Dendrochronology and Environmental History: The Difficulties of Interpretation

András Grynaeus
Hungarian Dendrochronological Laboratory
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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 9 Issue 2  (2020): 302-314 DOI:10.38145/2020.2.302

The study provides insights into questions concerning forest management and timber use by drawing on case studies in the dendrochronological research which has been underway over the course of the past couple of decades in Hungary. The essay refers to natural resource-use and historical and demographic questions which arose in analyses of the wooden materials. The study questions some of the topoi of historical research, such as the immense forest loss traditionally associated with the Ottoman wars.

Keywords: dendrochronology, Hungary, forest resources, Ottoman wars, environmental history

The dendrochronological research which has been underway in Hungary for more than two decades now has brought to light a number of environmental history (related) data which goes beyond the use of the method in dating. If one takes a closer look at these data, several questions arise many of which remain unresolved. This study discusses some (if not all) of these questions.

In 2017, Gergely Rákóczi, associate of the Dobó István Castle Museum of Eger, excavated a wooden sluice bridge structure in Eger in the bed of the Eger Stream.1 Based on the four samples, the earliest year in which the oak trees which were used for the construction could have been cut was 1798. Analyses of the beams showed that the trees were considerably older than what is considered the ideal age for cutting (90 to 120 years), as the samples had 242, 257, 117, and 168 consecutive rings. Thus, these four samples offered a dataset which spanned a long period and could be used for dating and other investigations.

A relatively new and increasingly used method in dendrochronology which has yielded important insights is dendro-provenancing. By using many regional chronologies, researchers try to identify the original habitats of the trees used for timber and thus offer a spatial comparison.2 As Fig. 2 shows,3 the tree rings in the samples from Eger fit best with the chronology from trees in present-day Slovakia, which means that their original habitat was probably there.

This conclusion seems logical, as the Archbishopric of Eger had significant land holdings in this region. Furthermore, it harmonizes with the familiar topoi concerning the Ottoman Empire’s use of Hungary for its timber and the destructive impact on forests of the war to liberate the country from Ottoman occupation, as it suggests that there was a dearth of suitable trees in the Great Hungarian Plain and timber had brought in from the north. However, data referred to by Eszter Magyar concerning the valley of the Hron (Garam) River (a river in Slovakia was a tributary of the Danube) are frequently cited in support of the contention that the region of present-day Slovakia was not used for timber mining.4 In Magyar’s words, “as is clear from a lawsuit in 1544, […] the dynasties of charcoal burners who had been working in the easily accessible forests of the area since the death of King Matthias I [1490] cut down and charred the forests for the second or third time in little more than 50 years.”5 The finds from Eger, however, shed light on this conclusion, as the trees felled in the late 1700s at the age of 200 to 250 were already about 100 to 150 years old at the end of the Ottoman period. This suggests that during the period of the Ottoman presence in the Carpathian Basin, the forests in present-day Slovakia were never completely timbered or burned.

In 2012, during the construction of the new gym of the Saint Elisabeth High School in Esztergom, Edit Tari, an associate of the Balassi Bálint Museum, excavated a number of timber-framed Ottoman-period wells.6 The most “beautiful” and elaborate structure was no. 60, the timber of which was cut during the winter of 1584–1585.7 The builders used trunks cleaved in two, so in each case it was possible to measure the full series of the tree rings, while in most of the samples, both the bark and the sapwood were removed. Fortunately, in eight cases, they were not accurate enough, and in three cases not even the bark was removed decently. If one looks at the relative age of the timber used for the well, it is clear that very young trees were used. Thus, the well supports the conclusion concerning timber mining by the Ottomans in the forests of the Carpathian Basin.

However, when applied in these cases, dendro-provenancing yields surprising conclusions. The timber of the well can be best dated according to the chronology valid for the Vienna Basin. In other words, the timber used in Esztergom came from the Danube River valley or the surroundings of Vienna.8 This means that the timber mining was not “Ottoman” but rather “Ottoman period.” In other words, it was done on the other side of the border.9 One is also confronted with the rather surprising fact that, among the three (hostile) polities that shared the territory of the medieval Kingdom of Hungary, there was considerable trade. This somewhat contradicts the traditional view.10

In 2015, Gábor Wilhelm and Máté Varga, archaeologists from the Katona József Museum, excavated two “barrel wells” in the center of the town of Kecskemét (Nagykörösi Street 7–9), i.e. two well structures in which, within the timber frame, there barrels, one in each (objects 19 and 26).11

Similar structures are familiar from the Roman period (e.g. from Ménfőcsanak) but are unique in late medieval contexts.12 The timber material is well suited for analysis, and it turned out they were cut at the earliest in 1486 and 1484.13 As there was no way to provide a more precise dating for the samples, it cannot be determined whether they made their way to Kecskemét in the late Middle Ages and the barrels, which were considered useless, were re-used in this manner or whether they were brought to the town in the period of the Ottoman occupation and were recycled as “rolls.” Unfortunately, there is no way to resolve this question, which is regrettable, as the timber originates from Transylvania. More precisely, they best match the chronologies of Biertan (Berethalom) and Târgu Mureş (Marosvásárhely).14 This means that they made their way Kecskemét by trade. The question of what was originally stored in them is fascinating, if still unanswered, and it would be similar interesting to know whether the barrels also testify to trading activities across the borders in the Ottoman period similar to the practices observed in the context of the site at Esztergom. The uncertainty lies in the fact that, because of the post quem dating of the barrels, it cannot be determined whether they were brought to the town in the last years of the unified Kingdom of Hungary or only after the tripartition.

In Budapest, at Kacsa Street 15–23 (in the second district of the city), Katalin Éder and Tibor Hable (both of whom were associates of the Budapest History Museum at the time) found wooden wells the trees for which were felled around 1584–1585. These Ottoman-period objects also testify to “transborder” trade (certainly present towards the Kingdom of Hungary and presumably towards the Principality of Transylvania) in the life of the country after the fall of the medieval kingdom, as the material of the well can be best dated according to the Viennese chronology.15

As a method, dendrochronology bears surprises for scholars of significantly earlier periods as well. In 2011,16 Katalin Sebők and Gábor V. Szabó (Institute of Archaeology, Eötvös Loránd University) unearthed a well that be dated to the Late Bronze Age (Urnfield culture) at Pusztataksony–Ledence.17 Most of the timber in the well (twenty of the twenty-two pieces) was of ash (Fraxinus sp.). The difficulty of interpreting the finds lies in the fact that one cannot draw a distinction among the three species of ash that are indigenous to the Carpathian Basin, the European ash (Fraxinus excelsior L.), the flowering ash (Fraxinus ornus L.), and the narrow-leaved ash (Fraxinus angustifolia subsp. pannonica) on the basis of the image of their tissues.

The habitats of the three species, however, differ. The first two species are mountainous, while the Hungarian subspecies of the narrow-leaved ash prefers flood plains.18 This provides us with an opportunity for further interpretation. One could assume that the trees were transported, in which case one gains valuable data concerning the economic life of a community very far away from Hungary today, both in space and time. However, one can interpret the data from an environmental history perspective. In that case, the data tells of the significantly different composition of species in the flood plain forests back then. Which reading of the data would be correct?19 The site provides us with one more surprise: young (only 40- to 50-year old) trees were used here again. Why? This question, i.e. the age of the felled trees, is difficult for specialists even at sites on which they have more information.

In the cases of a number of excavation sites, information can be acquired on the ages of the trees used to craft different objects. A telling example is the case of the two Neolithic wells (nos. 629 and 583) that were unearthed at Szalkszentmárton–Táborállás in 2017 by Bernadett Kovacsóczy (an associate of the Katona József Museum).20 The wells were built of trees felled with an eleven-year gap. For the older well, they used trees which were 200 years old, while for the younger, the trees were roughly 150 years old.21 This indicates two things: when building wells, there were trees of those ages at the disposal of the community within a reasonable distance, which means that the forests in the territory had been left intact for at least 200 years. However, it also became clear that the newly settled population started to use the forests, so after a decade, they had to “fall back on” the less suitable timber, which was “only” 150 years old.

The use of old trees can be observed at many sites throughout Hungary, such as in the case of a Celtic-period well22 unearthed at site no. 212 (Center for Heritage Protection, Hungarian National Museum, 2010) by the M3 highway at Pócspetri–Bikarét, where trees which were 100 to 160 years old were built into the well’s structure. But the same could be observed at the Sarmatian-period wells found at Püspökladány–Sárréti Csali-tanya (2013)23 and at site no. 14 at Tiszagyenda–Lakhatom.24 One tends to conclude that the use of old trees indicates an undisturbed environment, while uninhabited territories and the use of younger trees shows a disturbed environment and densely inhabited areas. However, if one has some background knowledge of these periods, one may call into question the accuracy of this reading of the data.

Site no. 45 by the M6 highway close to Szekszárd, which was excavated by János Ódor (Wosinsky Mór Museum) in 2010, prompts one to call into question the above conclusion.25 Two Avar-period wells (nos. 53 and 70) were also made of timber from trees felled within a gap of eleven years. This is just a coincidence with respect to the aforementioned example, of course, but the interpretation is more problematic, as in this case, the structure of the older well was made of trees felled at about 100 years of age, while in the case of the younger well, the trees used were over 200 years old when felled.26

Is it reasonable consistently to associate the use of older trees with demographic tendencies? Do we really have to assume that there were long periods during which areas were uninhabited and/or periods without forest clearance? Or would it be more realistic to set aside the notion of forests going untouched for generations and consider the possibility that forests were consciously used and cultivated? Could one reasonably make this assumption in the case of the Avars, the Sarmatians, and the Celtic-period populations? Or can one communities inhabited a certain area? The question is clear: should the features make this assumption with regard to periods in which different peoples/of the wood be understood as demographic data or as cultivation data? Do they yield conclusions concerning demographic processes or farming knowledge and practices?

At this point, one must consider methods of forest clearance in historical times. A number of questions and many possible answers arose in the course of an excavation led by Gábor Váczi (an associate of the Institute of Archaeology, Eötvös Loránd University) at site no. 5 at Tiszabura–Bónis-hát. The most important “source” was an Avar-period well. The eight beams studied included trees younger than 100 when felled and older than 200, but only one in between those ages.27 Why?

Was this the result of clear cutting? This would explain the mixed ages of the trees. However, this may also have been the result of selective cutting, as based on the sizes and the shapes of the beams, they may have been carefully selected. Or could their placement in the structure of the well be related to their age? There is no substantive data that could support or dismiss this possibility. Do we have so many unanswered questions simply because the low number of samples distort the results? Is this problem aggravated by the fact that parts of the samples have been destroyed (some of the beams and planks), so some parts of the dataset are missing, and some of the external tree rings may be rotten? Of course, one can also interpret the feature as a consequence of a particular method used to shape the beams, because assuming that the wood was cut from a suitably mature tree which was cleaved in half to create two 100 year-old beams, we may have only found one of them. This can also be understood as a special feature of the excavation, which can be traced back to the fact that only the bottom beams survived. The ones above them were destroyed over the centuries.

Can we assume that different methods of wood-cutting were used? I.e., is it possible that people at certain periods could not fell trees of any size? This may seem plausible, but it is unlikely that, if they were able to fell the old trees, they could not deal with the younger ones. Is it possible that the trees preserved traces of demographic processes? Or are both true? Did one of the peoples arriving in the region not know how to or did not want to fell larger trees, and so the trees survived only to be felled and used by later groups? Environmental reasons can also be considered, as for instance younger trees stands could have fallen victim to an ice-flood, while older trees may have proved to be more resilient. And in that case, we have not considered explanations concerning possible rituals or beliefs, such as “sacred oaks” left standing by previous peoples who had lived there.

Which interpretation is correct? How far can an archaeologist/scholar go in interpreting such data? These questions are difficult to answer, but similar features can be observed at late medieval (Vácszentlászló–Hajta-patak28) and Árpád Era (Hódmezővásárhely–Kingéc29) sites, and these similarities limit the interpretive possibilities to some extent, certainly in connection with ritual practices.

What explanations are the most convincing in such cases? And what methods should researchers use when positing explanations? Should they brainstorm, or should they patiently wait until, at some point in the future, enough data have been gathered to yield definite answers? Should one consider stick to observations of features or should one build theories, which of course involves the risk of error? These questions are not simple to answer.

Bibliography

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Fülöp, Kristóf. “The Birth of Wells: A Late Bronze Age Well from Pusztataskony–Ledence.” In State of the Hungarian bronze age research. Proceedings of the conference held between 17th and 18th of December 2014, edited by Gabriella Kulcsár, and Gábor V. Szabó, 309–36. Budapest: ELTE BTK Régészettudományi Intézet, MTA BTK Régészeti Intézet, Ősrégészeti Társaság, 2017.

Grynaeus, András. “A 164. számú kút deszkáinak dendrokronológiai vizsgálata” [Dendrochoronological investigation of planks of well no. 164]. Múzeumi Műhely 8. Hódmezővásárhely: Tornyai János Múzeum, forthcoming.

Grynaeus, András, János Gábor Ódor. “Dendrokronológia: Avar kori kutak Szekszárd, Varga Peti-dűlő, 1. lelőhely” [Dendrochronology: Avar period wells at Szekszárd Varga Peti-dűlő site no. 1]. In Nem térkép e táj: Régészeti kutatások eredményei Szekszárd területén 2006–2015 [The landscape is not a map: Results of the archaeological investigations at Szeszárd, 2006–2015], edited by András K. Németh, 31. Szekszárd, 2016.

Hajnal, Zsuzsanna. “Migration period settlement at Tiszagyenda with Hun period destruction horizon.” Poster presentation at the Attila Európája [Attila’s Europe] conference Budapest, June 6–7, 2019.

Kondé, Zsófia. “Egy kút élete: Avar kori településrészlet Tiszabura–Bónishát lelőhelyről” [The life of a well: Avar-period settlement fragment from Tiszabura–Bónishát]. In Beatus homo qui invenit sapientiam: Ünnepi kötet Tomka Péter 75. születésnapjára [Volume in honor of the 75th birthday of Péter Tomka], edited by Teréz Csécs, and Miklós Takács, 337–51. Győr, 2016.

Kovacsóczy, Bernadett. “Előkelő avar férfi sírja Szalkszentmárton határából” [Burial of a member of the Avar elite from the borders of Szalkszentmárton]. In Hatalmi központok az Avar Kaganátusban [Power centers in the Avar Khaganate], edited by Csilla Balogh, József Szentpéteri, and Erika Wicker, 69–96. Kecskemét 2019.

Larsson, Nicklas, Vera Majerik. “Pócspetri határa” [The borders of Pócspetri]. In Régészeti kutatások Magyarországon 2011 [Archaeological investigations in Hungary, 2011], edited by Júlia Kisfaludi, Judit Kvassay, and Attila Kreiter, 146–47. Budapest: Magyar Nemzeti Múzeum, 2018.

Magyar, Eszter. A feudalizmus kori erdőgazdálkodás az alsó-magyarországi bányavárosokban (1255–1747) [Forest management in the Lower-Hungarian mining towns in the age of feudalism, 1255–1747]. Budapest, 1983.

Molnár, Karola. “Kecskemét–Nagykőrösi utca 7–9. lelőhely kútjainak vizsgálata: Adatok a késő középkori-kora újkori kutak vizsgálatához” [Analysis of the wells of Kecskemét–Nagykörösi Street 7–9 site. Data to the study of late medieval – Early Modern wells]. In Acta iuvenum: Sectio archaeologica. Tomus III. Acta Universitatis Szegediensis, edited by László Révész, 129–51. Szeged: Szegedi Tudományegyetem, Régészeti Tanszék, 2017.

Ódor, János. “Avar szőlő, avar kút: Szekszárd, Varga Peti-dűlő, 1. lelőhely – M6 To 045 lelőhely 2008” [Avar vineyard, Avar well: Szekszárd, Varga Peti-dűlő, site no. 1 – M/ To 045 site, 2008]. In Nem térkép e táj: Régészeti kutatások eredményei Szekszárd területén 2006–2015 [The landscape is not a map: Results of the archaeological investigations at Szeszárd, 2006–2015], edited by András K. Németh, 22–23. Szekszárd, 2016.

Rákóczi, Gergely. “Zsiliphíd az Eger patak medrében” [Sluice bridge in the bed of Eger Stream]. Agria, forthcoming.

Schweingruber, Fritz Hans. Der Jahrring: Standort, Methodik, Zeit und Klima in der Dendrochronologie. Bern–Stuttgart: P. Haupt, 1983.

Szabó, Péter. “Erdők a kora újkorban: történelem, régészet, ökológia” [Woodland in the early modern period: History, archaeology, ecology]. In Környezettörténet: Az utóbbi 500 év környezeti eseményei történeti és természettudományi források tükrében, edited by Miklós Kázmér, 137–56. Budapest: Hantken, 2009.

Szolnoki, László. “Püspökladány, Sárréti Csali-tanya” [Püspökladány, Csali farm in Sárrét]. Déri Múzeum Évkönyve 89 (2018): 41.

Tari, Edit. “Az Esztergom-vízivárosi oszmán fajanszedény-kincslelet” [The Ottoman faience-treasure hoard at Esztergom–Víziváros]. Archaeológiai Értesítő 141 (2016): 195–210.

Váczi, Gábor. “Tiszabura, Bónishát” [Tiszabura–Bónishát]. In Régészeti kutatások Magyarországon 2009 [Archaeological investigation in Hungary, 2009], edited by Júlia Kisfaludi, 366–67. Budapest: Magyar Nemzeti Múzeum, 2010.

Vadas, András, Péter Szabó. “Not Seeing the Forest for the Trees? Ottoman-Hungarian Wars and Forest Resources.” Hungarian Historical Review 7, no. 3 (2018): 477–509.

