gentleman and scholar of integrity who represents the best traditions of maintaining those qualities while facing historical challenges.
On the paternal line, Vásáry hails from a high middle-class Calvinist family from Debrecen, today East Hungary, who had risen to prominent positions in society and politics in the first half of the twentieth century. His grandfather, also by the name of István Vásáry (1887–1855), was a prominent mayor of the city in the interwar period and was Minister of Finance in the interim government at the end of World War II, only to be forced out of political life after the Stalinist turn of the country in 1947; and the internationally famous conductor Tamás Vásáry (1933–) is his cousin. On the maternal line, he has German ancestors; one of his uncles was an important Classical Philologist and his grandfather a scholar of pedagogy. Vásáry was born in Budapest a few days after the Second World War was over in Europe, where his mother had fled from the advancing Red Army of the Soviets towards the end of the war in 1944, his parents having gotten married only for his father to go to the front shortly afterwards and spend the next few years in Soviet prison camps, whence not many returned home.
Vásáry had a high middle-class upbringing despite the unfriendly environment of Communist Hungary. The first decade of his life saw the rapid Stalinization of politics, aimed at the total control of society and the forced industrialization of a predominantly agrarian economy. Like almost everyone, Vásáry has vivid memories of the Generalissimus’s death and the hysterical public mourning around it all over the Soviet Bloc, a sign of the effectiveness of mass propaganda. At the age of eleven, he was too young to realize the full gravity of what was happening during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, but he sensed the easing of harsh repression afterwards, as the excesses of a Stalinist regime gradually gave way to a milder form of dictatorship, popularly labeled as “Goulash Communism,” rendering Hungary the “happiest barrack,” which fostered a sense of well-being and relative cultural freedom in exchange for Hungarian society’s political submission to the Communist rulers of the country.
Vásáry was a very hardworking student, committed to the study of the humanities, especially languages, already at an early age. By the time he finished high school, he had learned English, which was a veritable tradition in his family, and Russian, mandatory and therefore deeply unpopular in the Communist era. Vásáry was a relative rarity among his high school peers to actually master Russian, but it would serve him extremely well later as a scholar, giving him access to both Russian sources, secondary and archival, and Soviet scholarly circles in Moscow and Saint Petersburg. In addition, Vásáry taught himself Polish and German during his high school years, started Turkish, and earned acceptance to university by placing second in the national high school Latin competition. His thirst for languages was not quenched yet. At university, he learned Italian, French, and Persian, and as part of the curriculum, he acquired a strong reading knowledge in several Turkic languages, extinct and spoken, such as Old Turkic, Old Uyghur, Chaghatay and Qipchaq on the one hand, and Ottoman, Tatar, and Uzbek, on the other hand; and his research has also led him to read Romanian, Bulgarian, and Mongolian. The review of Vásáry’s D.Sc. thesis written by the medievalist Pál Engel remarks that in addition to the aforesaid languages of primary sources, it quotes sources written in 12 modern languages.
At university, Vásáry studied as an English and Turkish major between 1963 and 1968, his choice of the latter subject motivated by his interest in early Hungarian history.1 Despite the regime’s close control over universities, the intellectual and scholarly networks the young aspiring philologist entered had a great deal of continuity with the “long nineteenth century” and the interwar period. Vásáry’s two chief mentors, Gyula Németh (1890–1976) and Lajos Ligeti (1902–1987) were products of the start of Oriental Studies in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and took an active role in the integration of this field of inquiry into national Hungarian scholarship. Their intellectual make-up and scholarly profile were also informed by liberal nationalism in the Kingdom of Hungary in the nineteenth century, where a broader nationalist discourse called for a search for the origins of Hungarian ethnicity and the Hungarian language. They were deeply impacted by the shock of World War I and the resulting territorial losses and irredentism in the interwar period, coupled with Hungarian cultural and educational policies that aimed at reaching cultural supremacy vis-à-vis the surrounding countries, which had benefited territorially from the peace treaties at Hungary’s expense. The latter half of Ligeti and Németh’s careers coincided with Hungary’s tragic role and defeat in World War II, the country’s subsequent Soviet occupation, and the enforcement of Communism during the Cold War.
