THE MAN WHO LOVED ONLY NUMBERS by PAUL HOFFMAN : BOOK EXCERPT
pages 62-63
"Death and tragedy have long been part of the Hungarian character. According to the historian John Lukacs, on All Soul's Day in Erdos's youth, "thousands of people steamed toward the cemeteries of Budapest, with flowers in their hands, on that holy day which is perhaps taken more seriously in Hungary than anywhere else because of the national temperament. Temetni tudunk - a terse Magyar phrase whose translation requires as many as ten English words to give its proper (and even then, not wholly exact) sense: 'How to bury people - that is one thing we know.'" The phrase was coined long before Hungary had experienced the devastation of the two world wars, whose carnage would come disproportionately from within its borders.
Few countries have had as violent a history as Hungary. In the ninth century, nomadic Magyar warriors from the steppes of Easter Europe crossed the Carpathian mountains, and renouncing their peripatetic way of life, settled in the middle Danube basin at the heart of what is now Hungary. The Magyars, also known as the On-Ogurs ("people of the ten arrows"), were skilled archers and javelin throwers who raided their neighbors, plundering Germany from Bavaria to Saxony. Recent converts to Christianity, the Magyars had to defend their own new territory against a series of invaders. They held their own until 1241, when several hundred thousand Mongol horseman from Genghis Khan's empire slaughtered half the Magyar population and enslaved much of the rest, a bloodbath from which the country barely recovered "
The problem with Hungary," Erdos once joked, reflecting on his country's history, "is that in every war we choose the wrong side."