Várkonyi, Gábor. Ünnepek és hétköznapok: Művelődés és mentalitás a török kori Magyarországon [Feasts and weekdays: Education and mentality in Hungary in the Ottoman Era]. Budapest: General Press, 2009.

Figure 3. Well 60 (image by Edit Tari). Relative age of the beams (the light fields on the diagram mark the hardwood, while the dark fields indicate the sapwood of the tree rings)

Transformations of Metal Supply during the Bronze Age in the Carpathian Basin

Viktória Kiss*
Research Centre for the Humanities
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 Hungarian Historical Review Volume 9 Issue 2  (2020): 315-330 DOI:10.38145/2020.2.315

This paper presents recent research questions which have been raised and methods which have been used in the study of Bronze Age metallurgy in connection with available natural resources (ores) in and around the Carpathian Basin. This topic fits in the most current trends in the research on European prehistoric archaeology. Given the lack of written sources, copper and bronze artifacts discovered in settlement and cemetery excavations and prehistoric mining sites provide the primary sources on which the studies in question are based. The aim of compositional and isotope analysis of copper and tin ores, metal tools, ornaments, and weapons is to determine the provenience of the raw materials and further an understanding of the chaine operatiore of prehistoric metal production. The Momentum Mobility Research Group of the Institute of Archaeology, Research Centre for the Humanities studies these metal artifacts using archaeological and scientific methods. It has focused on the first thousand years of the Bronze Age (2500–1500 BC). Multidisciplinary research include non-destructive XRF, PGAA (promptgamma activation), TOF-ND (time-of-flight neutron diffraction) analyses and neutron radiography, as well as destructive methods, e.g. metal sampling for compositional and lead isotope testing, alongside archaeological analysis. Microstructure studies are also efficient methods for determining the raw material and production techniques. The results suggest the use of regional ore sources and interregional connections, as well as several transformations in the exchange network of the prehistoric communities living in the Carpathian Basin.

Keywords: Copper Age, Bronze Age, metallurgy, scientific analysis, exchange networks

Introduction

Given the lack of written sources from the period in question, an important research question is simply where did the raw materials, used by prehistoric communities come from. If we determine the provenance of stone and metal raw materials, we can venture hypotheses regarding the connections among prehistoric groups. Over the course of the past decade, montan-archeological research (Montanarchäologie; archeology of raw material mining) and archeometallurgy have proven the existence of several prehistoric copper ore mining sites in various European regions. As a result, most current research trends in the archaeological study of the Copper and Bronze Ages are connected to scientific analyses of metal artifacts discovered in settlement and cemetery excavations, as well as ores found at prehistoric mining sites.1

Figure 1. Map of social interactions based on the archaeometallurgical analyses of the first copper artifacts in the Carpathian Basin2

In the central areas of the Carpathian Basin metal, ores were not available, or in a very small amount.3 Compositional analysis of the first small items of copper jewelry, which appeared in the late Neolithic period (the fifth millennium BC), revealed that they were made of high-purity copper. Thanks to recent lead isotope analyses, the conclusion has been reached that these artifacts came to the Carpathian Basin from communities living in the vicinity of mines in Serbia and Bulgaria (Fig. 1).4 The very few lead isotope data so far indicate that they are objects that were imported from the Balkans even in the Copper Age, possibly with the use of mines in the Slovak Ore Mountains and the eastern Alpine region.5 We can suppose that the development of local metallurgy began in the Copper Age.6

Analysis of Bronze Age Artifacts in Central Europe

The metalwork of the Bell Beaker culture (around 2500 BC), which began to emerge at the dawn of the European Bronze Age, is an important research topic, mainly because artifacts used by these communities were the first metal objects in the western part of Europe. On the basis of the available data, scholars outlined a uniform metal type, the so-called Bell Beaker metal, which consisted of 98% copper with arsenic, antimony, and nickel impurities.7 A selection of 1,943 trace element analyses of copper finds from the material of Central European communities (southern and central Germany, Bohemia, Moravia, and the Carpathian Basin) used between 4500 and 2000 BC resulted in a picture which differed from the western European Bell Beaker metal: the artifacts were categorized into 13 different groups. According to the compositional analyses, 65 of the 80 eastern Bell Beaker objects were made of tin-rich or fahlore coppers with varying impurities (antimony, arsenic, silver) and a small (less than 4%) amount of tin. The various dominant elements suggest that there was no uniform Bell Beaker metal in this region.8

Elemental composition data of the next period prove that the most widespread raw material of the Central European Early Bronze Age (from 2100 BC; contemporaneous with the 3rd phase of the Early Bronze Age and the Middle Bronze Age in Hungary)9 was the so-called Ösenring metal, the characteristic fahlore type of the neck rings.10 The latter copper, which contained silver, arsenic, and antimony impurities, has been associated with ore occurrences in the triangle of the Eastern Alps, Slovakia, and the Czech-Saxon Ore Mountain range based on the distribution area of the mentioned neck rings (Fig. 2).11 Lead isotope tests which were used to arrive at more accurate determinations of provenance indicate that the raw material of these artifacts derived from the Slovak region.12

Figure 2. Prehistoric copper mining regions associated with Ösenring metal type13

Figure 3. Abundance of copper with fahlore and chalcopyrite signatures produced
in the eastern Alps from the beginning of the Bronze Age to the Hallstatt period based
on the compositions of approximately 1200 prehistoric metal artifacts from Tyrol, Salzburg, and southern Bavaria14

In the 1960s and 1970s, the transformation of the raw material used at the beginning of the Central European Middle Bronze Age (contemporaneously with the transition from the Middle to the Late Bronze Age in Hungary) was detected by the Stuttgart metallurgy project (Studien zu den Anfängen der Metallurgie or SAM project).15 This metal type, which contained arsenic and nickel, spread in a wide region of Europe, also called Einheitskupfer or eastern Alpine copper. The new unified metal type, based on lead isotope data, was associated with chalcopyrite ores (Fig. 3) of the Mitterberg region, situating to the south of Salzburg.16 According to the most recent radiocarbon dates, these ore sources were exploited from the 16th to the 14th centuries BC.17

Analysis of Bronze Age Artifacts in Hungary: State-of-the Art and New Perspectives

As we have seen, research on Eurasian copper raw material has provided important data, although questions still remain regarding the origin of copper ores used by Bronze Age metalworkers in the Carpathian Basin.

Research on metal finds has intensified over the course of the past two decades in Hungary as well. Re-dating of the earliest axes from the 3rd millennium to the end of the 4th millennium provided important data concerning raw materials. Based on an evaluation of the Stuttgart database, 21 axes of the Bányabükk hoard prove that Copper Age and the earliest Bronze Age axes were made of pure copper. The raw material of later Fajsz-, Corbasca-, and Kömlőd-Kozarac-type axes18 show a more varied picture, with fahlores containing impurities at 1–2%, namely arsenic, antimony, and silver. Occasional low nickel content suggests a mixture of ores.19 This indicates that the raw materials the natural impurities of which made it possible to produce harder tools were sought and were not the result of intentional alloying.20

Analyses of metal finds from Bell Beaker burials (2500–2200 BC) were also begun. According to the findings, the raw materials out of which the daggers and pins were made usually consisted of pure copper (98–99%) with antimony, silver, lead, and tin impurities.21

Based on several metal analyses, neck rings, hair rings, spiral arm rings, pins, and daggers from the end of the Early Bronze Age (Fig. 4) which were excavated in western Hungary (2100–1900 BC)22 were manufactured from fahlore copper rich in trace elements, such as antimony, arsenic, and silver.23 Copper artifacts containing arsenic and nickel, beside fahlore copper ornaments and tools are known from cemeteries of the same period which were discovered in eastern Hungary.24

Figure 4. Typochronology of metal finds from the dawn of the Early Bronze Age until the first period of the Middle Bronze Age in Hungary25

At the beginning of the Middle Bronze Age (2000/1900 BC), tin bronzes appeared with 4–10% tin, which is a clear indication of intentional alloying
(Fig. 5).26

Optical emission spectroscopy analyses of the aforementioned Stuttgart metallurgical project provided 116 data for Middle Bronze Age metallurgy of Western Hungary based on samplings of five hoards of Transdanubian Encrusted Pottery (1800–1600 BC; the so-called Tolnanémedi horizon) and artifacts of a burial from the same period. The findings indicate that 80% of the local ornament types were made of the characteristic fahlore type Ösenring copper alloyed with tin.27 Compositional analyses of the Zalaszabar hoard from the same period suggest that tools and jewelry, which were found together in hoards, were manufactured with the use of several casting procedures.28

Testing of the Koszider type hoards and several ornaments and tools from the end of the Middle Bronze Age in Hungary demonstrates a transformation in the use of raw materials similar to contemporaneous Central European Middle Bronze Age, with the dominance of so-called Einheitskupfer or containing arsenic and nickel.29 In connection with the research on the find assemblage of the famous Nebra Sky Disc, dating to the 16th and 15th centuries BC and discovered in the region of Halle (northeastern Germany), elemental analyses of the axes of the Hajdúsamson hoard, axes and a sword from Vámospércs and Téglás were performed. As in the case of the material of the Nebra finds, the compositional data all match the mentioned eastern Alpine copper (with two exceptions from Téglás). This research yielded the first lead isotope data from Hungary confirming the association of the mentioned raw material with the chalcopyrite ore mines of the eastern Alpine region. Investigations of the Apa hoard, which has close typological relations to the weapons from Hajdúsámson, and other contemporaneous find assemblages suggest that, in addition to Alpine and Slovak raw materials, ores from other regions of the Carpathians (in the area of Baia Mare and the Apuşeni Mountains) were also processed (Fig. 6).30

Figure 6. Lead isotope ratios of the objects from Apa and Hajdúsámson and of copper ores from Mitterberg, the Slovak Ore Mountains and lead ores from Baia Mare31

We have seen that data concerning elemental compositions suggest large trends, but the exact provenance of raw materials and the chaine operatiore of production need further confirmation.

The project of the Momentum Mobility Research Group of the Institute of Archaeology, Research Centre for the Humanities aims to study metal artifacts of the abovementioned period during the first thousand years of the Bronze Age in Hungary (2500–1500 BC). We analyzed ornaments, weapons, and tools from precisely dated inhumation and cremation burial assemblages of the Bell Beaker period (2500–2200 BC) and the Early and the Middle Bronze Ages in eastern and western Hungary (Fig. 7–8).

Multidisciplinary analyses of chemical composition are provided by non-destructive XRF, PGAA (prompt-gamma activation), and TOF-ND (time-of-flight neutron diffraction) analyses in cooperation with the Budapest Neutron Centre (Centre for Energy Research). XRF results can only be interpreted for the surface, while bulk area was analyzed by PGAA.32 Neutron radiography and TOF-ND are

33 

applied in order to determine production techniques (see summary of research facilities and relevant technologies available for the archaeometallurgical testing in Hungary).34 It is important to note that while post-casting elaboration was formerly identifed by destructive microstructure analysis we could detect the hardening of the edge of flanged axes without any destruction of the artefacts (Fig. 8).35

Figure 9. Dendritic structure of an as-cast pendant from Zalaszabar36

We perform destructive metallographic examinations on some objects, selected on the basis of non-destructive analyzes, in cooperation with the specialists of the Department of Materials Science of the University of Miskolc and the Department of Solid State Physics of the University of Debrecen (Fig. 9). We also study the effect of cremation to the microstructure of the bronze jewelry found in cremation burials.37

Figure 10. Multidisciplinary analyses of Bronze Age finds from Hungarian Early and Middle Bronze Age sites (Balatonakali, Budakalász, Nagyrév, Polgár, Sárrétudvari, Zalaszabar, Zsennye) with Central European prehistoric copper mining sites38

There are 42 ongoing lead isotope measurements (Fig. 10) performed in collaboration with the Curt-Engelhorn Archaeometry Center in Mannheim. The significance of these lead isotope analyses is emphasized by the fact that, with the exception of the above mentioned nine objects from the region of Debrecen, no additional lead isotope data were available from the inner areas of the Carpathian Basin.

Our results complement the research performed in the 1960s and 1970s and over the course of the past two decades. Changes in raw material use over time show similar tendencies to those in Austria and other parts of Central Europe. Though compositional data are still matter of discussion,39 results suggest that, in the Early Bronze Age, copper ores which were mined in the territory of present-day Slovakia were used.40 Based on some artifact types dating between 2800 and 1500 BC we can suppose networks of relationships which stretched over long distances. In the case of these artifacts, the question has arisen as to whether they were manufactured at and exported from the same workshop or they are locally made copies that indicate long-distance connections among Bronze Age communities.41 E.g. lead isotope data concerning the weapons from the Hajdúsámson treasure and other swords and axes found near Debrecen suggest that the raw materials with which they were made originated from the Eastern Alpine region. The decoration motifs on these weapons, however, indicate that they were made locally in the Tisza region.42 The findings summarized here indicate interregional connections, as well as several transformations in the exchange network of the prehistoric communities living in the Carpathian Basin.

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* The author is the PI of the „Lendület” (Momentum) Mobility Research Group at the Research Centre for the Humanities, Hungarian Academy of Sciences (LP 2015-3/2015)

Figure 5. Tin–arsenic chart based on artifacts of the Zalaszabar hoard, Western Hungary

Figure 8. Texture results of the TOF-ND analysis of the flanged axe from Zalaszabar at the neck, and at the edge of the axe

Figure 7. Metal ornaments from inhumation and cremation burials of the Middle Bronze Age cemetery excavated at Bonyhád

Along the Danube and at the Foothills of the North-Eastern Hungarian Mountains: Some Data on the Distribution of Stone Raw Materials in the Late Iron Age

Zoltán Czajlik
Eötvös Loránd University
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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 9 Issue 2  (2020): 331-342 DOI:10.38145/2020.2.331 

Stones as raw materials are important environmental resources often found at prehistoric sites. Since their various types essentially retained their original geological features, it is generally relatively easy to identify their origin. Nevertheless, there is hardly any systematic research on late prehistoric stone raw materials. Furthermore, these materials are mentioned very inconsistently and the geological terms, definitions and analyzes are absent from the discussions. The general picture that we can sketch based on secondary literature is therefore mosaic-like. However, it is by no means impossible to identify extraction sites. Based on on-site experience and using modern analyzes, it is possible, for example, to differentiate between individual types of sandstone and andesite. From the perspective of future research, analyzes of late Iron Age stone materials from well-studied archaeological contexts could contribute to understand better how stones as raw materials were used in late prehistoric periods.

Keywords: natural resources, stone raw materials, Carpathian Basin, Iron Age

Introduction

Stone raw materials are important environmental resources. They offer a good topic for research, since they are usually frequently present among the finds of both prehistoric settlements and cemeteries. An additional advantage of this material is that the various ways in which they were modified and put to use did not change them significantly, unlike in the case of many other raw materials, such as clay ceramics or in various ores. Given that their original geological conditions are essentially preserved, it is usually comparatively easy to identify their provenance. Regrettably, in spite of the suitability of this resource as a useful tool on the basis of which to pursue study of a given period, there is very little systematic research regarding stone raw materials from the Late Iron Age, in contrast with the secondary literature on earlier periods of prehistory. These materials are mentioned only inconsistently in the scholarship, and the geological terms, definitions, and analyses are missing from these discussions. The general image we can outline concerning the secondary literature is mosaic-like, and this reflects the lack of research.

The most important figures in the history of the Carpathian Basin in the Late Iron Age were the Celts. Their arrival and presence in the area can be reconstructed in comparative detail on the basis of historical sources and archaeological evidence. Regarding the latter, attention should be drawn to the several waves of western immigration which began in 450 BC and to the changing settlement areas of the different periods.1 Furthermore, the remarkable changes observed from the third century BC should be mentioned, which are associated with the formation of many larger and more structured settlements and with the more intensive utilization of natural resources. This process is well documented in the Western Celtic territories and especially in Czech lands and Moravia,2 further important study has been published from the Scordiscan region,3 but it cannot yet be outlined in the whole Eastern Celtic area. Similarly, the development of the next economic-technological stage, the establishment of the oppida (fortified Iron Age settlements representing the pre-industrial level), is not common here, and these settlements existed much shorter period in the region east from the Danube than in the west.

Taking into account the archaeological-historical circumstances, we would list the most important available data about the use of the raw materials needed for stone tools. Despite the obvious difficulties and the lack of data, due the increasingly intense archaeometric research which has been underway over the course of the past few decades, certain raw material sites and the networks in which they were involved are slowly being outlined, as are their positions in the regional resource supply chains.

Stone Tools

Although various stone tools were often found in the archaeological material of Celtic settlements, they were only rarely studied in detail, with clear discussions of their geological provenance. Two main tool categories should be given primary consideration in the research: the sharpening stones and the grinding/mill stones. For these different functions, stones with different characteristics were needed, as the first tool was used for sharpening metals, while the second was mainly used for grinding grain. While in the first case stones which contained quartz (e.g. sandstone) are especially favorable, hard rock types (e.g. extrusive igneous volcanic rocks: andesite, dacite, etc.) are suitable for grinding.

1. Sharpening stones

Most of the known sharpening stones were discovered used and fragmented, buried in buildings within settlement areas. In the Eastern Celtic territories, however, most of the large cemeteries also had some finds in the tombs, and sharpening stones were unearthed among the personal belongings of
the deceased.

The excavated whetstones of the Pottenbrunn cemetery (Austria, representing the Early Celtic Period) are made from flysch (sandstone; tomb no. 520, no. 1005) and quartzite originating from greywacke strata.4 According to the authors, with regards to the provenance of the raw material, the gravelly alluvia of the Traisen River should be primarily taken into account. i.e. these objects seem to be made of local secondarily deposited raw materials.

