MORE HUNGARIAN MUMMIES REVEALED : EXHIBIT IN BEKESCSABA : HUNGARIAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY : NUN WITH MISSING FINGER

HUNGARY TODAY : NUN WITH MISSING FINGER - MUMMY EXHIBIT 

Excerpt:  Visitors to the exhibition in Bekescsaba can see ten mummies in the exhibition hall, including Teresa Sandor, aged around 4o, whose coffin had no name, but it was known that she was buried in 1783 in a nun's habit.

Two of Teresa's fingers were found wrapped around her left leg.  Tests revealed that her fingers had not been cut off in a robbery (the coffin was intact), nor had they been amputated due to illness (X-rays showed no infectious complications or lesions suggestive of healing). It was probably mutilated for unknown reasons after death before the body was placed in the coffin.

LINK TO THE MUSEUM EXHIBIT NHMUS - Natural History Museum

BUKKABRANY VILLAGE MUMMIFIED FOREST : BUKK NATIONAL PARK : WONDERFUL PLACES IN HUNGARY #18

Bukki Nemzeti Park 

In 2007 in the village of Bukkabrany, archaeologists discovered that beneath the ground at 60 meters (around 200 feet) down the trunks of swamp cypress trees.  These have been dug out and are on display at the visitors center of Bukk National Park.

According to this article that appeared via Rueters the trees were living at a time when the Carpathian basin was a fresh water lake.

RUETERS: HUNGARY : CYPRESS TREES RARE FOUND "Instead of petrifying -- turning to stone -- the wood of 16 Taxodium trees was preserved in an open-cast coal mine allowing geologists to study samples as if they were sections cut from a piece of living wood."

*** The village itself is being considered for a Paleo Park (and I don't mean the diet!)

Click on the label Wonderful-Hungary to get to the entire series on this theme.

STORM OVER EUROPE : THE WANDERING TRIBES : MAGYAR AMERICAN FILM SERIES REVIEW

An excellent four-part series, STORM OVER EUROPE focuses on the migration of Germanic tribes from what was as far north as Denmark and Norway south and throughout present-day Europe and into Tunisia (Africa but not far from Sicily). There is a lot of information to learn so you may want to take it slow or rewatch the series over time.

The Goths - Ostrogoths - Visigoths. The Vandals. The Franks. The Anglo - Saxons. For some their wish was to live with the Romans or live like them: Romans lived in relative luxury and their legal system was desirable. And Italy was thought to have excellent resources.

The winters in their Germanic homelands were harsh and resulted in wintery starvation. Their leaders lead them on foot slowly migrating to find a new place to settle. Forty years - three generations - or more - and then they'd start migrating again.

But as has been the history of the world, it's not so easy to find a place vacant of people who got their first. Bloody battles resulting in the death of thousands over centuries occurred, each changing the course of history. The Roman Empire was vast. The Romans were not going to easily give up their power or allow fast assimilation.

This is also a story of Paganism and Christianity and how Catholicism won out.

In some cases the Germanic people were slaves. In others they dominated, mating with local women and reducing the Y DNA of the native male population.

I was surprised to know that France and Spain were so Germanic. Ok. The Franks are France, Brittany Celtic, but I think of French culture and language differently. I think of the culture and language of France and Spain as Latin just as I do Italy.

Of interest especially to my Hungarian and Hungarian - American readers, the Huns and their Attilla are part of the story. From Scandinavia to the Black Sea area, the Visigoths would make it to the South of France but the Huns attacked them there. And sometimes Germanic tribes found themselves on opposite sides and battled each other. But it was the Germanic tribes that finally sent the Huns back to their Asian base, according to this series.

Here are some positives in this series;

Archeologists from all over Europe are studying graves and grave goods and their work is profiled. 

A skull collection at the Hungarian Natural History Museum in Budapest is brought forward due to the talents of a forensic artist anthropologist who recreates the faces so we can see what people from the 6th century looked like, including Huns. (They practiced skull elongation.)

Gorgeous finds of jewelry, crowns, helmets, swords, buckles, bows and arrows prove that each culture was sophisticated enough to have high caliber artisans even if they thought of the other culture as "barbarian." 

The quality of the production is high. The costuming, war wounds, hair styles, authentic. 

However, I ran the English text on screen and there were some translations that were so wrong from the spelling of Attila to the spelling of the Tisza River and there was no mention of Magyars or other non-Germanic tribes associated with Hungarians.

So according to other sources the Hunnic empire stretched over Central Europe in the fifth century. The Huns and the Romans were enemies. The Huns were actually a number of tribal groups that did not include the Magyars. ... Direct descendants of Attila, Prince Almos and Prince Arpad became founders of Hungary generations later. King Istvan was a fifth generation descendent of Almos.

Only episode 4, which dwells on the Anglo Saxons mentions DNA. DNA is, to me, the most revealing story of migration and culture.

C 2021 Magyar American - BlogSpot

SANTA ANA HOSPITAL SCANS HUNGARIAN MUMMY MOM and BABY TO FIND OUT HOW THEY DIED

ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER - HUNGARIAN MUMMIES IN CAT SCAN  Great Photo!
There are genealogy records of the 350 people who were buried near the church where they were entombed, and theoretically anyway, it could be YOUR great great great great great grandma that they're scanning!

EXCERPTS from article by ANTONIE BOESSENKOOL 

Johannes Orlovits and a mother named Veronica Skripetz,are on loan from the Hungarian Natural History Museum, underwent CT scans at OC Global Medical Center in Santa Ana Monday. Ildiko Szikossy, left, from the Hungarian Natural History Museum places the baby after the scan. They are part of the Mummies of the World exhibit at Bowers Museum and date from the 1800s. Researchers are hoping to discover more about how these two people lived and died from the CT scan. ...

“We never really know what we’re going to find. We’re kind of unwrapping a surprise package,” Sutherland said. Skripetz appeared to have died from tuberculosis, but Sutherland said the CT findings may be able to confirm that.

In a CT, or computerized tomography, scan, a computer combines multiple X-ray images into cross-section views to create 3D images of a body. Along with other tools such as written records and standard X-rays, mummy experts use CT scans to learn about diseases, injuries, causes of death and lifestyles without having to cut open or damage mummified bodies.

“It’s also a surprise for us, what we can find out,” said Ildiko Szikossy, director of anthropology at the Hungarian Natural History Museum and an expert on the Vác mummies. “Using these scientific techniques, we can press them to tell us their life, their history.”

The bodies of Skripetz and her baby, with their dried, papery skin and old-fashioned clothes, made for a stark contrast with the modern machine at Orange County Global Medical Center. Szikossy and Katy Hess, associate registrar at the Bowers Museum, together carefully lifted Skripetz’s body onto the CT scan table. As the body moved slowly through the scanner’s aperture, cross-section images began to appear on the computer screen in an adjoining viewing room, as Dr. Maurice Yu, director of radiology for the hospital; Michelle McLaughlin, CT supervisor for the hospital; and Sutherland looked on.

What’s already known is that Skripetz had a life touched with death. Her son Johannes died at less than 1 year old, and he was the last of her three children, none of whom lived to age 3. After her husband, Michael Orlovits, a miller, died at 41 years old, Skripetz was a widow at 36. She remarried, but died shortly after, at age 38, in 1807 or ’08.

“The child mortality was very high ...” Szikossy said. “We can tell that yes, it’s very sad.”