While in the West, Oriental Studies were in the service of colonialism from the late nineteenth century, in Hungary, they formed part of a nationalist project. The Chair of Oriental Studies was originally established in 1870 by Emperor Franz-Joseph (r. 1848–1916), who appointed to it the famous Orientalist Arminius Vámbéry (1832–1913) as Professor. A colorful self-made man with a Jewish background, Vámbéry was known internationally for his contributions to Central Asian Turkic philology and for his staunch Russophobia in politics, a position that he shared with the majority of the elite in Austro-Hungary, and which made him popular in Britain. Within Hungary, however, Vámbéry was much better known for his views about Hungarian ethnogenesis and for supporting the debunked theory that the Hungarian language is related to Turkic. When Vásáry started his studies, the chair was still held by Gyula Németh, who had succeeded to Vámbéry’s vacant position in 1916 through an appointment by the last Habsburg king of Hungary, Charles IV (r. 1916–1918), and who founded the Department of Turkic Philology and Early Hungarian History in 1930.2 Németh paradigmatically shaped the development of Turkic Studies or Turkology in Hungary, while also maintaining close contacts with the field at large at the international level. In a lecture he delivered in 1928 at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences—an institution born in 1826 of Hungarian nationalism and progressive social, cultural and political reforms—Németh defined Turkology in Hungary as part of the study of the origins of the Hungarian language, early Hungarian history (i.e., the history of Hungarians prior to their settlement in the Carpathian Basin), and the history of Ottoman Hungary.3 This definition made Turkic Studies part of the so-called “national sciences,” and it also fit well the nationalist political vision of the Hungarian elite in the interwar period, which after the 1920 Treaty of Trianon found itself in a much smaller country surrounded by mostly unfriendly nations that ruled over huge communities of ethnic Hungarians.
The other profound influence on Vásáry’s formation as a scholar came from Lajos Ligeti. Earning a doctorate in Mongolic, Chinese, and Tibetan philology at the Sorbonne as a student of the great Sinologist Paul Pelliot (1878–1945), Ligeti was the Orientalist par excellence before World War II who spent several years of research in China, doing field work in Inner Mongolian Buddhist monasteries. Returning to Hungary, he continued to work on Mongol and Tibetan philology, Inner Asian Studies, and Hungarian comparative and historical linguistics. Both Németh and Ligeti shaped scholarship and intellectual life in an institutional sense as well. Németh served twice as Dean of the Humanities and once as Rector of ELTE in the 1930s and 1940s, and he was the director of the Research Institute for Linguistics at the Academy of Sciences between 1950 and 1965. Sensing the political currents of the time, Ligeti, who himself never joined the Communist Party, was one of the founders of the Hungarian-Soviet Society of Friendship in 1945 and the longest-serving Deputy Chairman of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (1949–70). While he held a firm grip on the field of Oriental Studies and its practitioners in Hungary, his position of considerable power and influence also helped him extend a protective shield over Oriental Studies, which was thus largely spared from infiltration by the regime at the personal and ideological level, and also made it possible that the field maintain extensive contacts with international academia despite the Iron Curtain.
It was Ligeti who first offered Vásáry an academic position after the latter’s graduation in 1968, inviting him as a Research Associate to his Altaic Research Group at the Academy, where the young scholar worked until 1980, when he returned to Eötvös Loránd University. On the face of it, Vásáry rose steadily in the promotion system fashioned according to the Soviet model.4 In 1971, he received his Doctor Universitatis (Dr.) degree with a thesis that contains the edition of a seventeenth-century Armenian-Qipchak chronicle, and his Candidatus Scientiarum degree in 1981 with a dissertation about the chancery of the Golden Horde.5 He received two Habilitations, both at the University of Szeged: in Language Sciences in 1995, and in history in 1997. In 2002, he was awarded the Doctor of Science (D.Sc.) degree at the Academy of Sciences about the role of Cumans in the pre-Ottoman Balkan.6 He would sometimes joke to his doctoral students about the tight control of the state and of the Communist Party over academia that his generation of scholars had to write three Ph.D.’s during an academic career.
His rise in the academic hierarchy continued. He was Chair of the Department of Turkic Studies in 1992–93 and 1998–99, and he directed the Institute of Oriental Studies between 2006 and 2011. At the Academy of Sciences, he chaired the Committee of Oriental Studies between 1996 and 1999, being elected Corresponding Member of the Academy in 2013 and full member in 2019. Vásáry collaborated with several prominent scholars, including Turkologists and Mongolists like István Mándoky-Kongur (1944–92) and András Róna-Tas (1931–), Ottoman historians like Géza Dávid (1949–) and Pál Fodor (1955–), Armenologist Edmund Schütz (1916–1999) and cultural historian Lajos Tardy (1914–1990). In 2012, he co-founded the Early Hungarian Research Group at the Academy of Sciences, which brings together an interdisciplinary cohort of scholars including historians, archeologists, musicologists, folklorists, etc., and has greatly revised key issues in the study of early Hungarian history. He retired in 2015, becoming an emeritus professor but continuing to be remarkably prolific. Most recently, he has co-written a major monograph on the Szekler Runic Script.7
Vásáry was a fellow at the Wilson Center during the 1989–90 academic year in Washington, DC, accompanied by his family. It was the first time he had spent an extended period in a western research environment, Hungarian citizens having been allowed to visit western countries every three years since the 1960s. However, it was never a foregone conclusion that one would be issued a passport by the authorities, and the officially available amount of foreign currency was never enough to pay for expenses during travel. Hungarian Turkologists and Mongolists were lucky that at least some of the financial and bureaucratic hurdles could at times be mitigated by the good offices of Denis Sinor (1916–2011). Sinor, a scholar of Inner Asian history, had been a Ligeti student in the 1930s, and worked with Pelliot in Paris. He had risen to international prominence by turning Indiana University Bloomington into the most important center of Inner Asian and Central Asian research, and founded and acquired funding for, such institutions as the Permanent International Altaic Conference (PIAC), which regularly brought together academics from both sides of the Iron Curtain.