The evaluation of the material from the Celtic site at Süttő - Sáncföldek is still in progress, but based on the excavated features, it can be dated to the period between the second half of the fourth century BC and the beginning or middle of the third century BC.5 The whetstones of the site were studied by Dóra Kürthy, and most of them can be linked to the Lábatlan Sandstone Formation, located 8–10 km to the east of the Süttő plateau.

The sharpening stones from the third-century BC settlement of Sajópetri Hosszú-dűlő were mostly made of hard, fine-grained sandstone.6 The exact geographical provenance has not been identified, but there are several different types of sandstone nearby among the sedimentary rocks in the valley of the Sajó River, i.e. within a distance of 15–20 km. It also should be noted that 50–60 km away from this microregion, connected to the valley from the West are the Ózd-Pétervására Hills, which include a sandstone zone significant in the regional context.7 It would definitely be worth dedicating a more detailed geoarchaeological study to it. In the contemporary cemetery of Sajópetri–Homoki szőlőskert (grave nr. 62/136, 1 km to the south of the settlement) and in the pit 03.46A.194 of the settlement, whetstones from rhyolitic tuff were also excavated. This material originates from the east, from the Tokaj Mountains.8 Similarly to the case of the Ózd-Pétervására Hills, the distance between the Sajópetri microregion, the southern part of the Sajó Valley and this raw material source is 40–50 km.

The Celtic settlement of Nitra-Šindolka is from the same period, and it has also been thoroughly studied. The majority (13) of the 17 geologically determined sharpening stones proved to be sandstone. Their provenance is unknown.9

The whetstone found in one of the pits of the oppidum at Gellérthegy, which is from the Late Celtic period (end of the end century BC and beginning of the first), was made of a fine variant of the Hárshegy sandstone, which was identified by Péter Bohn as a type known from the Ezüst-hegy in Budakalász.10 This area can be reached along the Danube River on a 13–14 km long road, so it can be considered, from point of view of Gellérthegy, a microregional natural resource. The whetstones and polishing tools of the Bratislava-Devín oppidum were published by Karol Pieta as finds belonging to a workshop. Most of them are sandstone, but there is one tool made of rock crystal, which suggests goldsmithing.11 As a possible provenance area for rock crystals within the Carpathian Basin, we can mention the Eastern Alps, specifically the High Tauern. This hypothesis is indirectly confirmed by the rock crystals unearthed at Magdalensberg,12 and also by the Neolithic rock crystal mining site discovered at Riepenkar. Although the latter site is far from Devín, which is thought to be the western gateway to the Carpathian Basin, a number of rock crystal finds indicate the important route connecting the Riepenkar zone with the Inn and Danube valleys.13

2. Grinding stones, millstones

At the Celtic site of Süttő–Sáncföldek, we also excavated broken pieces of grinding stones deposited in a pit. Their material is andesite, and according to the research of Dóra Kürthy, they originate from the Börzsöny or the Visegrád Mountains.14 Although further geological studies are necessary to determine their provenance accurately, it is certainly noteworthy that on the western edge of the source area of the andesite, on both banks of the Danube, very important, partly contemporary Celtic sites are located. The Celtic cemetery of Szob-Kőzúzó was found at the mouth of the Ipoly River.15 The settlement presumably belonging to the cemetery16 was discovered by the riverside approximately 500 m higher. Farther, 3 km away, on Csák Hill an andesite quarry that is still in use is located. On the right side of the Danube, in Pilismarót-Basaharc, another Celtic cemetery was excavated which is also significant in the supra-regional context.17 The contemporary settlement18 was identified ca. 1–1.5 km east of the graves, on the riverbank. The best-known locality of andesite in the region is 4–5 km southeast of the Celtic sites of Pilismarót, on Szekrény Hill. For exact identification, further research is needed, but we know that the raw material of the grinding stones of Süttő originates from a distance of at least 40 km downstream.

The Late Iron Age third-century BC settlement of Sajópetri Hosszú-dűlő was excavated on an area covering more than 40,000 m2, and it provided a huge amount of stone material, including larger, mostly fragmented tool stones. The only intact grinding stone was unearthed in the votive ensemble 02.A.93. The best-preserved rotary quern fragment was in the building 03.B.32. Most of these stone tools belong to semi subterranean buildings, and they are made of porous/compact andesite. To identify the provenance area of the andesite, we took into account the probable origin of the rhyolite tuff (Mád/Tállya/Szerencs) which was also discovered in the settlement, and in 2007, we suggested that it comes from the Tokaj Mountains, which are 40–45 km away, but we did not exclude the possibility that they came from the Mátra Mountains.19

Millstone and grinding stone exploitation sites (in total exceeding an area of 10km2) were discovered at the foothills of the Mátra Mountains in the Domoszló microregion.20 At the Pipis-hegy, Középső-hegy, Hosszú-hegy, Hegyes-hegy (etc.) a unique rock type of the Nagyhársas Andesite Formation was utilized. The size and the shape of the andesite bombs and boulders made it easier to produce the tool stones.21 Based on geological analyses of excavated archaeological stone tools, the andesite from Domoszló was used as early as the Middle Bronze Age (Füzesabony culture) and until the seventeenth century (Szendrő-Vár), i.e. this raw material may have been known to the Celts as well. The most significant Celtic site in the surroundings is discussed in a 2012 monograph22 on the cemetery of the Ludas–Varjú-dűlő, 10–12 km south-southwest of the raw material extraction site. The necropolis was established in the same period as the Sajópetri site, in the third century BC, but a settlement with a similar scale has not been discovered around it yet. Before the expansion of a lignite mine, there were rescue excavations on an area of 30 hectares,23 and field surveys were done along the Bene Valley,24 In the course of both, remains of smaller farmsteads were found in the vicinity. Nothing has been published on the stone material of the excavated settlement remains in Ludas, and there were no andesite tool stones in the burial sites of the Varjú-dűlő. However, there may still have been a connection between the site and the Mátra Mountains, as the graves are oriented to the main peaks.25

Based on the above-mentioned facts, we can assume that in the Late Iron Age, andesite was in use in the Börzsöny/Visegrád Mountains, the Tokaj Mountains, and the Mátra Mountains. In addition, previous studies suggest that the extraction of andesite in northern Hungary began in the Cserhát Mountain range relatively early, as the basaltic andesite millstones of the Sarmatian settlement of Üllő (third and fourth centuries AD) suggest.26

Péter Bohn examined two millstones from the Late Celtic oppidum at Budapest-Gellérthegy.27 He identified the provenance area as laying either in the Börzsöny Mountains or the Visegrád Mountains, but no further research was conducted. In this case, assuming waterborne transport, we can calculate a distance of 50–60 km. Other oppida on the banks of the Danube (Devín and Bratislava) draw attention to a different important raw material source, namely the basalt of Pauliberg at Oberpullendorf (Austria).28 During the Late Celtic period, this basalt was transported not only to the Danube Valley but also to areas lying more to the north, to the Moravian territories.29

The millstone found in a subterranean building at the excavation site of the fortified settlement of Nitriansky Hrádok belongs to the same period, and it is also made of andesite.30 Although in the Northern Carpathians (e.g. Liptovská Mara), earlier Tatra granite and rhyolite were also used for stone tools, a remarkable quarry and production area for andesite grinding stones with semi-finished and waste products is known from Rakša, where there is a Late Celtic settlement nearby.31 The site is located far from Nitriansky Hrádok (130 km), but probably most of the route (85–90 km) could have been made on the River Nitra.

One can also mention several relevant studies done outside the Carpathian Basin, in neighboring territories, such as northern Italy and Bohemia. The fourth-century and third-century BC grinding stones from the material of Monte Bibele originate from the volcanits located around Orvieto, which was at least 300 km away from the site across the Apennines and much farther if using sea lanes.32 The era of the oppida is represented in Bohemia by specialized centers like Lovosice and the Kunětická Mountains. They supplied the entire northern part of the region and often even more distant areas with their products.33

Concluding Remarks

We examined three regions from the period of the Celtic expansion to the Carpathian Basin: the Traisental; the section of the Danube between Devín and Budapest; and the border zone of the Hungarian Plain and the mountains in northern Hungary, the region from the Mátraalja to the Tokaj Mountains. In the Pottenbrunn, Süttő, and Sajópetri microregions, the evidence suggests that the sandstone for sharpening stones was supplied mostly from local/microregional sources of raw materials. Nevertheless, in the case of Sajópetri, we should bear in mind the use of two different regional sources for raw materials, the Pétervására Hills for sandstone and the Tokaj Mountains for rhyolites. Based on the available data, in the oppidum at Budapest-Gellérthegy, we can observe the use of microregional sandstone raw materials, while the rock crystal artefacts in the Devín oppidum indicate an economic background that made it possible to procure special raw materials for these urban settlements.

The distribution of grinding stones suggests a regional network system. Andesite, the most commonly identified raw material in our region, is clearly linked to its geographical source sites within the Börzsöny/Visegrád Mountains and the Tokaj Mountains, and in the more distant Mátra Mountains we can even determine a very significant extraction site for it (the Domoszló region). The number of grinding stones from the fourth and third centuries BC with known provenance is still small, but in the case of Süttő and Sajópetri, we see that these heavy tools were transported over a relatively long distance.

The exploitation of andesite from the Börzsöny/Visegrád Mountains did not stop during the period of oppida, as the findings at Budapest-Gellérthegy suggest, although this cannot be confirmed by a contemporary settlement discovered on the Danube Bend. We do not even have indirect data on the utilization of the andesite of the Domoszló region and Tokaj Mountains from this period, but we know of a mining site in the northern Carpathians (Rakša). The tools of several Late Celtic settlements in Moravia and millstones from the oppidum in Devín and Bratislava were made of basalt, and in their case, provenance can be determined precisely (Oberpullendorf–Pauliberg, Austria).

The studies listed above show that, in the case of the grinding/mill stones, the quality of the raw material was of primary importance, and despite their large size and weight, they were transported over considerable distances. At the same time, this also means that high-quality raw material may have significantly increased the value of the resource supply of a given micro-region.

We have seen that it is far from impossible to identify extraction sites. Based on field experience and with the use of modern analyzes, individual types of sandstone and andesite can be distinguished from one another. From the perspective of future research, we need analyses of Late Iron Age stone materials from well-studied archaeological contexts. Such analyses may lead us to a better understanding of the late prehistoric role of this natural resource, which has been somewhat neglected in the secondary literature.

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Figure 1. Archaeological sites from the Celtic period in the Carpathian Basin and in the Eastern Alps mentioned in the paper (black dots): a. 5th–3rd centuries BC, 1. Pottenbrunn – Steinfeld, 2. Nitra – Šindolka, 3. Süttő – Sáncföldek, 4. Szob – Kőzúzó, 5. Pilismarót – Basaharc, 6. Ludas – Varjú-dűlő, 7. Sajópetri – Hosszú-dűlő/Homoki-szőlőskert, b. 2nd–1st centuries BC, 8. Magdalensberg, 9. Bratislava – Devín, 10. Nitriansky Hrádok, 11. Liptovská Mara, 12. Budapest – Gellérthegy

Lithic raw material sources in the Carpathian Basin and in the Eastern Alps mentioned in the paper (black triangles): a. Identified, 13. Riepenkar, 14. Oberpullendorf – Pauliberg, 15. Lábatlan, 16. Rakša, 17. Budakalász – Ezüst-hegy, 18. Tatra Mountains, 19. Domoszló, 20. Tokaj Mountains, b. Assumed, 21. High Tauern, 22. Szob – Csák-hegy, 23. Pilismarót – Szekrény-hegy, 24. Ózd – Pétervására Hills.

Map edited by Zoltán Czajlik and Balázs Holl.

Mark Cornwall
University of Southampton
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This article reassesses the official British discourse around the Treaty of Trianon between 1919 and 1921. It studies a range of colorful opinions for and against the treaty, why they emerged at particular times, and why some could prevail over others. Especially it focuses on the rationale of those British parliamentarians or officials who spoke out against Trianon as being unjust to Hungary. These leading voices had varied backgrounds and prejudices, but they all had personal knowledge of Hungary either before or after World War I. The article is divided into three time-periods, thereby highlighting the main shifts in British opinion that were often caused by geo-political changes in Hungary itself. While the key British decisions were taken in 1919 at the time of the Paris Peace Conference, the vibrant and public British debate of 1920–21 also had a long-term impact: it sustained Hungarian hopes and illusions about a future revision of Trianon and about potential British sympathy. In fact, despite the strident voices heard during the British debate, the evidence suggests that there was more agreement among the British elite than some historians have suggested. By 1921, both opponents and supporters of Trianon had reached a certain pragmatic consensus; they recognized both the faults and the fairness of the peace settlement, but most now considered there could be no return to greater Hungary.

Keywords: Trianon, Great Britain, Paris Peace Settlement, revisionism

In one of the compelling spy thrillers which the novelist Eric Ambler wrote in the late 1930s, his stateless hero, Josef Vadassy, is a Hungarian living in France whose life has been dramatically changed thanks to the Treaty of Trianon. It was typical of Ambler to bring East-Central Europe into his thrillers, portraying the region for an English readership as somewhere both exotic and dangerous, where spies competed in the ideological battle of fascism against communism. However, at the start of Epitaph for a Spy, his Magyar protagonist makes a gross error. Explaining to the French police that he is from Szabadka, he gives the date of the Treaty of Trianon not as 1920 but as 1919.1 The reason for the mistake is perhaps simple. Ambler had never been to Hungary, and for him the detail was irrelevant: it might well be jarring to a professional historian or any Hungarian reader, but few among his English audience in the 1930s would care, for “Trianon” was unknown to them. On the other hand, if we wish to be generous to Ambler, we might suggest that Vadassy’s Magyar credentials were intact when he assumed that the Treaty of Trianon was in place by 1919. Arguably, the crucial decisions about Hungary’s future borders were made in that year. What was left, in 1920, was a flood of Hungarian protests, with some outspoken British voices of support, but these voices had little effect on the signing and ratification of the peace treaty.

Since 1920, many historians have suggested that Great Britain played a key role (perhaps the most vital among the Great Powers) in drawing up the treaty which shaped Hungary’s new borders and in stabilizing interwar Hungary. In the early 1920s, there was certainly much wishful thinking on the Hungarian side about Britain’s major influence, as well as Britain’s alleged historic sympathy for the Hungarian cause. Gyula Andrássy, for example, spoke in 1921 of “how deeply disappointed he and others had been that England had deserted her old principles […] It was not the England that Hungary used to know that had made the peace.”2 This illusion of special British sentiments towards Hungary always found some echoes in London too. In one British parliamentary debate in March 1920, for example, a garrulous politician who had recently visited Budapest pressed in exaggerated language for his country to intervene and help the Magyars: “It is Britain that is serving as a lighthouse for the whole world, and if it flickers and goes out through our cowardice, half the world will sink in the storm for lack of guidance which this country alone can give.”3

Yet the extent to which Great Britain really shaped the Hungarian settlement remains debatable. Even at the time, some establishment figures could not understand why the severe Trianon Treaty emerged as it did and why it had British approval. In April 1921, the treaty was debated in the House of Lords, and Lord James Bryce commented, “No-one has carried any lamp into these dark corners in which the fate of Hungary was decided.” A few months later, Lord Sydenham agreed. The Supreme Council’s decision concerning Hungary, he said, was “one of the most extraordinary things of which I know. Someday it may be explained, and we shall know what was behind this determination, but at present it is unintelligible.”4

Over the course of the past forty years, several British and American historians have tried to answer these questions. One conclusion has been the predominant influence on the British Foreign Office of “New Europe” adherents, especially the diplomats or “expert advisers” in Paris who shared the liberal-national outlook of publicists like R. W. Seton-Watson. Seeking to carve out a territorial settlement on the basis (mainly) of national ethnicity, these advisers’ role in 1919 was crucial in fixing Hungary’s borders to the advantage of neighboring states like Czechoslovakia and Romania.5 Other historians have approached the British impact on Trianon more broadly, highlighting how and why the Anglo-Hungarian relationship dramatically improved between 1918 and 1922 as Britain aspired to the restoration of political and economic stability. According to Gábor Bátonyi, these years were a unique chapter in British interest in the region. From a position of hostility or at least passivity towards Hungary in the first half of 1919, there was then a “positive shift,” as the influence of the “New Europe” group declined and the stabilization of Budapest became London’s predominant approach. Certainly, Britain was motivated by the desire to penetrate the Carpathian Basin economically, but perhaps as important was the sense that any long-term stability needed to be based on a just or fair settlement too. To some key British observers, the evidence increasingly suggested that the settlement was neither just nor fair to Hungary.6

The following discussion, in the centenary year of Trianon, seeks to rethink this shift in British official attitudes. It is primarily a study of the conflicting British discourse about Hungary and Hungary’s borders, with a particular focus on when and why certain voices emerged and why some gained ascendency. The article is divided into three time periods of the “Trianon settlement.” It also proceeds in reverse chronological order, working from 1921 back to 1918, in order to challenge a rather well-worn historical narrative and to highlight more clearly the trajectory of opinion-formation. Through this approach to the sources, I reassess the continuities or breaks in British perceptions. I also show that the shifting Hungarian geo-political framework itself determined how British observers responded in a positive or negative fashion. Indeed, to a large extent, London was always reacting to events on the ground in the Carpathian Basin, faits accomplis which could not be controlled and were usually only of modest concern to British official interests.

A Certain Consensus

The first period to consider, as an introduction, is spring 1921. After Hungary had ratified the peace treaty in November 1920, the focus in London was on British ratification in order to finish the peace process and allow reconstruction across Central Europe. This ratification occurred on May 5, 1921. The British parliamentary debates before this in the House of Lords and the House of Commons reveal well the underlying perceptions and prejudices for and against the treaty. However, we should not simply note the individuals who took a stand as supporters or opponents of Trianon, but also consider the ways in which the ideas of both camps overlapped and converged. Ignác Romsics contends that by 1921, there was still no rapprochement between the “Foreign Office faction” and the “pro-Hungarian faction.”7 Yet as we shall see, this is only partially true. This notion, furthermore, implies a strict division in opinion when by 1921 the divide was actually rather artificial.

