{"id":4034,"date":"2022-05-25T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-05-25T17:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/rusynsociety.com\/?p=4034"},"modified":"2022-06-03T12:41:32","modified_gmt":"2022-06-03T17:41:32","slug":"natives-of-subcarpathian-rus-in-budapest-antoniy-hodinka","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rusynsociety.com\/rul\/2022\/05\/25\/natives-of-subcarpathian-rus-in-budapest-antoniy-hodinka\/","title":{"rendered":"Natives of Subcarpathian Rus in Budapest: Antoniy (Antal) Hodinka"},"content":{"rendered":"

One day, my wanderings about places in Budapest connected with Subcarpathia led me to the Fiumei \u00dati S\u00edrkert (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 Batthy\u00e1ny, Ferenc De\u00e1k, M\u00f3r J\u00f3kai, Imre Kert\u00e9sz, and many other grand architects, sculptors, heroes and martyrs of the 1848 and 1956 Revolutions\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here is buried Mih\u00e1ly Munk\u00e1csy (1844\u20131900), most likely the best-known native of Munk\u00e1cs\/Mukachevo for the Hungarian nation. Mih\u00e1ly Munk\u00e1csy, born as Michael Le\u00f3 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 <\/em>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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another one of our compatriots from Subcarpathia who was buried in the Fiumei Road Cemetery is Antal (Antoniy) Hodinka (1864\u20131946), 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Antoniy Hodinka was born in the village of Ladom\u00e9r (now Ladom\u00edrov, Snina District, Slovakia) to a family of a Greek Catholic priest. He graduated from a school in Sz\u00e1ldobos (now Sokyrnytsia, Khust District, Ukraine), and studied at gymnasium schools in M\u00e1ramoros Sziget (Syhit Maramorosky \/ Sighetu Marma\u0163iei, now Romania) and Ungv\u00e1r (Uzhhorod), Munk\u00e1cs 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 \u201cThe sources of Serbian history and its initial period.\u201d 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 \u201cHungarian-Slav contacts until 1526,\u201d 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\u20131935, in the post-Trianon Hungary (which was popularly referred to as \u2018the kingdom without the king,\u2019 while its proxy ruler Admiral Horthy was called \u2018admiral without the sea\u2019), Antal Hodinka had been working at P\u00e9cs University: as Head of the Department of General History, Dean of the Philosophical Faculty, and finally \u2013 President of the University. In 1935 he retired, but in 1941\u20131943, when after the collapse of Czechoslovakia Subcarpathian Rus was reincorporated to Hungary (as Rusyns would say: \u201cIt was during the time of the Second Magyars\u201d), he was appointed the Chairman of the Subcarpathian Association of Sciences in Ungv\u00e1r\/Uzhhorod. The circle of his academic interests included the history of Hungary, Subcarpathia and church history, as well as Hungarian-Slavonic contacts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u2013 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) \u2013 and when Subcarpathia in 1939\u20131944 again became part of Hungary (Uzhhorod, Mukachevo and Berehovo even earlier \u2013 starting from November 1938, as a result of the First Vienna Award<\/a>), the Hungarian-centred Rusyn movement became official, books and magazines were again published using pre-revolutionary Russian alphabet (with the \u2018hard sign\u2019 \u044a at the end of words, letters \u2018yat\u2019 \u0463, \u2018fita\u2019 \u0473, etc.), while the Ukrainian movement that had become the most widely spread in the last period of Czechoslovakia\u2019s existence was proclaimed treasonable and persecuted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A selected list of Hodinka\u2019s works (most of them were written in Hungarian) would give an idea of the spectrum of his academic interests:<\/p>\n\n\n\n