By the late 1980s, the Communist system was decadent enough to loosen some of its control over society, but Vásáry most likely shared with everyone the surprise that the system would collapse so fast. The research facilities of the Library of Congress as well as the wealth and the personal and intellectual freedom he encountered in the US were in profound contrast with what he considered as a corrupt and shabby atmosphere in the Hungary of the 1980s in general and the backward, underfunded conditions in Hungarian academia in particular, so he was tempted to try his luck and stay. However, the changes that were taking place in 1989, the quick collapse of the regimes in the Eastern bloc, made him reconsider. He did not want to miss history as it was happening and returned to Hungary after the end of the fellowship.
His life trajectory launched him on the path of scholarship, but the political changes in Europe in the early 1990s allowed him to do two stints of diplomatic service. Back in Hungary, his life took a turn that would have been impossible for someone with his bourgeoise family background during Communism. Hungary was transitioning to a democratic political system, and the newly elected first free government, a moderately conservative coalition, needed a new cadre of diplomats that had not been compromised during the Communist era and had expertise regarding the countries Hungary had diplomatic ties with. Vásáry had been friends with the new Minister of Foreign Affairs, Géza Jeszenszky (1941–), and had also known Prime Minister József Antall (1932–93) from before, who invited him to represent Hungary as consul in Istanbul, filling several other diplomatic vacancies with academics. Vásáry held this position for a year, when he was appointed ambassador in Ankara, a position he filled until a new, left-wing government came to power four years later. His diplomatic career was not over, however, as he became ambassador of Hungary in Tehran between 1999 and 2003. While he greatly appreciated these opportunities, as they gave him access to some of the regions he had been working on as a scholar throughout his career to an extent that would have been impossible before, Vásáry never thought he would remain in the foreign service and was all too happy to return to academia afterwards.
Vásáry is a member of the post-Second World War generation of the 1960s. The bulk of his career took place in the Cold War, and, as we have seen, he was trained by scholars who had seen two world wars, the breakdown of more than one modern imperial ventures, and the rise of totalitarian regimes in the first half of the twentieth century. His work has been deeply impacted by how the nation state was challenged by the ostensibly internationalist ideologies of Communism during the Cold War and by postmodern globalization after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rejoining of Hungary to the West by entering NATO and the EU. As he would often put it to his students, “A scholar can be a nationalist, but scholarship is international.”
The overall themes that unify Vásáry’s work are language and ethnicity, continuing but also greatly expanding the tradition he inherited from his mentors, Németh and Ligeti. His early work was accordingly philological and etymological, largely in their wake, and he was also interested in the Szekler Runic script and its relations to the Old Turkic Script. Conscious of the need to contextualize his own work in the history of scholarship, Vásáry developed an interest quite early on in how the modern fields of study came about, as well as in the historiography of medieval, early modern and modern Orientalism. His pursuits in early Hungarian history led him to study the Hungarians of “Magna Hungaria,” i.e., scattered groups of ethnic Hungarians who had become separated from the main body that settled in the Carpathian Basin at the end of the ninth century and who disappeared during the expansion of the Mongols in Eastern Europe in 1235–41. In a related fashion, and also following in Németh’s footsteps, Vásáry’s attention was drawn to another subject, the Cumans and Qipchaqs, Turkic tribal confederacies that had ruled the western Eurasian steppe prior to the rise of the Mongols.