Certainly, there were basic disagreements in the parliamentary debates from March to May 1921, and these very much echoed the views expressed a year earlier (by many of the same speakers). On the one hand, the British Coalition government in 1921 was pressing for treaty ratification. It claimed that the terms of the treaty could not now be reopened for negotiation, as that would mean another peace conference. Instead, the famous “Millerand note” (sponsored by the British) suggested a way forward for some Hungarian border adjustments in the future.8 Fundamentally, however, speakers like Robert Cecil in the Commons and the Foreign Secretary, Lord Curzon, in the Lords justified the dismemberment of historic Hungary as a process that was legitimate because of the ways in which the Magyar rulers had behaved before 1918. They had “grossly misgoverned the subject races.” Moreover, as Curzon put it, the Habsburg Monarchy had been “an artificial system” which had already begun to totter before 1914: the war, which Budapest had helped cause, had simply given the system its coup de grâce.9 Following this line of argument about Magyar misrule, the speakers also stressed that neither Britain nor the Paris Peace Conference had broken up Hungary. Rather, the peacemakers in 1919 had been faced with a fait accompli: at the end of the war, Hungary’s “hostile races” had taken matters into their own hands and Hungary had “fallen into its component parts.”10 Great Britain’s role, with the other Powers, had been, according to Curzon, to find a compromise when settling the borders. This had been done as far as possible according to the Wilsonian principle of self-determination. He maintained that the Magyar arguments had been given a fair hearing, and it was now time for Hungarians to put the past behind them: “the war may before long become no more than a painful dream.”11

Against this optimistic stance, the parliamentarians who spoke out against Trianon also appealed to the lessons of history and then, especially, attacked the way in which the principle of national self-determination had been adjudicated for Hungary. In both areas, however (history and self-determination), many “anti-Trianon” speakers were prepared to accept some of the government arguments: it was not a clear-cut division of views, notwithstanding the contrary contentions of later historians. Among the critics of Trianon, two main loose groups can be identified. One represented new, younger politicians of the parliamentary intake in the immediate wake of the war. A second small group of individuals stand out because of their experience of pre-1914 Europe, including having born personal witness to the relative stability of the old Habsburg Empire. Let us turn to them first.

Most notable in this regard were Lord Bryce and Lord Newton (Thomas Legh). James Bryce had visited Transylvania as early as 1866. He had met József Eötvös in Budapest, and had come to the conclusion that Hungarians were “a courteous graceful people.”12 In a speech in the House of Lords in May 1921, he disputed Magyar responsibility for the war and consistently stressed the sympathetic ties between Hungary and England, which included their alleged mutual crusade for “liberty.” Nevertheless, even Bryce was prepared to admit that “old Hungary” now had to bow before the “principle of nationality.” Indeed, when travelling in northern Hungary in 1878, he himself had seen how most of the rural population was Slovak (he described them as “a less advanced and less politically active race” than the Magyars with whom they lived together as friends).13 Forty years later, he seems to have acknowledged reluctantly that much of Slovakia wished to escape Magyar tutelage; he also conceded that the half of Transylvania with predominantly Romanian speakers might justifiably fall to Romania. What he disputed was the caricature of pre-war Hungary that had made the country seem as bad as Prussia or czarist rule in Poland. In other words, he claimed Hungary was being treated with disproportionate vindictiveness – most glaringly in the unjust way that the borders had been decided in Paris. Bryce therefore conceded the relevance of the “principle of nationality” to some extent, but he stressed that this principle had been violated, notably in the case of Bratislava (Pozsony) and the Székely communities of Transylvania.14 His parliamentary performance was noticed by Budapest, and it cemented Bryce’s reputation as a champion of the Magyars.15

Others who opposed the Treaty of Trianon were less compromising than Bryce. Lord Newton questioned whether Slovaks or Croats really wanted to leave old Hungary; he concluded that the country should be treated with “humanity and justice,” as it was “the least guilty of our ex-enemy powers.” A speedy ratification of Trianon would at least allow the resumption of correct Anglo-Hungarian relations.16 Newton’s forays on behalf of Hungary after the war were well known to the British Foreign Office, where one official thought him simply a dupe of Magyar propaganda, completely ignorant of Hungarian history and policy. But how true was this? His growing connections with Central Europe are intriguing, for alongside Bryce, he was one of Hungary’s most persistent supporters.17 Before the war, Newton had been a professional diplomat, traveling widely and acquiring his own understanding of the Habsburg “civilizing” mission in the Balkans. Apart from having seen Vienna and Budapest briefly in 1887, a visit to Bosnia three years later, mainly for trout fishing, left him singularly impressed: “I got the impression that [Bosnia] was well administered and that there was little to complain of in Austrian rule.”18

If Newton’s Habsburg links before 1914 were always tentative, by the end of the war, he was well-acquainted with several fellow-countrymen who were sympathetic to Hungary, including the future British High Commissioner Thomas Hohler, but also his own cousin, Admiral Ernest Troubridge, the British (Allied) commander on the Danube.19 Most significant was Newton’s underlying conservative stance against any radical peace settlement. He wished that the wartime belligerents had negotiated earlier for a stable peace and thereby prevented the destruction of the old order. In this regard, his scorn for Hungary’s neighbors was quite clear, mirroring perhaps his contempt for what he termed the “ill-mannered” Irish politicians, who before 1914 had constantly made trouble for Great Britain. In short, at Trianon, Magyars had been handed over “like so many animals, to alien races of an inferior civilization, in flat defiance of the sacred principle of Self-Determination.”20

Bryce and Newton viewed Trianon partly through a pre-war lens, in other words a certain nostalgia for what they had observed of the old Hungary, and this colored much of their criticism of the New Europe. However, while one historian has recently suggested that the critics’ “inveterate predilection for the old social and political order” was their sole common denominator, it was not in fact the only motivating force.21 A second group of critics was formed by some younger politicians, newly elected to the House of Commons, who had experienced the horrors of a European war first hand and did not want hostilities to break out again. For them, the troubling aspect of Trianon was not so much what was being lost (old Hungary, Anglo-Hungarian friendship), but rather the new nationalist instability which was already so evident. One speaker in the House of Commons, a former naval officer, attacked the whole “disease of nationality”; with an eye on other running nationalist sores, he claimed that little Ulsters or Alsace-Lorraines were now being created in Slovakia and Transylvania.22

Among those who attacked Trianon, a Scottish Conservative, Captain Walter Elliott, was the most vociferous of this new parliamentary intake. According to one witness, as a former wartime doctor and wounded soldier, Elliott had “a wide erudition and a fascinating capacity for conversation.” But in debate, “he was too diffuse with an argument insufficiently concentrated, often a fault in those who delight others and themselves delight in conversation.”23 Nevertheless, the new parliamentarian immediately made a stir with his oratory, and his many qualities led him to a seat in the British cabinet in the 1930s. His stance on Trianon in 1921 can be explained in a number of ways. As a maverick who tended to shirk from any party label, he felt mistrustful of the politicians who had produced the postwar chaos. He himself, with one eye on the Irish and Scottish problems, inclined towards a “national” style for British politics, where in his perception unity should predominate over fragmentation.24

He approached Hungary with the same pragmatism, and here two personal experiences of unabashed nationalism shaped his outlook. First, in the summer of 1919, he had decided to explore the territory of the fallen Habsburg Monarchy. He had motored along the Dalmatian coast (presumably encountering Italian-Croatian nationalist rivalry) and had then visited Budapest, observing the chaotic scenes there precisely in the wake of the regime of Béla Kun. While his biographer lightly dismisses these “trivial tales of excursions,”25 for Walter Elliott they were crucial in clarifying his abhorrence of the nationalist forces which, he felt, had caused the war and then decimated Hungary and the Monarchy. Secondly, this experience reinforced the views he had long held from his native Scotland. Before the war, the liberal commentator “Scotus Viator” (R. W. Seton-Watson) had proposed Scotland-in-Britain as the ideal federal model for national autonomy in Hungary.26 Elliott, though greatly loyal to Scotland, was equally averse to what he viewed as the whining criticisms of Scottish nationalists, and he drew his own lessons from that in the interwar world. In April 1921, in the parliamentary debate on Trianon Hungary, he savaged the “wicked policy of self-determination,” which had swept away a thousand-year-old entity. He then suggested a vivid comparison. If the Serb “immigrants” into southern Hungary could now leave the country and take territory with them, it would be like Belgian wartime refugees suddenly annexing the English coastal town of Bournemouth: what ingratitude that would signify to their host nation!27

Elliott took the most radical stance in this parliament, but in the long debates of 1921 there was actually some consensus that Trianon should now be ratified to achieve stability and perhaps also to further British influence in the region. The government side was conceding that the Hungarian settlement had been a most difficult subject: it was already criticizing the reparations imposed on Hungary as unrealistic and implying that small border corrections might be possible. In turn, the “anti-Trianon camp” was composed of men who professed to know about Hungary from personal experience, and they shared a common abhorrence of the nationalist New Europe which had replaced pre-war “stability.” But even here, there were some surprising concessions and some readiness to accept a break with the old Hungary. They agreed that previous Magyar rule over greater Hungary had indeed caused unrest and dissatisfaction; they also felt that it might be justifiable to implement the principle of national self-determination across the region. The big question for them was whether that principle had been carried out fairly, or whether Trianon contained fresh grievances which might be the seeds of a future European war. Behind the parliamentary vote in favor of treaty ratification on May 5, 1921, there was therefore a latent consensus that some future adjustments to Trianon could be necessary, while at the same time, the basic Hungarian settlement should be accepted.

The Debate at Its Height

The second phase to consider is from October 1919 until the signature of the Trianon Treaty in June 1920. These were critical months, when British interest in Hungary was at its height for many reasons. It was a time when, with the rise of the Horthy regime, there were many new British representatives in Hungary, including a High Commissioner, Thomas Hohler, and a special emissary from the Peace Conference, George Clerk (arriving in October 1919). Meanwhile, in Paris, Hungary’s treaty was finally being properly scrutinized. Count Albert Apponyi was able to submit the Hungarian arguments and objections, and in February–March 1920, the “Big Three” of Britain, France, and Italy disputed at least the viability of the proposed Hungarian borders.28 The winter of 1919–20 produced a heightened cacophony of British voices for and against the peace terms. In the end, it was the Foreign Office loudspeaker which would triumph, because its “experts,” like Allen Leeper, were deferred to as the key policymakers. They were already insisting that Hungary’s frontiers had been permanently fixed, all the more so, as precisely that message had been sent to the surrounding states in June 1919.

The authority of a contrary set of British opinions owed much to the fact that they came from new men on the spot, located on Hungarian territory from the summer of 1919 due to London’s concern about Romanian military excesses. Notable were those responsible to the Admiralty or the War Office: particularly Admiral Troubridge, who in August moved the headquarters of the Allied Danube Command to Budapest, and Reginald Gorton, who was sent as the British representative on an Inter-Allied Military Commission.29 These critical voices were then echoed in the British parliament by Bryce and others. The question arises whether, if this disparate Magyarophile camp had been more coordinated, it could have challenged the “Foreign Office” clique at this crucial stage. Rumors circulated at the time that support for Hungary was mounting. But as Seton-Watson (correctly) reassured the Czechoslovak President Tomáš Masaryk in March 1920, people like Troubridge and Newton did not really represent British policy:

They are individuals who have been caught up in certain currents and are busily engaged in urging a policy of their own upon our government, but not with success […] I can find no evidence of a serious nature to suggest that the Magyar intrigues have got any hold here in London.30

Indeed, the challenge for any champions of Hungary’s cause was tremendous, because of the Foreign Office “insider advantage” and the prejudices still circulating about Hungary as a German or Bolshevik ally, not to mention the concerted hostile stance of Romania, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia.

Nevertheless, in late 1919, British officials in Budapest began to request a sympathetic hearing for Hungary in London. They did so partly because the new Horthy regime seemed accommodating, even moderate, and it thus offered a contrast with continued stories of Romanian “atrocities” in occupied Transylvania or the Yugoslav refusal to withdraw from the region around the city of Pécs. The British were also faced for the first time with an onslaught of Magyar petitions against the treaty, coupled with the widespread expectation that England at least would give Hungary a “fair hearing.” Most striking were the reports sent to Paris by Sir George Clerk and members of his mission, for they, after all, were Allied delegates whose designated role was to bring stability to Hungary (ensuring that a stable government was established and Romanian troops were evacuated from the country). One member of Clerk’s mission, for instance, reported to London about a tour of the truncated country: “The universal feeling throughout is that the old boundaries must be restored by some means or other and Roumania made to disgorge what she has taken.”31 Another, Percy Loraine, agreed after receiving a mass of petitions that there was widespread opposition to many of the suggested amputations. The loss of Croatia was accepted, but not Slovakia (where it was felt the conference had been duped by the Czechs) and especially not Transylvania.32

On the subject of Transylvania, Clerk himself felt that, because of the harshness of the Romanian invaders, a special Inter-Allied commission should be sent there. During the war, Clerk had been strongly influenced by the “nationality principle” in the British Foreign Office. But after arriving in Budapest, he quickly agreed with his Magyar hosts, who stressed that the “new rulers” in occupied Hungarian territory were “learners in the art of government” and of a “lower civilization.” One petition submitted to Clerk by the Hungarian Technical University pressed for territorial integrity, arguing that “Hungary has raised culture to a high level on its natural geographical territory […] On mutilated territory Hungary would be unable to further fulfil this vocation!”33 Clerk concluded that, while the new states needed firm supervision and guidance from the West, Hungary itself, on the basis of what he had observed, could be expected to be sensible: “They realize, I think, the broad justice of the inclusion of peoples of one common stock in one State, but they feel that the Allies have […] only heard one side of the case and have naturally given the benefit to those who fought on their side.” He warned against the Allies sowing the seeds of future conflicts.34

These reports usually found an unsympathetic ear at the Foreign Office, as they were sent first to Allen Leeper or Eyre Crowe (permanent secretary), key figures on the territorial committees of the Peace Conference, and they could easily be deflected.35 Both Leeper and Crowe were now irritated at Romania’s refusal to withdraw to the demarcation lines and were even prepared to send an Allied commission to investigate. But they did not want to reopen au fond the nationality questions, which their committees had settled in May 1919. Thus, when in November they were sent a memorandum from the Hungarian government about injustices in Slovakia, both responded negatively. Leeper noted that the memorandum was exaggerated and not worth passing on to the Supreme Council. Crowe remarked simply, “Better leave it alone. These controversies lead to no practical results.”36

Despite this, there is good evidence to suggest that by early 1920, the mood in the Foreign Office was indeed slowly shifting away from the Leeper-Crowe perspective towards a more positive engagement with Hungary’s complaints. One reason was the replacement as foreign secretary of Arthur Balfour, who fully supported Trianon and had been a member of the Peace Conference, by Lord Curzon, who seemed to have less blatant sympathy for Hungary’s neighbors.37 Curzon’s introduction to the Central European situation also coincided with the Clerk mission to Budapest, which, as Gábor Bátonyi suggests, started something of a special Anglo-Hungarian relationship in the winter of 1919–20. In addition to a Hungarian Delegation now being invited to Paris, another result of Clerk’s mission was the appointment of a British High Commissioner to Hungary. From January 1920, Sir Thomas Hohler was to be an “extraordinarily sympathetic and totally uncritical minister” in Budapest, partly due to his friendship with Regent Miklós Horthy in prewar Constantinople.38

Precisely at the time when the Hungarian delegation under Apponyi was putting its case in Paris in early 1920, Hohler sent several reports to the Foreign Office expounding the Hungarian case. He passed on the views of Horthy and Apponyi that, whatever treaty was signed, the state would eventually be restored “to its old historic limits.” Here, there was strong evidence that the Magyar leadership hoped especially for British support, all the more so after January 16, when both Curzon and Prime Minister David Lloyd George had shown interest in Apponyi’s ethnic map of Hungary.39 Hohler strongly promoted the idea that Britain should support Hungary as a “friendly buffer state” in the region, and he asked Curzon to consider a fresh presentation by Apponyi in Paris. “The present arrangements,” he concluded on February 1, “appear to be faulty and incapable of standing the test of time.” The treaty was contrary to Wilson’s principle of national self-determination and therefore constituted “an immediate menace to the peace of Europe.”40

It is of course tempting to suggest that Hohler was simply hoodwinked by Magyar propaganda, but like Clerk, he was at least reporting the protests and mood he observed on the spot. These critical winter months require more research to illuminate in detail the close interaction and even confluence of Anglo-Hungarian arguments and networking. Britain was keenly aware at this time that the French too were vying for influence over Hungary; this has been well documented by historians.41 Budapest in turn was taking new initiatives to highlight in London the benefits of Britain securing influence in the region. For it was precisely now that Miklós Bánffy was sent by the Hungarian government to London to make contact with politicians, including Curzon and Asquith. According to his memoirs, Bánffy had some success after “endless hard work, attention to detail and, above all, tact.”42 He found willing ears in Bryce, Cecil, and Newton, but also among church leaders, particularly Unitarians and Presbyterians alarmed at Romanian treatment of Transylvanian Protestants, and Jewish leaders like Lucien Wolf, who were anxious about minority rights.43

