One day, my wanderings about places in Budapest connected with Subcarpathia led me to the Fiumei Úti Sírkert (Fiumei Road Graveyard), the most famous and best-preserved cemetery in Hungary, and the pantheon of Hungarian national heroes. This is the place of the last repose for such renowned Hungarians as Lajos Kossuth, Lajos Batthyány, Ferenc Deák, Mór Jókai, Imre Kertész, and many other grand architects, sculptors, heroes and martyrs of the 1848 and 1956 Revolutions…

Here is buried Mihály Munkácsy (1844–1900), most likely the best-known native of Munkács/Mukachevo for the Hungarian nation. Mihály Munkácsy, born as Michael Leó von Lieb in a Schwab family, became the brightest representative of Hungarian realism in art, who adopted the name of his native city as his pseudonym. Here I would like to mention just one of his works: The Hungarian Conquest of the Carpathian Basin depicting the arrival of the Magyars in the Carpathian Basin in 896 AD, which is the largest scale oil painting located in the House of Parliament.

Another one of our compatriots from Subcarpathia who was buried in the Fiumei Road Cemetery is Antal (Antoniy) Hodinka (1864–1946), a Rusyn historian, linguist, folklorist, author, teacher, and a full member of the Hungarian Academy of Science. His name is inscribed on the gravestone in two languages: Hungarian and Rusyn (it seems to be the only inscription in the Rusyn language in the cemetery). The tombstone with the scholar’s bust was erected in 2010 with the support of the National and Budapest City Rusyn Self-Governments, the Antal Hodinka Association, and the Hodinka family.

Antoniy Hodinka was born in the village of Ladomér (now Ladomírov, Snina District, Slovakia) to a family of a Greek Catholic priest. He graduated from a school in Száldobos (now Sokyrnytsia, Khust District, Ukraine), and studied at gymnasium schools in Máramoros Sziget (Syhit Maramorosky / Sighetu Marmaţiei, now Romania) and Ungvár (Uzhhorod), Munkács Theological Seminary, then at the Central Theological Seminary in Budapest. He worked for the library of the Hungarian National Museum, and in 1889 he was granted a scholarship at the Vienna Institute of Historiography. In 1891, Antal Hodinka defended his doctorate thesis “The sources of Serbian history and its initial period.” After that, as a research fellow of the Imperial and Royal Denominational Library, he was involved in studies on paleography, history of Southern Slavs (Serbs and Croats), and the publishing of archives. For the study “Hungarian-Slav contacts until 1526,” he was awarded the title of a freelance lecturer at the Philosophical Faculty of Budapest University. In 1906, he was appointed a professor at the Law Academy and University in Pozsony (now Bratislava, Slovakia). From 1923–1935, in the post-Trianon Hungary (which was popularly referred to as ‘the kingdom without the king,’ while its proxy ruler Admiral Horthy was called ‘admiral without the sea’), Antal Hodinka had been working at Pécs University: as Head of the Department of General History, Dean of the Philosophical Faculty, and finally – President of the University. In 1935 he retired, but in 1941–1943, when after the collapse of Czechoslovakia Subcarpathian Rus was reincorporated to Hungary (as Rusyns would say: “It was during the time of the Second Magyars”), he was appointed the Chairman of the Subcarpathian Association of Sciences in Ungvár/Uzhhorod. The circle of his academic interests included the history of Hungary, Subcarpathia and church history, as well as Hungarian-Slavonic contacts.

As for his academic (and political) views, Antal Hodinka is considered to belong to the Rusynophile camp that existed in Subcarpathian Rus in the time of interwar Czechoslovakia alongside the two other camps of Rusyn intelligentsia – Russophiles and Ukrainophiles. What was more, Hodinka is said to be a promoter of the concept of Magyar-Ruthenian people upheld by part of the Greek Catholic clergy (the so-called Magyarons) – and when Subcarpathia in 1939–1944 again became part of Hungary (Uzhhorod, Mukachevo and Berehovo even earlier – starting from November 1938, as a result of the First Vienna Award), the Hungarian-centred Rusyn movement became official, books and magazines were again published using pre-revolutionary Russian alphabet (with the ‘hard sign’ ъ at the end of words, letters ‘yat’ ѣ, ‘fita’ ѳ, etc.), while the Ukrainian movement that had become the most widely spread in the last period of Czechoslovakia’s existence was proclaimed treasonable and persecuted.

A selected list of Hodinka’s works (most of them were written in Hungarian) would give an idea of the spectrum of his academic interests:

• A History of Munkács Greek Catholic Eparchy (Budapest, 1909)
• Archives of Munkács Greek Catholic Eparchy: Years 1458–1715 (Ungvár, 1911)
• Parts of Ruthenian Manuscripts Connected with Magyars (Budapest, 1916)
• Addenda to the History of Ungvár Castle and Ungvár City (Ungvár. 1917)
• Rusyn-Hungarian Dictionary of Verbs (7,500 words; Užhorod, 1922)
• Fatherland, Economy and the Past of Southern Carpathian Rusyns (Užhorod, Oxford 1922; Budapest, 1923; Paris, 1924)
• Prince Francis Rákóczi II and ‘gens fidellissima’ (Pécs, 1937).

Even Hodinka’s literary pseudonyms reflect his ethnographic bias: Sokyrnytsky Syrokhman (literary: a wretched/poor thing from Sokyrnytsia; the first word is an adjective from the name of the village where he went to school, while the second word is very popular and widely used in Rusyn vernacular), Sokyrnytsky Syrotiuk (‘an orphan from Sokyrnytsia’).

In 2001, the Antal Hodinka Linguistic Research Centre was opened in Berehovo/Beregszász, as the Ukrainian branch of Hungarian language studies of the Hungarian Academy of Science. According to the Centre’s official website, it cooperates with similar institutions functioning in other neighbouring countries that have a significant Hungarian minority and works under the aegis of the Ferenc Rákóczi II Transcarpathian Hungarian College of Higher Education. The main declared spheres of activities of the Centre are studies of Ukraine’s linguistic policy, multilingualism in Subcarpathia, and the linguistic map of the region.