However, it is his work on the history of the Mongol Empire, especially two of its successor states, the Golden Horde and Ilkhanid Iran, that would establish his name in international academia. The subject was also connected to his earlier research on early Hungarian history, in that Mongol history could help him contextualize it in the broader history of the medieval Eurasian steppe. His familiarity with Russian sources as well indigenous sources from the Mongol empire, written in Turkic, Mongolian, or Persian, allowed him a special perspective on the long durée history of interaction between sedentary and pastoral societies in Eurasia and on how the myriad facets of that relationship informed various imperial projects all over history, from the Xioungnu to the Turkic Qaghanates, the Uyghurs, the Khazars, the Ghaznavids, the Kharakhanids, through the Mongols down to the Russians. He also expanded into other regions in the Mongol and post-Mongol world, such as the Jalayirids and the Crimean Khanate. Equally notable, he connected the history of the medieval Eurasian steppe and Balkans by writing about the Cumanians in the Balkans in the eleventh through the fourteenth century, and in a parallel vein, he has worked on continuities of political culture between the Mongols and Russia. While he has always remained a philologist at heart, the range of sources he works with has also substantially expanded over the years to include numismatics and archeology. Vásáry’s work has fundamental implications for the study of politics and social consciousness in pre-modern pastoral societies in Eurasia, the study of which has frequently been appropriated and abused by various forms of modern ethno-nationalism. In some sense expanding from the study of Hungarian ethnogenesis, Vásáry tries to understand early Hungarian, Central Asian, Iranian, and Balkan history in terms of the connection of these regions to the Eurasian steppe, which profoundly shaped their ethnic history and political culture. For example, searching for a framework beyond ethno-nationalism to broach the study of premodern pastoral societies, he has relied on concepts like gentilism. Originally coined by Reinhard Wenskus regarding the Germanic tribes in the late Roman period and applied to early Hungarian history by Jenő Szűcs, gentilism refers to the ideology of a political group with a fictive consciousness of a common origin. Recently, he has become greatly interested in the broader ideological basis of Mongol rule, comparing the sharia or Islamic revealed law with the Yasa, the law code associated with Genghis Khan, which as a form of dynastic law and manifestation of charismatic authority profoundly informed political theology in the Perso-Islamicate world in the medieval and early modern periods.
Vásáry is a highly prolific scholar. His publications, mostly in English and Hungarian, but some also in Russian, Turkish and German, are marked by precision, a thorough familiarity with and integration of the sources, penetrating insight, and lucidity. The sheer breadth of his scholarship makes him an authority in multiple fields. At the same time, he does not take his position for granted. He is not aloof of public outreach, taking his role to represent scholarship for the public seriously, be it a public talk, or an article in a newspaper or in a popular science magazine.
The present volume has taken a long time to prepare, largely due to the vicissitudes in the editors’ life. We therefore thank our contributors for their enthusiasm and patience that has kept the project running. We note with profound regrets that David O. Morgan (1945–2019), a leading expert on Mongol history, passed away before he could see his chapter published.
As Vásáry has distinguished himself in four distinct although related fields—i.e., early Hungarian history, historical linguistics, the history of Orientalism, and Central Asian history—we have opted for a certain thematic unity instead of trying to represent all these fields, and decided to solicit papers that focus on the last subject, i.e., Central Asian history or the history and culture of the Eurasian steppe. This editorial decision regarding a festschrift that is addressed to an international audience can be justified by the fact that most of Vásáry’s works for international academia are related to this subject, whereas his research in the other three fields was chiefly addressed to a Hungarian readership. Indeed, the 2020 special issue of the Hungarian journal Keletkutatás, “Oriental Research,” celebrated him with papers in Hungarian in all the aforesaid fields. The biographical part of this introductory salutation has also benefitted from a biographical interview book written about him.8 The cover image is the work of the Tehran-based Hungarian-Iranian painter, Gizella Varga Sinai. We are grateful to her for allowing us to use her painting.
Eötvös Loránd University had been renamed after a famous Hungarian physicist following World War II, the name Eötvös more tolerable for the heavily anticlerical Communist regime than the institution’s previous designation, Royal Hungarian Pázmány Péter University, Cardinal Péter Pázmány (1570–1637) having been a major figure in the sixteenth-century Catholic Counter-Reformation.
Charles I as Emperor of Austria Charles IV as King of Hungary.
Németh, Gyula, “Akadémiánk és a keleti filológia,” Budapesti Szemle CCXI (1928), 80–95.
Following the Soviet system, academic promotion in Hungary at the time was entirely under the auspices of the politically controlled Academy of Sciences, except that the first degree of promotion, dr. univ. was granted by universities. The second degree was the so-called candidate degree, the third and last the D.Sc. “doctor of sciences” degree, each three ranks requiring the completion and public defense of a dissertation. D.Sc. holders could then be elected first corresponding and then regular members of the Academy of Sciences at its annual convention.
Published as “Armeno-Kipchak Parts from the Kamenets Chronicle,” Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 22 (1969): 139–189.
Published as Cumans and Tatars: Oriental Military in the Pre-Ottoman Balkans, 1185–1365 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
Benkő, Elek, Klára Sándor, and István Vásáry, A székely írás emlékei (Budapest: Bölcsészettudományi Kutatóközpont kiadó, 2021).
Ézsaiás, Erzsébet, A boldogító tudás: Vásáry István életpályája (Budapest: Lexica Kiadó, 2020).