Bánffy’s path into the corridors of power was also considerably eased through the “invaluable help” of the Hungarian-born Rozsika Wertheimstein, the wife of Charles Rothschild. Having met the Rothschild heir, a serious conservationist, in 1906 when he was exploring the Carpathian mountains, the flamboyant Rozsika had moved to England, but she always kept firm ties with her family in Hungary. There, in December 1918, she had led a campaign publicizing the miserable plight of Hungarian children; in interwar Britain, she knew Magyarophiles like Lord Newton, and she actively promoted financial aid to Hungary from Rothschild resources.44 “In her house,” wrote Bánffy, “I almost felt I was breathing the air of my own home; and the lion’s share in any success I may have achieved in my mission was thanks to her advice and help and to her mediation on my behalf.”45

In the spring of 1920, indirectly through Rozsika Rothschild and other social contacts nurtured by Bánffy, vigorous debates began in the British parliament. Bryce, Newton, and others, having urged the Hungarians to delay finalizing the treaty as long as possible, echoed the language of Budapest when they spoke in the House of Lords: namely, that Hungary was pro-British and had been against the war, and that “civilised human beings” were now being handed over like cattle to the successor states.46 According to Newton, Hungary was like a man “who has had a paralytic stroke and is being constantly kicked and cuffed by his former associates and dependents.”47 Another Bánffy target, Lord John Montagu of Beaulieu, agreed, contending that the treaty was simply “insane and unworkable.” If Montagu’s own passion for motoring and modern transport perhaps naturally inclined him to criticize the new fragmented communications network in the Carpathian Basin, he had also just visited Budapest. There, he had honed some pro-Hungarian views when staying with his friend, Admiral Troubridge. He concluded that “that country had suffered unfairly in the breaking up of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire after the war.”48

Yet this fresh British political momentum of early 1920 also owed much to news reaching London about Romanian misrule in Transylvania and rumors about a White Terror (which a delegation from the Labour Party and the British trade unions would soon investigate). Some eccentric Conservative politicians were encouraged to support the Horthy regime precisely because of Labour opposition to it. Thus, in one House of Commons debate, Walter Elliott pointed out the prejudices of the left-wing press as he went on to condemn the treaty. Describing the new Slovakia as a “banana-shaped country,” he ridiculed the proposed borders: “The Peace Conference is full of very great and important gentlemen, but they cannot make rivers run sideways across mountains, because they run downhill and not across.” In his view, the iron rules of geography could not be changed.49

The Government responded to these criticisms in March 1920 by noting that the expert territorial committees had worked very diligently in 1919, that there was no bias, and that Hungary in January 1920 had had ample time to put its case to the Peace Conference. The critics rightly found this line of defense disingenuous. In fact, it did obscure the differences of opinion that had begun to appear at the Foreign Office. On February 10 in response to Hohler’s reports, Curzon noted that he did not really know why the conference had decided on the proposed borders for Hungary. Allen Leeper, however, quickly jumped in to reject Hohler’s arguments. He stressed that the territorial committees had followed the ethnic principle as far as possible (except in Slovakia and Transylvania, where transport links were necessary). And since the new countries had been told by Britain that this was the final settlement (and in the meantime had signed their peace treaties), future stability was in danger if everything were to be reconsidered. This would simply encourage Hungary to resist, and would constitute a betrayal of the recognition which Britain had given to Czechoslovakia and the other neighboring states.50

Curzon’s behavior a few weeks later suggests that he was not wholly convinced by this argument, or he felt at least that the Hungarian question still needed to be revisited. Lloyd George similarly was urging France and Italy that Europe would have no peace if the Hungarian case were not fully scrutinized. A key reason for this governmental shift was that, in early 1920, new opinions had surfaced at the Foreign Office, stemming either directly from British supporters or indirectly from Magyar campaigners in Britain. The Hungarian settlement was suddenly (for the first time) a real focus of public attention.

Nevertheless, Curzon continued to listen to the “expert” Allen Leeper, who stridently expounded his opposition to Hungary’s “anachronistic” arguments. The result was that, during a meeting of Allied foreign ministers in London on March 8, the idea of making any changes to the treaty was rejected.51 The overriding argument, as detailed in writing by Leeper, was that Hungary’s borders must be settled quickly and short-term stability must be prioritized over any long-term dangers. Thus, in 1920, the very idea of reopening the treaty was construed as a major obstacle. But there was a small “carrot” which the Powers (especially Britain) still seemed to be offering Budapest and which the Hungarians seemed grudgingly to accept when they signed the Treaty of Trianon (June 6). This was the so-called Millerand note, which was sent to Hungary on May 6 under the signature of the new French premier, Alexandre Millerand. While rejecting the Hungarian Delegation’s demand for plebiscites in contested areas, the note suggested that if Hungary had objections to the treaty, it might eventually appeal to the League of Nations over specific border rectifications. It was a glimmer of light that would sustain Hungarian revisionist hopes thereafter, just as the Anglo-Hungarian flirtation of winter 1920 had substantially prepared the ground.

Fixing the Trianon Framework

As we have seen, by 1921 there was growing British official consensus over Hungary, a realization that the new normality of Trianon should be accepted. In 1920, however, the clash of opinions was only too evident, for in the struggle for stability in the region, fresh voices had challenged the official line favoring Czechoslovakia and Romania and had questioned what the new Hungarian frontiers might mean for Central Europe. If we now turn briefly to 1918–1919, the third and best documented phase, this was of course the period when the Trianon framework, which later proved so hard to dismantle, was firmly set in place. First, in the faits accomplis of late 1918, the Allies had allowed the successor states to invade greater Hungary and stay there. Second, the Peace Conference’s territorial committees, guided by the principle of national self-determination, scrutinized the Hungarian frontiers and had them approved without debate by the Council of Ten on May 12, 1919.

Historians have examined much of this period in depth, showing that Lloyd George was an occasional spokesman for Magyar interests (for example in his Fontainebleau Memorandum of March 25, in which he warned about a draconian peace which could ferment Hungarian irredentism). On April 30, he proposed to the Council of Four that Hungary should be invited to Paris to discuss the peace terms. However, generally he was not interested or engaged enough to push his concerns in the face of the Foreign Office, which dominated in Paris and consistently favored the Czechoslovak and Romanian states.52 It is usually noted that Harold Nicolson, Crowe, and Leeper played key roles on the territorial committees, siding with France and defining Hungary’s ethnic borders in the narrowest sense possible; in addition, they focused on making the surrounding states economically viable. What is often ignored is the historic continuity in official British thinking: namely, Hungary was consistently seen as a destabilizing element in Central Europe. As I have shown elsewhere, the Foreign Office before World War I had summed up the “chauvinistic” Magyar regime as a key source of instability and had anticipated, even before Seton-Watson began to gain more influence in 1917, that Hungary would have to be restructured in some way.53 In the wartime British press, diverse opinions were ventilated for and against Hungary, but in Whitehall, a viewpoint sharply critical of Budapest was long established.54

During the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, this trend persisted. The Foreign Office believed that the old Magyar regime had fought to the bitter end and therefore deserved punishment, while the country’s new rulers (or were they really so new?) seemed in their petitions to the West far too obsessed with Hungary’s territorial integrity. Moreover, any small sympathy for Hungary’s aspirations was weakened by the reign of Béla Kun, which caused major headaches for the peacemakers. As Crowe noted on one occasion, the Allied plan in Central Europe was “to set up free and independent states as a counterbalance to a German-Bolshevik combination.”55 Hungary, having been Germany’s staunch wartime ally, could now for four months be portrayed as a virulent Bolshevik threat. In both cases (whether Hungary was a German ally or a hotbed of Bolshevism), it was natural to them in the regional danger by affirming tighter frontiers. During the key months of the Peace Conference, these concerns formed a steady backdrop to British official thinking, especially when Leeper and others suggested that Magyar nationalism and Bolshevism went hand in hand as a combined threat to Central Europe.56

Only a few British observers (apart from Lloyd George) started to become concerned about the future of Hungary. Ironically, Seton-Watson was one of them. In May 1919, having witnessed the chaos there, he wrote, “Little as I love the Magyars or regret the fate they have brought on themselves, I do not wish to see them destroyed altogether.”57 Despite this, like most British officials in Paris or London, Seton-Watson was not questioning the notion that greater Hungary needed to be dismembered. What was vital was to ensure stability and security for the New Europe; the new successor states were the allies who needed to keep order (since Britain itself could not contribute any troops). Only in the last months of 1919 was a new Hungarian regime established which tried to present itself to Britain as a respectable force for regional stability and order. As we have seen, this prompted new forms of support for the Hungarian cause and a new British questioning of the peace settlement.

Conclusion

Of course, the British debate on Trianon did not end in 1921. Fresh controversy was stirred through the press campaign of Viscount Rothermere six years later.58 During the three phases of the creation of Trianon, it is clear that the Hungarian treaty really became a subject for public discourse in Britain only from late 1919. Until then, the British officials who debated it were working in private on the territorial committees of the Paris Peace Conference. They were chained above all closely to the “nationality policy,” which Britain in mid-1918 had semi-officially adopted towards the Habsburg Monarchy.59

In its essence, that vision of a New Europe always had an anti-Hungarian streak based on the firm conviction that the Magyar regime in the old Monarchy had been oppressive and that similar nationalistic chauvinists were still in control of Hungary. It was only in 1920 that the idealistic crusade began to weaken, when the reality of the New Europe became clearer, and when new British voices sprang up to counter Leeper or Seton-Watson. Particularly, some new Magyarophiles emerged in the British parliament to paint a different version of modern Hungarian history and even to question the ideal of self-determination. Among these critics, there was a strong sense that an alternative moral dimension to the ongoing Hungarian crisis existed, one which any “fair-minded person” would surely support.60

Indeed, this early British debate over the morality of Trianon had some parallels with a later moral contestation over Central European grievances during the Sudeten crisis of 1938. In the early interwar years, the matter of Czechoslovakia’s German minority had received little British attention, or at least justice and morality were mainly felt to be on the Czech side against anything German. By 1936, however, many British observers were inclining towards a moral stance in favor of Sudeten German complaints about discrimination. They did so on the basis of the belief that firm evidence existed to support those grievances; that notion was strengthened by their own personal observations in Czechoslovakia and by the avid campaigning in Britain of Sudeten German political activists.61 In both cases (the Hungarian in 1920 and the Sudeten in 1938), there was a moral underpinning to the cause that strengthened the arguments of Britons who primarily feared regional chaos or even a new war if the respective grievances were not addressed. The difference in 1938 was that the British government was now prepared to back a (Sudeten) cause, which would reverse the peace settlement of 1919. It viewed that course as both moral and practical for British interests. This, in turn, raised again the matter of territorial revisionism more broadly. Recent research has shown how, parallel to the Sudeten crisis, British equivocation about Trianon naturally resurfaced; in the late 1930s, Anglo-Hungarian relations began to matter again, since key pillars of the New Europe were starting to crumble.62

Yet early 1920, when the Hungarians had first put their case to the Allies in Paris, was the key time when they had looked to the British lighthouse for guidance and aid. New feelers were then sent out from Budapest to sympathetic supporters in Britain. In response, the lighthouse sent back some reassuring messages, but it remained flickering and was never consistent. On the one hand, the British establishment was naturally conservative, wishing to conclude the Hungarian treaty as quickly as possible, gain economic advantages, and ensure regional stability. On the other, many British politicians who were now studying the subject for the first time began to feel uneasy about what had occurred. At most, they could suggest to Budapest that the Trianon borders might be adjusted in the future, if only Hungary would behave responsibly and peacefully on the European stage. By 1921, a certain consensus prevailed across the British political spectrum that the basics of Trianon were now permanent. It is worth emphasizing, especially in this centenary year of Trianon, that even friends of Hungary like Lord Bryce or Walter Elliott were not advocating a crusade to overturn the new frontiers. Theirs was a pragmatic approach: to complain about Trianon Hungary, but largely to accept it despite its imperfections: there could be no restoration of greater Hungary.

The next twenty years saw the Trianon grievance occasionally surfacing in Britain and stirring public awareness. Among those who harped on the subject were mavericks like Rothermere or idealists like Lord Newton. For Newton, Hungary had become a lasting passion, a new chapter in his life, and one that brought him into the company of the “most charming” Rozsika Rothschild. He continued to visit the region (for instance Transylvania in late 1921) and advised the Hungarians to be patient: they should “strive to create a homogeneous state, which will serve as an enviable model to their neighbors and do more towards recovering Hungarian Irredenta than anything else.”63

For others who heard the word “Trianon” in the late 1930s, it surely sparked anxious thoughts. Thus, for the novelist Eric Ambler in 1938, Trianon was above all useful as a small device to enhance the drama and credibility of his espionage thriller. His Magyar protagonist, Vadassy, might well personify one of the sad injustices of Trianon for those who were well-informed. But for most British readers, he probably evoked hazy ideas of chaos in nationalist Eastern Europe in the aftermath of a cataclysmic war. In their minds, the old Hungarian grievances were just some of the many that seemed to be resurfacing in 1938, edging Britain and Europe towards a new period of war and mass death.

Archival Sources

The National Archives, London (TNA)

Foreign Office files (FO)

Bibliography

Ambler, Eric. Epitaph for a Spy. London: Penguin, 2009. First published 1938.

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* I would like to thank Catherine Horel and Balázs Ablonczy for their help and advice in the original commissioning of this article.

Etienne Boisserie
Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

A few weeks after the Czechoslovak State has been proclaimed in Prague (October 28, 1918), Slovak territory is still a battleground for political and military control. Mid-January, the Czechoslovak forces are about to control the demarcation line under the command of Italian officers. But still, at that time, political and material problems surrounding the real control of the territory are hardly overlapped (and won’t be for almost a semester).
This paper intends to observe and analyze this short period of time (February–June 1919) when the material and psychological consequences of World War I cumulate with a weak legitimacy of the (Czecho)Slovak authorities, multiple material obstacles and the lack of experience of the so-called government in Bratislava. Those uncertainties are cruelly reminded in the personal–official and unofficial correspondence–of the main Slovak protagonists who describe a situation far from being controlled as the propaganda puts it.
The paper is based on archives of Slovak National Archive, and namely the general Minister plenipotentiary fond, and some personal archives of the main political actors of that period in Slovakia (mostly Vavro Šrobár, Ivan Markovič, Pavel Blaho, Fedor Houdek, Anton Štefánek). We shall also use some elements of the Regional Military Command (ZVV) Košice available at the National Military Archiv, and notably the regional reports.

Keywords: Czechoslovakia, Slovakia, Upper Hungary, aftermath of World War I, Czechoslovak provisional government in Slovakia

Months after the proclamation of the Czechoslovak State in Prague on October 28, 1918, the Slovak territory1 remained the theater of a battle for military and political control. Throughout this period, the priority for Czechoslovakia and the Slovak political and intellectual elites which supported the newly proclaimed state was solidly to anchor this territory to the new state, despite limited support and fragile political conditions.2 First, the Czechoslovak claim to certain territories, particularly those furthest east, was contestable and indeed contested. Second, the forces available in Slovakia to run the administration and take over from the Hungarian authorities were too few. Third, relations between Czechoslovak civilian authorities and the Italian military mission responsible for occupation of the territory were fraught with mutual mistrust. Last, like in most other regions of the former Habsburg Empire, the population faced worsened living conditions of all sorts, and this made the political situation fluid and unstable.

These difficulties and the uncertainties they created within the Czechoslovak apparatus in Slovakia are clear in the private and official correspondence of the main Slovak leaders of the time, who were responsible for administering the region from November 1918. In this article, we will primarily observe the correspondence between the Plenipotentiary, his “government,” and the prefects he appointed. This correspondence will shed light on a few themes that structured the activity and influenced the hopes and fears of these authorities in the first six months after the war. This correspondence shows the consequences of the Great War for the territory, as well as the material and political obstacles to the assertion of Czechoslovak authority. After a general overview of the context of the efforts to take over the civilian institutions in Slovakia in autumn 1918, I consider the main difficulties encountered up until April of the following year, when Czechoslovak authority was endangered during the first weeks of the conflict with the Hungarian Republic of Councils.

The Immediate Problem of Taking Control of Slovakia

In the early days of November, the new government under Mihály Károlyi in Budapest did not specifically address the issue of the Kingdom’s northern counties, where the Hungarian authorities only partially disappeared. The administrative apparatus was usable neither by Budapest, which had other urgent issues to address, nor by the Slovak National Council (SNR) in Turčiansky Svätý Martin (Turócszentmárton), which had been formed on October 30 and which struggled with its inexperience and lack of authority and political sway.3

From the very first days of November, serious problems arose concerning public order, and in many places, they broke down into armed conflicts and looting.4 Often, the various local councils cooperated with the local authorities in an attempt to maintain order and ensure that supplies reached local people, who were often disoriented.5 In the northeastern regions, Hungarian National Councils or Hungarian National Guards were assembled at the behest of the Budapest government. This happened most widely in the eastern part of the territory, but these bodies were also formed in some of the most densely Slovak-inhabited counties (like Orava [Árva], Turiec [Turóc], Liptov [Liptó], and even Turčiansky Svätý Martin, where a Hungarian National Guard was created on November 4, which contributed to maintaining political confusion through declarations in favor of autonomy). In response, National Councils and National Guards supported by the Slovak National Party (SNS) were formed in several towns.6 In some places, these Councils managed to take control of the municipal administration, but disorder remained considerable and difficult to control.7

On November 4, the National Committee (Národní výbor) in Prague named a provisional government in Slovakia (Československá dočasná vláda na Slovensku). Led by Vavro Šrobár, it was composed of three of the most reliable (and available) pro-Czechoslovak politicians: Ivan Dérer, Pavol Blaho, and Anton Štefánek.8 Its task was to take control of the territory with the help of a few hundred soldiers. This provisional government (known as the “Skalica government,” after the city where it had its first seat) managed to take control of the southwestern tip of Slovakia, between the Moravian border and the area north of Bratislava (Pozsony).9 A few towns were occupied, but resources were known to be insufficient to consider continuing as far as Bratislava.10 The Czechoslovak troops did succeed, however, in following the river Váh (Vág) upstream and occupying part of it before reaching T. S. Martin. But the situation of the Czechoslovak civilian authorities in Slovakia soon became delicate. The situation varied among regions, but the weakness of the available forces was felt everywhere, raising immediate difficulties for the “liberators.”11 There were many pockets of resistance that were not limited to transport nodes like the Vrútky (Ruttka) railway hub, where the workers came essentially from the Hungarian Plain and which was beyond Czechoslovak control.12 Initially, the position of the provisional government was fragile, but it was nonetheless more favorable than that of the Slovak National Council. The situation of the Skalica government grew increasingly complicated following the Belgrade armistice, which left the Hungarian Government free to govern the whole territory of the Kingdom, including regions which had been claimed by Czechoslovakia. The Skalica government did work, however, to keep or retake control, eventually reaching parts of the Moravian border. These operations left only a narrow, fragmented strip of land along the Moravian border under Czechoslovak control. Most situation reports sent to Šrobár at the time underlined the instability of the situation and detailed the provisional solutions aimed at ensuring the safety of the population.13

In Prague, the Revolutionary National Assembly met beginning on November 14. Two days later, Club of Slovak Deputies which had been formed within it proclaimed the transfer of the competences of the SNR to the provisional assembly and the Czechoslovak government.14 The SNR was marginalized by the second half of November.15

The situation in Slovakia raised further difficulties for the Czechoslovak authorities, which were also facing challenges in the Czech Lands. The question of the authority of civilian bodies was acute, and several obstacles complicated the issue of control of the demarcation line.

