Rákóczi-szobrok külhonban
Rákóczi Statues Abroad

Summary/Abstract: The study seeks to answer the question of which among the initiatives to erect a statue of Rákóczi, prompted by the repatriation of the prince’s ashes in 1906, emphatically within the coordinates of the cult of Rákóczi, were the first to be realised in practice. Since completeness was impossible to achieve, three examples were selected, one from Upper Hungary, one from Transylvania and one from Southern Hungary, which happily coincide with the “first” Rákóczi statues. Their common fate was to fall outside the 1920 boundaries of Hungary, whereupon two of them were destroyed, while the third was relocated after several decades of “hiding”. The earliest among them was the very first statue of Rákóczi, the bust unveiled in 1907 at Zólyom in Northern Hungary and reerected in 1969 at Borsi. The second is the memorial inaugurated at Marosvásárhely, in Transylvania, likewise in 1907, which, however, was destroyed roughly a decade later. The same fate awaited the full-length Rákóczi statue that was erected at Zombor, in Southern Hungary, in 1912; it also disappeared by the middle of the twentieth century. The three statues had several common features in terms of their creation, ceremonial inauguration, the associated programs, and the attitudes of national politics in general. These monuments became sites of historical memory in Hungary in the early twentieth century, the symbols of independent Hungarian statehood, while, after the destruction of historical Hungary in 1920, they were immediately turned into sources of political, national and military conflicts, and thus into relics to be destroyed; in short, they became mementos of the change of political regime.

• Details
• Contents