If you haven’t tried it yet, you must taste the Hungarian Kashkaval cheese. This delicacy is fabulous! Those of you who don’t know, Kashkaval is a yellowish cheese made of cow or sheep milk, and it is popular in Romania and in the Balkan countries. Also, a favorite treat in the Arab world. Growing up in Hungary, I never heard […]
Historian Mária Schmidt introduced the mayor of Budapest’s 8th District and local city councillors to the almost completed new Holocaust museum, called the “House of Fates–European Education Centre” (in Hungarian: Sorsok Háza: Európai Oktatási Központ). The interpretive centre, housed in an abandoned train station and created with 6.6 billion forints ($25 million) in state support, relies heavily on personal stories […]
I am still sometimes surprised by the true extent of the Orbán government’s small-mindedness, its pettiness and the remarkably arrogant, self-serving use of public funds. It has been 25 years since the formation of Hungary’s first democratically elected parliament in May 1990. The government-funded Veritas Research Institute, led by historian Sándor Szakály–who callously called the deportation of Jews during the […]
The Hungarian Human Rights Foundation (HHRF), based in New York, claims they are “the only professional organization in the West” protecting the human rights of ethnic Hungarians who live as minorities in Croatia, Romania, Serbia, Slovenia, Slovakia and Ukraine. Currently they are lobbying on behalf of Attila Markó, a prominent ethnic-Hungarian politician in Romania. (Read here about HHRF lobbying efforts.) […]
For years, as a matter of principle, Hungary’s left-leaning ATV news network didn’t allow the far-right Jobbik’s politicians into its studios. All of that changed just over a year ago and now party chairman Gábor Vona and other prominent Jobbik politicians are regular guests. Fortunately, most of ATV’s hosts are skilled, shrewd journalists and they are able to scratch below Jobbik’s new, “improved” and […]
Ukraine may not be in the headlines at the moment, as a lull in the fighting that claimed over 6,100 lives in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions appears to be largely holding, but both the U.S. State Department and experts on Russian foreign foreign policy strongly suggest that it’s merely a matter of time before the war is reignited. Russia […]
Members of the Night Wolves, a Russian biker club decided to travel to Berlin to mark the 70th anniversary of the defeat of fascism. Their journey started in Moscow on April 25; they were heading west to the Polish border. The Polish Foreign Ministry has banned the biker gang linked to Russian President Vladimir Putin from entering the country. Polish […]
Ever since the governing Fidesz party’s defeat in the Tapolca by-election to the far-right, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has been shamelessly scrambling to appease and win back the support of those who voted for Jobbik. A few days ago, I wrote about the Orbán’s government overtly xenophobic “national consultation,” where a series of loaded questions suggest that immigration and terrorism […]
A group of young Czech libertarians planted a flag on a 7 square kilometer tract of land, nestled between Croatia and Serbia, which has been abandoned, uninhabited and disputed since the Yugoslav wars of the 1990’s. The heart-shaped plot of land, located along the shores of the Danube, is considered to be a terra nullius, although according to an agreement […]
By now, I lived most of my adult life in California, and I consider myself a proud citizen of this state, which is also the home to the largest Armenian community outside Armenia. April 24th is the Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day, and there were commemorations all over California. This year marks the 100th anniversary of the massacre of more than […]