In early December, a bill was prepared on exceptional provisional measures in Slovakia.16

Slovakia (MPS). He arrived in Žilina (Zsolna) five days later, and he convened his government the next day.17 While his presence in Žilina was a step forward from a Czechoslovak perspective, this government had no legitimacy in the eyes of the locals. There is no clearer demonstration of the difficulties facing the Czechoslovak provisional authorities than the tale of the night-time arrival of one of its key figures, Štefan Janšák, who was in charge of public works. His account is far from glorious: “[The government] set to work in its new seat inconspicuously. At the station, it was met by a single man. Dr. Brežný was afraid that the people of Žilina would protest against our arrival, so he led us towards the center through the side streets. In our worn coats, with battered, old-fashioned suitcases, we looked like traveling salesmen [...]. The hotels were in such a state [...] that we did not venture into them. Dr. Brežný spread us among various local families.”18 

In his memoirs, Ivan Thurzo, then Secretary of the Slovak National Council, mentions another difficulty faced by the Skalica government. Šrobár “knew nothing of what had happened in Slovakia in the last few days,” and, in particular, he knew nothing of the passage of the Mackensen army through Žilina, which had had an effect on the population far greater than the effect a few dozen Czechoslovak soldiers could have had.19 Šrobár also faced a variety of challenges: making the civilian administration work, organizing supplies, and controlling the postal service, communications, and railways.20 The doubt as to the solidity of Czechoslovak positions was also an obstacle for the members of his government.21 In a report to Šrobár on the military situation after a tour by train, Fedor Houdek, referent in charge of National Defense, painted a picture of the uncertainty of the time:

in Sučany and Turany [Nagyturány in Hungarian; situated a few kilometers east of T. S. Martin], we did not find any Czechoslovak army members. That was suspicious. The railway administration was occupied by old officials. Either they knew nothing or they did not want to tell us anything, so we learned very little from them. In Turany, the station manager is from Lisková, and he says Šrobár knows him.22 He was not very well disposed to us, but you could read the fear in his eyes. Disoriented in the political situation, perhaps he feared the return of the Hungarians, and being too attentive to us could have damaged his position. I asked him if I could use the station telephone, and I contacted Ľubochňa [Fenyőháza] and then Ružomberok [Rozsahegy]. In both places, they were unable to tell me if there were Czechoslovak army elements ahead of us, and I could obtain no information from them on the possible presence of the Hungarian army.23 

At the end of October, the decision was made provisionally to retain all legislation from the Dualist period. Minister Plenipotentiary Šrobár therefore had to reorganize the whole administration on that basis. The implementation of policies in the different sectors was carried out by government delegates chosen carefully by Šrobár from among men who were both experienced and reliable. The various lists available in the Šrobár papers indicate that, while appointments were not yet decided with certainty, he could rely on a group of some 20 close collaborators with long reputations in the Slovak patriotic milieu. Apart from them, the pool was limited, most notably for the administration.24 In addition to the emergencies that Šrobár’s “government” had to handle itself, an essential task was delegated to the prefects (župani) appointed in the different counties. Upon their appointment, they were to reorganize local and municipal administrations and ensure the Czechoslovak State’s control over the territory. A shortlist of potential prefects had been drawn up before Šrobár’s arrival in Slovakia,25 but one of the difficulties was balancing the importance of presence in Prague and in the Slovak territory.26

In the days and weeks that followed, political uncertainty would be an obstacle to strengthening the pool of personnel on which the Šrobár government could. Several men reputed to be reliable cautiously declined the offer when contacted.27 Šrobár’s initial list had its limits. In his memoirs, Janšák sets out the problem in wider terms and highlights that the difficulties continued in early 1919. “Šrobár did his statistics before he even received answers from the people he had considered making the officers of this army of officials. When he informed them in writing that they were to take office, he encountered many refusals and much prevarication. Political insecurity in late 1918 and early 1919 and the risks attached to serving the new state were such that members of the older generations, especially fathers whose livelihood was assured (even if modest), preferred to wait and see which side fortune would ultimately favor.”28 Only in the early days of February were all the prefects definitively appointed.29 But some of them, like Otokar Jamnický in Komárno (Komárom), were only able to take office a few weeks later.30 It was sometimes impossible for them to exercise genuine authority. In Hont County, for example, the prefect’s position remained very unstable until April, when the appointment of Milutin Sahulčík enabled the establishment of a fledgling Czechoslovak authority.31 In his activity report published at the end of the year, the prefect of Hont recalled that “because of the complete lack of Slovak officials in the county seat, the prefect [author’s note: then Lehotský] could not carry out his functions, and old Hungarian officials continued to govern.” Only in late April could his successor establish his authority in some districts of the county.32

If the Žilina government faced these kinds of difficulties in the first half of December, this was also because the diplomatic and military situation remained disordered and uncertain. On December 9, the Czechoslovak Supreme Military Command in Prague published the “directive for the occupation of Slovakia,” which was to be carried out by the Czechoslovak army in Italy. Units of volunteers were tasked with securing the major transit routes and borders with Poland and occupying the interior of the territory. The last stage of this first phase of the occupation of Slovakia met with mixed results. The reports sent to Šrobár during the second half of December indicated multiple material difficulties, including food and/or coal shortages in several towns and regions, and the impossibility of installing a nascent administrative apparatus in certain towns. On January 7, 1919, Matej Metod Bella, who had been in charge of supplies for a few weeks, reported that “although we have appointed prefects, the administrations are not working.”33

However, after two months of great difficulties, some form of Czechoslovak civilian and military authority had been established over the territory. But when the peace conference opened in Paris, difficulties remained considerable—and they would increase throughout the spring, as the Slovak authorities faced resistances and insufficiencies that they were unable to overcome in such a short space of time.

Some resulted directly from the weakness of the authority exercised, while others, which were occasional but not unimportant, affected the eastern regions close to the demarcation line or were linked to disruption in certain sectors such as transport and supplies.34 The overall difficulties were a hindrance to exercising genuine civilian authority beyond Bratislava and western Slovakia, as well as to coordinating this civilian authority with the military authority handled by the Italian military mission since the December 1918 agreement.35

Italian-Slovak Tensions and Their Impact in Slovakia

During the construction phase of the Czechoslovak military apparatus, Czechoslovakia’s own forces were insufficient, and it had to rely on its allies for support. The main Slovak leaders in Slovakia were acutely aware of these needs. Initially, Italy expressed the most willingness to serve this function. In November, Foreign Minister Edvard Beneš had negotiated an agreement in principle for the Czechoslovak troops of France and Italy to be transferred to Czechoslovakia.36 It soon became clear that the French were reluctant, while the Italians were more inclined to go ahead with the transfer swiftly.37 The agreement reached in mid-December was quickly implemented. There were now Czechoslovak units (around 7,000 men) in Slovakia under the command of Colonel František Schöbl. Over the course of the month, these men took back the main cities claimed by the Czechoslovak state. But their behavior was criticized in all quarters, including by the Czechoslovak Defense Minister himself, Václav Klofáč, and by the Italian commanders who reported back to Luigi Piccione, Supreme commander of the Czechoslovak army in Slovakia.38 However, the Czechoslovak army deployed gradually along the demarcation line, and reinforcements came regularly.

But in the first weeks of 1919, tensions emerged between Rome and Prague, and relations between the Italian military authorities and the Šrobár government broke down rapidly. This had an impact on the situation in Slovakia. Ivan Markovič, Secretary of the Foreign Ministry specifically in charge of political and legal affairs reporting to Šrobár, underlined this in a report to Beneš sent in the first days of February:

In Slovakia, the attitude of the Italian officers is making waves. [...] I do not want to go into detail, because I would only be telling you what I have heard, without evidence, and you would not be able to conclude anything much from it. In short, the Italians are acting as if they had not recognized our sovereignty, particularly in the Magyarized towns. In particular, they are saying that it is not yet certain that these towns (Prešporok, Lučenec, Komárno, Nitra) will be ours. That comes across in the administration (in Nitra, the Italian colonel has not allowed us to raise our flags on the county administration building so as not to upset the Hungarian population).39

These conflicts heightened following the government’s move from Žilina to Bratislava in early February, and serious incidents occurred in the following days, including during the great demonstration of February 12, killing eight and injuring around 20.40 The Italians were now said to be favorable to the Hungarians. Their behavior was the subject of numerous complaints to the Czechoslovak authorities,41 and some of the most criticized officers were replaced. This tension between Italy and Czechoslovakia remained a point of constant tension until the departure of the Italian military mission at the end of May. It came on top of the shortage of available human resources, insufficiently compensated for by the contribution of Czech volunteers, which was organized spontaneously and informally in November 1918 before being made systematic.42

This policy of sending Czechs had its limits: the pool of personnel was small, and the chaotic conditions in Slovakia did not help. In several regions, reports from the prefects highlighted fragile political and social conditions.43 Other factors were not conducive to increasing the number of volunteers, including the prevailing financial conditions, as pay was markedly lower than in the Czech Lands,44 and professional questions, as some professions were better suited than others to being exercised in communities in which there were Hungarian majorities and which were reputedly hostile.45 Other difficulties were merely material and linked to the difficulty of billeting the men. These factors together explain the particular profile of most Czech volunteers in Slovakia: relatively qualified men who were young and unmarried, and who often mentioned pre-war Slovakophilia and/or had personal ties or friendships with Slovaks close to the new regime.46 Despite this contribution, staff shortages still affected all areas of the administration in early April, including the judicial apparatus, where the situation was soon considered acute.47 Even as late as April, Juraj Slávik in Prague noted that only three courts were totally controlled by the Czechoslovak authorities, in Banská Bystrica (Besztercebánya), Ružomberok, and Levoča (Lőcse), while others, such as in Nitra (Nyitra), had had to be closed.48 Šrobár made a wider, sharper report to Piccione on April 10, after having received authorization to occupy the territories north of the demarcation line: “I reminded him of the difficulties we would face if we were to occupy the country: supplies, the shortage of specialists and reliable people, administration, justice, railways, and the postal service. We have no teachers (...) and not even enough soldiers to hold a long border.”49 In addition to these administrative problems, there were also more political difficulties that the Czechoslovak administration in Slovakia struggled to resolve. Some of these difficulties were provoked by the attitude of the Slovak authorities themselves, particularly in early1919.

The Government’s Move to Bratislava and Internal Political Difficulties

From the Prevrat onwards, the city of Bratislava experienced a distinctive evolution as regards the territory potentially attached to Czechoslovakia. This attachment had initially been very strongly opposed among the German and Hungarian elites, before a form of accord was reached with the former. In the last days of 1918, the situation might appear to have calmed, but from the beginning of January and until the government’s arrival in Bratislava, the situation worsened in the city, particularly because of the decisions made by the Slovak government as it prepared its arrival. These measures contradicted the promises that had been made in the autumn, which had helped defuse the acute political opposition of the first weeks following the Prevrat. A few decisions made in late December had already appeared counterproductive. Railway employees who did not speak Slovak had been dismissed, as had those who had refused to swear allegiance to the government.50 In the days that followed, social allowances for the unemployed were reduced. Some workers were no longer paid, supplies became more difficult to assure, and the administration seemed to struggle to find a solution to material problems. The major difficulty faced by the Slovak authorities throughout the first half of the year remained supplies. The creation in January 1919 of a Supplies Department for Slovakia (Zásobovací ústav pro Slovensko) was supposed to help coordinate all activities. But it did not resolve the management and control difficulties that were creating tensions and serious concerns.51 Food stores in particular were looted, without the law enforcement forces (which were both insufficient in numbers and unreliable) putting an end to it. Moreover, disagreements between the Czechoslovak civilian administration and the Italian military authorities were now an open secret. In mid-January, the Slovak authorities still seemed optimistic about the situation in the city, but the situation went downhill fast.52 In the end, when Šrobár arrived in the city, there was an atmosphere of open hostility. The crowd that greeted him was essentially made up of Slovaks from the surrounding area who had been brought in for the occasion. The inhabitants of Bratislava ostensibly did not take part in these festivities. Šrobár had to contend with an insufficient, unreliable administration and a shortage of housing for the new arrivals, as well as scarce coal for the economic apparatus because of the priority accorded to transport, and the need to disarm the railway workers and some postal service personnel. The strikes in February demonstrated the importance of taking control of several administrations, including the railways.53 In the following weeks and months, more than 450 administrative staff and 2,500 railway workers were sent from the Czech Lands to replace employees who had refused to pledge allegiance to the new state and had been dismissed.

The new government also made repeated errors of judgment. Poor decisions included the closure of the city’s university after the refusal of the professors to take part in the festivities for the government’s arrival in the city.54 These tensions came on top of recurrent problems in relations with the civilian population in other regions. In early February, several reports from prefects noted a very unstable and dangerous situation for the Slovak authorities in regions close to the demarcation line.55 The normal functioning of the administration was endangered and the weakness of the Czechoslovak military presence had led to fatal incidents in a few towns.56 Two weeks later, Markovič summarized the government’s difficulties to Beneš, noting the persistent challenges faced by the civilian administration: “In Slovakia, the situation is more difficult than it was. The Hungarians continued committing provocative acts, especially among officials, and this has led to a general strike. It has above all affected the railways and the postal service, where the largest number of Hungarians and Magyarons work. Luckily, it did not break out everywhere at once, which has allowed us to gradually and fairly swiftly paralyze it by bringing in Czech personnel. Today, the trains are running more or less as regularly—or rather, irregularly—as before.”57 

Uncertainty on Borders and the Issue of the Circulation of Information

The other immediate difficulty was the lack of information available to Šrobár.58 And when information did circulate, it was not precise enough for measures to be taken in Slovakia. In his report dated March 11, Fedor Houdek, who was close to the men of the government in Slovakia and a member of the Czechoslovak delegation to the peace conference and who had been in touch with Šrobár for a few days, reported with a touch of disappointment and anger that he could “still not give any positive information on the final settlement of the borders.”59 This problem of information circulation would persist. It was an increasing source of concern as the situation worsened in Slovakia, and the contradictory information available in Prague soon gave Markovič a sentiment of discomfort, which he expressed to Beneš in early April.60 At that time, the little information Šrobár had received from Houdek dated back to early April and was not very encouraging: there was nothing on borders, there was an atmosphere of secrecy in Paris, and the Wilsonian position “of optimistic humanism... does more harm than good.” His general assessment of the overall situation was pessimistic: “For us, the danger has never been greater than it is now, and it will be greater still in the near future.”61 

In the meantime, in February and March, Markovič visited Bratislava, where he would spend several days before heading to Budapest. While he participated in several conferences aimed at asserting Czechoslovak authority,62 he sent reports to Beneš that were frankly optimistic as to the situation in the country. He had only just arrived when he sent a report on February 23, in which he offered the following conclusion: “I would not like my report to give you the impression that the conditions here are untenable. They are not. The people are generally showing calm and maturity, but the situation is worsening [...], the administration is working very poorly because there are not enough officials. In brief, the situation in Slovakia is not yet critical, but it is difficult, and it could become critical if the current uncertainty were to last even longer.”63 One month later, the effects of long-term uncertainty on the borders seemed to worsen due to effective Hungarian propaganda: “The Hungarians are still acting as if there were no doubt as to the territorial integrity of the Kingdom being upheld. That can be seen in several of their decisions and in the insinuations made by their press and agitators. And the masses are totally intoxicated by this hashish.”64

The uncertainty faced at the time by the Šrobár government and its administration was combined with political difficulties on various levels. These were linked in particular to the religious issue and the attitude of the politically organized Slovak Catholic faction. This fraction had organized in November 1918 around a priest from Ružomberok who was a figurehead of the Catholic faction of the national movement before the war: Andrej Hlinka.65 This Catholic faction, gathered within a Slovak People’s Party (SĽS), soon opposed Šrobár’s authority.66 The religious conflict which had marked the last years before the war was revived and amplified by the measures taken by the Interior Ministry in January 1919 to restrict freedom of assembly.67 These measures attracted much public criticism throughout February and March.68 In the context of the time, this agitation, described as “anti-Czech” by the authorities in Prague, was a constant source of concern. However, it was considered potentially less dangerous than the supply problems, which had become acute.69 In the first weeks of spring, the accumulation of material difficulties, political agitation involving the main leaders of the different Slovak factions, and the imperfect implantation of an embryonic administration supported by Czechs came to a head.70

In addition to this tense intra-Slovak context, the attitude of the Hungarian population also raised difficulties.71 Writing from Bratislava, Ivan Markovič underlined the most important aspects in a letter to Beneš in the first half of March.72 He reported the fear of incidents during the commemoration of the Hungarian Revolution and War of Independence on March 15 and the rumored armed uprisings, notably in Bratislava and Košice (Kassa), where exceptional security measures were taken.73 In Košice, the command of the 6th Infantry Division asked General Schöbl to ensure that all contact between officers and the civilian population was avoided in the days following the banned festivities.74 In Prague meanwhile, Prime Minister Karel Kramář was worried about the authorities’ ability to control the situation.75

Persistent Weaknesses and the “Kun Effect”

The impacts of the material difficulties and strategic situation of Slovakia both before and after Béla Kun came to power in Hungary were a source of concern. In early March, Markovič informed Beneš of the recurrent agitation provoked by the scarcity of food and other essentials and the lack of work. “This shortage is definitely a good means of agitating against the Czechs and the army, which is ‘starving’ Slovakia,” he wrote. No doubt used to modest goals, he did consider, however, that “the machinery is just about functioning”76 and that, while the stability of the Czechoslovak authorities remained fragile, the reliability of certain bodies that had long been questionable (for instance the police) was gradually improving, and anti-Czech agitation persisted in a less radical form. But less than two weeks later, while reporting a calm situation, he did note that, in some places, this calm could transform into a rebellion were the Czechoslovak authorities to show an insufficiently firm hand.77 The situation in Eastern Slovakia and Ruthenia particularly captured the attention of the Slovak authorities, which were informed of the multiple difficulties encountered. The material situation there was constantly described as even more unfavorable than in other regions. In March, acute supply difficulties became a problem again. During the Conference of Prefects and Deputies meeting of mid-April in Bratislava, the referent for supplies, Matej Bella, reported that the situation had at that stage “reached a point where there were fears of collapse.” The situation was still seen as critical by some, meaning only “the most basic needs” could be fulfilled.78 This situation raised fears of the population turning to Bolshevism in a region suffering endemic poverty and where the Czechoslovak ability to run a civilian administration encountered the most recurrent problems. Judging from the report by prefect Ladislav A. Moyš on the situation in Užhorod County in early May, this problem persisted throughout the period: “So far, we have been forced to run the administration, the justice system, etc. with officials from the old regime insofar as it is better to have poor staff than no staff at all.”79

Evidence indicates that the change in regime in Hungary and the Kun offensive had a positive impact on the authority of the Czechoslovak state. The fears inspired by the Kun regime in certain categories of the population, which had hitherto been either silently or overtly hostile to the Czechoslovak State, helped limit the destabilization of the Czechoslovak authorities, particularly in Bratislava,80 and criticism of the authorities became less audible. Reports converged in this vein to the extent that President Masaryk wrote in a rather satisfied tone to Beneš: “Hungarian bolshevism has helped us a lot in Slovakia: many Hungarians and Magyarons now see us as their salvation.”81 Markovič, meanwhile, mentioned certain segments of the population to which he referred as the majetnejšie neslovenské triedy (non-Slovak property-owning classes), for whom personal security and wealth were more important than the integrity of the Kingdom of Hungary and whose relations with the Czechoslovak authorities were now “generally better.”82 But the eastern sector remained an exception. Hungarian propaganda allegedly was exerting a growing influence over the population, who lived in a state of great deprivation, regardless of creed or nationality.83

Setting aside the special case of the eastern regions, which were fragile in the long term, early April saw the beginning of a general improvement in supplies and a gradual strengthening of the administration.84 In certain sectors important to the new regime, such as schools, the population was not spontaneously welcoming with the new arrivals, even in regions with Slavic majorities. This school issue was, along with that of the judicial institutions, one of the difficult points to address across the territory.85 In his report to the Conference in mid-April, the referent for school affairs, Anton Štefánek, reported that the opposition of Hungarian teachers to the new regime had grown in the first weeks of spring, and he announced the decision to close all schools that did not have a Czechoslovak teaching “corps” (Sbor československý) early, underlining the importance of triggering a “great cleansing of schools from the national point of view.”86

Despite persistent military difficulties, most civilian and military reports from this period mention a slight improvement in the situation, for which there were multiple causes. The attitude of the population now seemed more favorable to the Czechoslovak authorities, even if tensions persisted in certain regions, including in the west, such as in Nitra or Štiavnica. The general improvement in the food situation in April and early May helped strengthen the position of the Czechoslovak civilian authorities.87 Control of the railways and postal service had improved since the strikes had begun to subside in mid-March, but the worry provoked by the serious shortage of personnel to replace the previous administration remained high. It was in this context, which remained unstable, that the Czechoslovak army began a new phase in the conflict with the Hungarian Republic of Councils. Their initial victories gave way to a rout that shed light on the army’s endemic fragilities.88 It lacked means of transport and communication, its supplies were poor, it was ill-equipped, and it was weakened by a discipline more unreliable than ever and overt defiance of the Italian officers. A flurry of reports underlined the role played by the Italian officers in the moral breakdown of the Czechoslovak army.89 Moreover, during this Hungarian counteroffensive, part of the state apparatus also showed its fragility.90 Considerable pressure had to be applied to Hungary for the authorities to be able to take back and assert control of the territory from the beginning of July.

Conclusion

The failure of the Czechoslovak authorities to take quick control of the territories in question and the local administrations and the material uncertainties this failure caused undermined the Czechoslovak position.91 At the beginning of the summer of 1919, Markovič was even more pessimistic than he had been in the months before. He observed that the conditions were “beyond doubt worse than they were after the Prevrat [...]. Not so much because of a lack of will or because of any particular resistance, but because of the demoralization and general apathy of people, worn down by five years of war.”92 This observation in the summer was confirmed at the end of December 1919 in the Minister Plenipotentiary’s report on the situation in Slovakia, which warned against “the slightest optimism,” which it contended would be “inappropriate and dangerous” given the major difficulties the Czechoslovak authority continued to face, particularly in the four southern and eastern counties (Komárno, Hont, Gemer, and Abaujtorna).93 Most of difficulties were familiar from the previous period: the Hungarian threat, the apathy of the Slovak population, the fragility of the administration, and occasional tensions between the army and the civilian population in regions close to the Danube River or the Hungarian border, as well as in eastern regions.

It took several more months to structure the administration, this time employing resources from the Czech Lands and local Slovak elites and/or pre-Prevrat civil servants in some regions.94 But in many districts, particularly in the south and east, control remained incomplete. This administrative and political fragility of the Czechoslovak authority amplified the supply problems driven by the destruction and disorganization of the war against Hungary, which remained considerable.

Moreover, ahead of the legislative elections of spring 1920, Slovak internal political divisions (the early signs of which were observable from November 1918) intensified, as did the power struggles between the SNR and the Club of Slovak Deputies and the tensions between the authority of the Minister Plenipotentiary and political Catholicism. The Czechoslovak government in Slovakia addressed these difficulties through a policy of authoritarian control, taking measures to restrict the freedom of the press and the freedom of movement and using propaganda. Despite a few episodes of social conflict, the new absence of an external threat and the fatigue of the population helped stabilize Czechoslovak authority in the first months of 1920.

Archival Sources

Literárny Archiv Slovenskej Národnej Knižnice [Literary Archive Slovak National Library] (LA SNK), Martin.

Fond Daxner (80)

Fond Thurzo (166)

Slovenská Národná Rada v Martine (f. 94)

Starý fond 8. História kultúrna, C 903, Koncept návrhov na županov na
Slovensku [Draft proposal for prefects in Slovakia], 8 December 1918. 

Slovenský Národný Archiv [Slovak National Archives] (SNA), Bratislava

Českoslovenká dočasná vláda na Slovensku, 614.11.1918 [Čs. doč. vláda].

Ministerstvo s plnou mocou pre správu Slovenska, boxes 1, 5, 8, 255, 257.

Personal collection (of.). Dula, box 9.

of. Markovič.

of. Šrobár, boxes 8, 9, 10, 11, 26.

of. Milan Rastislav Štefánik, box 39.

of. Pavol Blaho, box 40.

of. Anton Štefánek, box 10,

of.Hlinka, box 21

Vojenský historický ústav [Institute of Military History] (VHÚ), Bratislava

Collection Zemské Vojenské Veliteľstvo Košice, Presidium 1919, boxes 2, 3, 4.

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Jernej Kosi
University of Ljubljana
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In this article, I examine political, cultural and social circumstances in Prekmurje/Muravidék after its occupation by Yugoslav forces in August 1919. Since the mid-19th century, Slovene national activists in Cislanthania had considered this part of the Kingdom of Hungary as a territory densely populated by Slovene compatriots and therefore as an integral part of Slovene national space. Drawing on this belief, in 1919 Slovene officials, politicians, and journalists celebrated the act of occupation of Hungarian territory as an event that brought to the end of Hungarian oppression to the locals and with it a radical, irreversible and liberating break with the past. By examining archival sources and secondary literature, I confront the victorious Slovene discourse with the reality on the ground. In addition, I also assess how a set of administrative ruptures and legislative changes imposed by the Yugoslav government in the immediate post-1919 period influenced the everyday lives and experiences of the local population.

Keywords: Prekmurje, Muravidék, Treaty of Trianon, transition, transformation, imperial legacies

On August 12, 1919, military units of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes crossed the border with the Kingdom of Hungary and occupied segments of two counties, Vas (Železna in Slovenian) and Zala. Several weeks before that, the occupation had been sanctioned at the Peace Conference in Paris. To be more precise, in early July 1919, the Council of Heads of the four great powers’ included this small fragment of land in the very west of Hungary in the package of territorial compensations promised to Yugoslavia in exchange for Yugoslav participation in the military overthrow of the Hungarian Soviet Republic.1 The Yugoslav territorial acquisition of Prekmurje was confirmed a year later with the signing of the Treaty of Trianon. With the exception of a short interruption during World War II, Prekmurje, as the region is officially known in Slovenian (Muravidék in Hungarian), has been under Slovenian administrative control ever since.

The sudden July decision to hand over the territory of soon-to-become Prekmurje to the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes came as a surprise, even though the Yugoslav Peace Delegation had laid claim to Prekmurje soon after the diplomats started to convene in Paris at the beginning of the year. According to the statements made by Slovenian members of the Yugoslav delegation, the linguistic and ethnographic facts unambiguously confirmed the region’s Slovenian character. To build a political strategy on language and cultural markers was a common practice among Central European diplomats competing for contested areas at the Paris Peace Conference.2 Yet in contrast to many territorial disputes that broke out after the collapse of Central European empires, the claim for Prekmurje did not require the Yugoslav diplomats and experts to engage in creative reasoning based on hastily compiled ethnographic and linguistic “facts.” On the contrary, in this particular case, Yugoslav diplomats could base their request for territorial rearrangement on “solid” evidence which had already been gathered. Since the late nineteenth century, Slovenian national activists, ethnographers, linguists, and writers living in the Austrian part of the Dual Monarchy had been accumulating extensive knowledge about the Slavophone community densely inhabiting western Hungary.3 In their interpretation, framed and thoroughly impregnated by the ethnolinguistically defined notion of Slovenian national belonging and adherence, these Slavophones were members of the Slovenian nation inhabiting the territory between the upper Adriatic to the west and the outskirts of Pannonian Basin to the east.4 In 1919, Matija Slavič, the Yugoslav delegation’s Slovenian expert responsible for Prekmurje, thus only additionally elaborated and refined previously published and widely disseminated findings.5 The culmination of his efforts was an ethnographic map of Prekmurje which meticolosuly depicted the area densely inhabited by Slovenian compatriots who had, according to the established Slovenian ethnolinguistic national narrative, been living under oppressive Hungarian rule for centuries.6

Despite the seemingly convincing case (convincing at least according to contemporary standards) substantiated with the strong evidence, the great powers were at best lukewarm about the Yugoslav territorial expectations regarding Prekmurje. The situation changed only as a result of the establishment of the Soviet Republic in Hungary. After the French delegation began propagating the need to suppress the Communist regime in Budapest, a window of opportunity opened for the additional readjustment along the northernmost part of the Yugoslav-Hungarian border.7

The legitimacy of the Yugoslav occupation of Prekmurje was grounded on the idea of the right of the self-determination, despite ultimately being only a consequence of strategic considerations. In reality, however, the decision could hardly be described as the implementation of the Wilsonian principles. There was no plebiscite in Prekmurje, and the locals were not given the right to choose which state they wished to join. They also had no say in the decision-making process at the Paris Peace Conference, despite different political initiatives formulated and propagated by members of local elites in the period between autumn 1918 and August 1919. It is true that the “Yugoslav option” was not without supporters in Prekmurje. In the months after the collapse of Austria–Hungary, many Slavophone catholic clergymen (though not all) who were in close contacts with Slovenian national activists in former Cisleithanian lands agitated among Slavophone parishioners for the annexation of the territory to Yugoslavia. Yet much more vocal were those members of the local elite who propagated an administrative reorganization within the borders of Hungary that would recognize the linguistic and ethnic peculiarity of the local population and grant the region some sort of autonomy. While these initiatives were seriously discussed on various levels of the Hungarian administration, the most radical application of the principle of self-determination was doomed to fail from the outset. The so-called Republic of Prekmurje, which was proclaimed on May 29, 1919 by Vilmos Tkálec, a low-level official of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, lasted for only slightly more than a week, as it was suppressed by the Hungarian army on June 6.8

In the days after the occupation of Prekmurje in 1919, Slovenian politicians, national activists, and journalists employed a common post-1918 interpretation to rationalize and substantiate the territorial gain. The contemporary Slovenian press described the territorial acquisition as “a moment of liberation” for the Slovenian compatriots and “a radical and irreversible break” of the region with its Hungarian past. “Nothing will ever be the same,” the Civil Commissioner Srečko Lajnšic promised the locals in August 1919. Lajnšic was the first head of the new Yugoslav administration in Prekmurje. According to him, the Yugoslav occupation of Prekmurje brought freedom after 1,000 years of struggle under the Hungarian yoke; it gave Prekmurje’s Slovenes a chance to unite with brothers in blood to form a single polity. This kind of post-imperial narrative was not uncommon among members of Central European national elites who happened to find themselves on the winning side of history in autumn 1918.9 Still, to what extend did the narrative correspond with the realities on the ground? Did the 1919 annexation truly play a role in the groundbreaking rupture with the past for people living in Prekmurje? What do administrative sources, historical accounts, and scholarly works reveal about the nature of this supposedly “radical and irreversible break”? In what follows, I will focus on a set of administrative ruptures and legislative changes imposed by the Yugoslav government after it acquired the region, and I will examine how these changes influenced the everyday lives and experiences of the local population.

As one would expect, for locals living in Prekmurje, the single most important break with the past was the change of the state regime, embodied in the incoming representatives of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. Despite the fact that the local inhabitants and Hungarian officials who were present in the region offered no resistance to the newly arrived Yugoslav officials, the process of the administrative incorporation of Prekmurje initially did not go smoothly. The first weeks following the annexation were marked by internal strife between the Slovenian and Croat mid-level administrative bodies. Slovenian and Croat politicians and administrators could not agree on the question of which geographic and administrative jurisdiction Prekmurje should be associated with. As a consequence of this, both the Slovenian and Croatian provincial governments sent officials to the region seeking to put the territory of Prekmurje under their own administrative control. Moreover, the provincial government in Ljubljana also proclaimed Srečko Lajnšič, the district captain in the neighboring Styrian town of Maribor, the new Civil Commissioner in charge of the organization of temporary administration in Prekmurje. Unsurprisingly, Slovenian politicians saw the attachment of Prekmurje to the provincial government in Ljubljana as the only possible outcome of the occupation. In their eyes, it logically harmonized with the predominant reasoning of the Slovenian political and cultural elites from the former Cisleithanian lands, who regarded the formerly Hungarian territory as an integral part of the Slovenian national space. To their chagrin and exasperation, however, Croatian politicians and civil servants in Zagreb did not share their views. Instead, they immediately sent their own officials to take over several government and security posts in areas of Prekmurje that bordered Međimurje on the south, an area which had already been under the control of the Croatian administrative bodies since the winter of 1918.10

The fragmentation of the civil administration in Prekmurje led to conflicts and misunderstandings, as there was no clear demarcation line between the overlapping jurisdictions of Croat and Slovenian administrative bodies. The dispute was put to an end only after the intervention of a higher authority. On September 2, the Yugoslav minister of internal affairs Svetozar Pribičević finally interfered and provided a conclusive decision concerning the issue of administrative competences in Prekmurje. Pribičević ordered the provincial government in Ljubljana to mitigate the conflict, which was creating internal strife between Slovenian and Croat branches of administration and could also put Yugoslav control of the occupied territory in jeopardy. He thus decided that until the new constitution was written and ratified, Prekmurje should remain a single administrative entity under the auspices of the Civil Commissioner. The Slovenian provincial government should then, he insisted, provide the necessary officials and, in case of need, ask the provincial government in Zagreb for help. In any case, Pribičević reiterated once again, the territory of Prekmurje should remain a single unit with the Civil Commissioner in charge of the administration.11 The next day, the president of the Slovenian provincial government, Janko Brejc, ordered the subordinated departments and offices immediately to provide the requested personnel to the Civil commissioner.12 The Civil commissioner then moved the seat of his office from Radgona/Radkersburg in Styria to Murska Sobota in Prekmurje.13 With that, the first phase of the consolidation of the new administration in the occupied territory was completed.

The Yugoslav occupation of Prekmurje in August 1919 thus marked the end of Hungarian administration and of Hungarian as the official language of the state administration. From the outset, the incoming state representatives did not tolerate the existing Hungarian administrative structures. The newly arrived Slovenian administrators regarded the presence of Hungarian officials in Prekmurje as a security risk. “The state within the state cannot exist,” Lajnšic insisted. He added, “law won’t be restored as long as the administration remains in the hands of those who constitute a threat to the new order.” Given the fact that “a proper administration must be established,” the Civil Commissioner continued, “authorization should be given to take over or at least to suspend the work of the existing administrative bodies, for the Hungarian authorities only work against the establishment of public order.”14 Many Hungarian officials thus voluntarily left the region soon after the occupation, while others were encouraged, by different means, to hand over their official responsibilities to the Yugoslav representatives, pack their belongings, and leave for Hungary. The replacement was quick and clinical. Several weeks after the Yugoslav forces started entering Prekmurje, the Slovenian officials had taken over all the public offices and administrative posts in Prekmurje, from the courts and the gendarmerie to post offices and railway stations, and they had subordinated them in the process to the administrative bodies in Ljubljana.

Another important case indicating a clear rupture with the past involves the new categories introduced for the population. A series of decrees and laws enacted in the weeks and months after World War I had ended revealed that in the newly constituted nation state of South Slavs, citizenship would be “nationalised.” The national belonging ascribed to each citizen would play a crucial role in determining a given citizen’s rights and the extent to which these rights were respected and protected by the authorities. In other words, national belonging would influence the way in which the authorities treated a particular citizen. Since the establishment of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes in December 1918, the newfound Yugoslav official ideology propagated the state as a nation state. Serbs, Croats and Slovenes were regarded as constitutive tribes of the so-called three-named nation (troimeni narod), or the Yugoslav nation. In this sense, the new state was understood as a culmination and embodiment of the principle of the national self-determination of one sovereign Yugoslav nation.15 However, alongside Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, many people lived within the borders of the kingdom who identified themselves or were identified by the state administration as members of other national and religious minority communities, for instance Montenegrins, Macedonians, Jews, Germans, Hungarians, Muslims, etc. Following the postwar international agreements on the protection of national minorities, the state granted the members of several of the abovementioned communities a set of specific minority rights. In this sense, the new state officially recognized the existence of several other national groups, the members of which were normatively bestowed equal citizenship rights and, in some cases, also specific minorities rights.16

After acquiring Prekmurje, the new Yugoslav administration began applying the new categories to the local population. Locals who were granted citizenship (the majority of people living in Prekmurje) were divided into two distinct categories. The first one consisted of locals who spoke Slovenian dialects. This part of Prekmurje’s population was regarded as an integral part of the Slovenian tribe and thus as members of the Yugoslav nation. The second category, however, was reserved for members of the local population who were identified by the state administration as belonging either to the German or to the Hungarian minority. According to the peace treaty, the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes was not allowed to discriminate against citizens who belonged to minorities. But the state bureaucracy nonetheless treated citizens in Prekmurje differently with respect to their presumed national affiliation. Many documents reveal that the level of citizenship rights depended on the ascribed national belonging, as only citizens who were regarded as members of a dominant nation were granted full citizenship rights.17

In addition to the replacement of the state administration and the introduction of the distinction between majority and minority groups, inhabitants of Prekmurje experienced another major shift in the years following the occupation, namely the land reform. In 1919, Prekmurje was a predominantly agricultural region. The majority of the population consisted of peasants who owned no land and farmers who had small holdings. The division of large estates into parcels gave the peasant population of Prekmurje access to a means of basic survival, i.e. land. The decision of the state to introduce the land reform and hence intervene in the existing property relations was thus perhaps the most important rupture affecting the everyday lives of the local population.

The land reform in Prekmurje was part of the broader strategy of rural pacification adopted by the government soon after the proclamation of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes in December 1918. In the precarious first postwar weeks and months following the proclamation of the new state, the Yugoslav countryside was plagued by a wave of discontent and a series of more or less violent outbreaks.18 The uprisings of the rural population were influenced by a revolutionary movement in Russia and enabled by a fragile state apparatus, massive social deterioration, and a weak or non-existent monopoly of the state on violence. Since the economic recovery was at best gradual, the government decided to use the promise of land reform as a tool to quell rural social movements. As part of this strategy, in February 1919, regent Alexander confirmed a provisional bill that dissolved all large estates in exchange for financial compensation.19

In the years that followed, in Prekmurje as in the rest of the kingdom thousands of hectares of farmland changed the ownership. In truth, the transfer of property (the ownership of arable land) came into effect sluggishly because of the many conflicting interests and the complexity of the process of land division itself. The constant shifting of people in government also slowed down the procedures, as did the complaints concerning the measures, the revisions that were made to the decrees, the annulment of some decrees, and the involvement of political parties. Nonetheless, the change of ownership of arable land transformed the economic and social conditions in the region. Before the beginning of the agricultural reform in Prekmurje, one could cross the whole region from one end to the other (approximately 90 kilometers) without leaving the estates of only twelve large landowners. A good decade after the introduction of the first decrees, almost ten thousand land seekers held legal property rights to 56 percent of the farmland that had formerly been part of large estates. Much of the land was thus still part of large estates, but the land reform enabled many farmers to get their own plots.20

The three post-1919 changes described above significantly influenced the everyday lives and routines of locals living in Prekmurje. In many ways, at least at first glance, the 1919 rhetoric thus indeed did describe actual changes which had taken place in Prekmurje in the years that followed the Yugoslav occupation and the subsequent annexation. Still, did these changes retrospectively substantiate the narrative of a “liberating,” “radical,” and “irreversible” break with the past in the summer of 1919?

To begin with, in post-1919 Prekmurje various institutional practices, administrative procedures and norms, and also everyday habits survived the collapse of the Dual Monarchy. Many sections of Hungarian civil law and other decrees from the Hungarian era were simply translated into Slovenian and remained in force in Prekmurje throughout the interwar period, despite the inclination of the Slovenian provincial government to replace the existing Hungarian body of law with the normative framework that was in use in other territories under its control. In the late 1920s, the “Provisions of Vas County Regarding Buildings and Public Cleanliness” from 1909, for instance, still regulated the urban spatial restructuring of Murska Sobota, the administrative center and commercial hub of Prekmurje, while the unique combination of former Hungarian laws specified the rights of citizens regarding fishing and hunting in Prekmurje.21

The aspirations of Slovenian state actors completely to reorganize everything in Prekmurje were not inhibited solely by pragmatic reasoning and the lack of state resources. Their ability to address and their willingness, ultimately, to tolerate the reality on the ground and the continued attachment to customs and practices were often influenced by conflicts with the expectations of locals. Through dynamic negotiations, locals on many occasions managed to convince the representatives of the Yugoslav state to show some consideration for established practices and existing institutions. When in 1920 the Slovenian administration tried to put the existing network of elementary schools run by the local clergy under the control of the state, the local Catholic and Protestant dignitaries viciously opposed the proposals. As a consequence, until the early 1930s, the network of confessional semi-independent schools remained intact in Prekmurje.22

The occasional willingness of Slovenian judges sent to Prekmurje from Ljubljana to include in their rulings specifics of Hungarian law and practice that did not exist in the existing body of law of the former Cisleithanian lands is also telling. For instance, after the death of Štefan Kerčmar, his wife Fani Kerčmar asserted the right of survivorship (widow’s right), which gave her the right to use her husband’s property until her death or marriage. Though since 1914 the imperial Austrian Civil Code had not acknowledges this right, a Slovenian judge who followed imperial Austrian procedure regarding the inheritance recognized the legality of the widow’s request in the concluding verdict.23

Furthermore, despite the intention of the Slovenian government to purge the administrative bodies in Prekmurje of any Hungarian influence entirely, several Hungarian lower officials retained their positions. Soon after the occupation, the new Slovenian civil servants came to the conclusion that they would not be able to govern without the help of experienced and literate officials fluent in Hungarian. These individuals were familiar with the circumstances on the ground and as such an important source of reliable information about the expectations and needs of local communities, and they could also function as intermediaries between the state institutions, where predominantly Slovenian was used, and locals who spoke only Hungarian.

The example of a dispute which erupted in November 1920 between the two highest representatives of the state authority in Prekmurje concerning the employment of a municipal clerk who had dubious political views illustrates how the pragmatic aspects on many occasions prevailed over political and nationalistic ones. On November 2, the Civil Commissioner wrote to the head of the regional State Police Department, Gustav Puš. He expressed his dissatisfaction with what he saw as the inappropriate prerogatives given to one of Puš’s subordinates. Puš was the highest state law enforcement official, and he also held the position of provisional unelected mayor (gerent) of the Murska Sobota municipality. In the complaint, the Civil Commissioner thus revealed his astonishment at the fact that he had received an official certificate issued by a municipal clerk named Györy. He could not understand how it was possible that Györy was still employed at the municipal office and had the right “to sign documents in the name of municipality and even use the municipal seal,” given that he had recently been convicted by the Civil Commissioner and even served a sentence for having committed anti-state acts. Györy was not loyal to the state, he continued, hence it was “absolutely unacceptable” to grant him authority to issue certificates and handle the official municipal seal. For this reason, the Civil Commissioner instructed the head of the state police and the provisional mayor of Murska Sobota to sort out the scandalous situation. In short, he asked him to replace Györy as a municipal clerk with someone who would be seen as trustworthy by the Slovenian population of Murska Sobota.24

Gustav Puš’s response was surprising. He explained to the Civil Commissioner that Györy was in charge of issuing certificates on the conditions of families and properties so that grain could be distributed to the poor population as had been demanded by the Civil Commissioner in the instructions Puš had recently received. Györy had been entrusted with this task for a good reason, as he knew the conditions of the local population well, Puš asserted. He continued: “I am well aware that Györy was punished, for I was the one who led the investigation in question. At the municipal council meeting on July 23, 1920, Györy was nominated and accepted unanimously to serve as the municipal secretary. The transcript of the municipal meeting in question was sent to the Civilian Commissariat. If today, as the order demands, the district government wants to dismiss him, this would create many difficulties. […] I must point out that Györi has done a good job so far. His specific task has been to compile various lists, such as a list of recruits, a census of livestock, and other things that would be difficult for someone else who does not know the situation, people, and language.” In short, in his role of provisional mayor of Murska Sobota, the head of state police defended diligent work of his subordinate clerk, whom he had previously persecuted. On this occasion, the smooth functioning of the administration took precedence over the more abstract interests of the state.25

These cases suggest that the consequences of the transfer in 1919 of power over the territory were far from radical and irreversible. But neither was the annexation liberating, at least not for many locals living in the region. As mentioned above, the newly founded Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes promised to respect the citizenship rights of all citizens regardless of their nationality and to recognize minority rights of several national communities. In spite of these promises, after the war, Prekmurje’s Hungarian speaking population encountered many obstacles. The majority of the educated Hungarian speaking inhabitants of Prekmurje left the region after the occupation and annexation and settled in the new state of Hungary. Others, especially Hungarian administrative employees and teachers, were fired soon after the occupation because they allegedly did not speak the official language of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes.26 Their departure was a major reason why it was difficult to set up a network of schools for the Hungarian minority. The interwar circumstances were precarious from the perspective of elementary schooling in Hungarian. This eventually led to a decrease in the number of pupils and, later, to the almost complete abolishment of minority schools in the region.27

In addition to disrespecting the rights of the Hungarian minority to their own educational institutions, the new authorities discriminated against members of the Hungarian minority, especially its rural segment, in another way. Hungarian speaking peasants, who densely inhabited the area around Lendava along the new border with Hungary, were also excluded from the land reform. Though the local Hungarian speaking farmers and rural communities were initially allowed to rent out arable land of the sequestered and dissolved large estates, they were forbidden in the second stage from buying it, and hence they were prevented from becoming proper owners. This opportunity was given to locals and newcomers considered Slovenians instead of to Prekmurje’s Hungarian speaking population. In contrast with what took place in some other parts of Yugoslavia, the exclusion was not about citizenship, but about the presumed nationality of the locals. At the beginning of the reform, the Yugoslav administration allowed peasants and farmers in Prekmurje who either spoke Hungarian or identified as Hungarians to lease the land, even though they still held the right to opt for Hungarian citizenship. Yet, in 1924, when these locals had become citizens of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, their contracts were revoked on the basis of their presumed nationality, which was determined by using the 1921 census. The officials of the district state agency responsible for the land reform in Prekmurje analyzed records of the census taken in villages along the Yugoslav-Hungarian border and postulated that the declaration of a local citizen’s mother tongue should be regarded as an objective marker of his or her national identity. In this sense, the state officials classified inhabitants of villages who declared Hungarian as their mother tongue as being of Hungarian nationality and, as such, potentially unreliable citizens, whose ownership of the land along the border could cause potential problems for the integrity of the Yugoslav state.28

The integration of Prekmurje’s Slavophone speakers of the region into the new Yugoslav frame was not exactly smooth either. The incoming administration perceived the Slavophone population of Prekmurje as their Slovenian brothers who had finally been liberated from one thousand years of Hungarian domination. The local Slavophones, however, looked on the newcomers with suspicion. Many of them were in fact patriotic Hungarians who expressed particular notions of self-belonging as Slovenes that did not correspond with the understanding of “Slovene-ness” cultivated in the former Cisleithania. As a result, after the Yugoslav occupation and annexation, two separate notions of “Slovene-ness” began to intersect in the region of Prekmurje. The sentiments of ethnic belonging held by the local Slovenian speakers were very different from the idea of “Slovene-ness” developed and widely disseminated in the course of the nineteenth century on the other side of the former border between the Austrian and Hungarian parts of the Dual Monarchy. The officials who came to the region after the war were for that reason identifying Prekmurje’s Slovenian speakers as a part of their own Slovenian nation, which supposedly stretched from the coasts of the Adriatic to the westernmost parts of Hungary. In contrast, the local inhabitants, with the exception of a few catholic priests, continued to nurture their own local and regional identifications. As a result, in 1919, members of Prekmurje’s Slovenian speaking population predominantly identified themselves as “Sloveni” or “Slovenci,” yet they regarded the incoming Slovenian officials sent to the region as representatives of the new Yugoslav state as Carniolans, Slavs, or simply “newcomers.” Prekmurje’s Slovenes hence did not think of the incoming Slovenes as belonging to the same ethnic group as them.29

The two abovementioned Slovenian groups commonly fought about the role of Prekmurje’s regional literary language, particularly in the educational and church setting. These disagreements were passionate because Prekmurje’s Slovenian was both a symbol of the region’s ethnical particularity and, above all, the language of the local evangelic and Catholic Church. The incoming Slovenian officials, especially teachers, nonetheless treated Prekmurje’s literary tradition in a patronizing and occasionally even contemptuous manner. In their eyes, the Slovenian spoken in Prekmurje was not a language but merely one of the dialects of “proper Slovenian,” and for that reason, it should be eliminated. After all, according to them, a true nation could only have one national literary standard.30 Misunderstandings between the locals and the newcomers were further exacerbated by a particular group of newcomers, the Slovenian teaching staff who fostered and spread liberal views which differed from the view of the local clergy.31

Many archival documents from the months following the annexation reveal the animosity between the local Slovenian speakers and the newly arrived Slovenian administrators. For instance, in April 1922, the commander of Murska Sobota’s gendarmerie reported on the positive responses of the local Slovenian “nationally unconscious intelligentsia” to Hungarian propaganda in support of border revisions and the return of Prekmurje to Hungary. According to the sources, along with the local Hungarians, some Slovenes also supported the return of the region to Hungary, more specifically “all the Lutherans, including Lutheran innkeepers, pastors, and teachers.” The writer of this report continued with the following claim: “Prekmurje’s people hate us—Serbs especially—and are convinced that they form a particular, not Slovenian nation.”32 Furthermore, under these tense circumstances, Jožef Klekl, a priest, a member of the national assembly, and one of the very few people in Prekmurje who had supported the Slovenian national movement in the prewar times, was declared a threat to the state because of his autonomist viewpoints.33

In conclusion, after August 1919, the inhabitants of Prekmurje had to confront the reality of living in a state in which the institutional framework and the political culture differed considerably from what they had experienced in the Kingdom of Hungary. The new Yugoslav state actors who came to the region replaced the Hungarian officials, but that was certainly not all they did. Almost immediately after the region’s incorporation into the new state, they started to introduce new administrative practices and state institutions, together with a new normative framework that legally divided the body of citizens into separate communities along the lines of presumed or expressed nationality. Generally speaking, the administrative apparatus treated the Slavophone majority of Prekmurje as a constitutive part of the “three-named nation,” and it classified local German-speaking and Hungarian-speaking communities as parts of two recognized minority groups. Last not least, the Yugoslav state enacted the land reform and radically intervened in the existing ownership relations. Thousands of local Slavophone farmers were given an opportunity to become owners of the land they cultivated.

However, a closer examination of several aspects of the local circumstances in Prekmurje in the decade after the incorporation of the region into the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes offers a much more nuanced interpretation of the changes which took place. Instead of supporting the characterization of the annexation as a moment of radical rupture, the events which took place on the ground suggest that the changes occurring in the summer of 1919 in Prekmurje instigated a process of pragmatic adaptations and gradual transformations framed by many aspects of the imperial past. In this sense, the documents which survive speak for themselves, and they also cast a shadow of doubt on the prevailing Slovenian national narrative, according to which the summer of 1919 was the moment of the unification of the Slovenes of Prekmurje with the mother nation.

Archival Sources

Arhiv Republike Slovenije [Archives of the Republic of Slovenia] (ARS)

Pokrajinska in študijska knjižnica Murska Sobota [Regional Library Murska Sobota] (PIŠK)

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Službene novine Kraljestva Srba, Hrvata i Slovenaca. http://sluzbenenovine.rs

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