On the Trail of Genghis Khan

by Tim Cope

  As deftly described by Jack Weatherford in his book Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, the initial destruction caused by Mongols during their conquests usually “yielded to an unprecedented rise in cultural communication, expanded trade, and improved civilization.” Although it is broadly true that the territories the Mongols conquered were incorporated into their empire and enjoyed the stability and relative prosperity that followed, Hungary could be considered an exception. Followed by the rapid withdrawal, the conquest must have appeared to be the kind of senseless murder and destruction for which Mongols (and nomads in general) have been largely remembered in Europe.

  Given the devastation wreaked on Hungary, it might be expected that someone like me, arriving in the spirit of the Mongols, could not expect a particularly warm reception. Yet in the dying light of the warm summer evening on the Hungarian-Ukrainian border, the atmosphere was anything but unwelcoming.

  Inside the veterinary control building that lay beyond immigration, János Lóska was excited. Within the tight coils of the Hungarian’s short blond hair, there seemed to exist the same spring-loaded energy of his bulging forearms and legs. János was a horse breeder, a former member of the Hungarian national eventing team, and currently the president of the Hungarian Equestrian Tourism Association. For months I had been corresponding with him by email, and he had pledged to do all he could to help get my horses across the border into his country. In the few weeks since I had said farewell to Mike in the Carpathians and dropped down to the Hungarian plains, János’s help had been instrumental in navigating the European Union’s tough quarantine regulations.

  Standing over the veterinarians as they inspected my animals and documents, János urged them on with a look of unwavering determination. When the last of the documents was stamped, he grabbed my sweaty arm with an iron grip and spoke to me in hushed English: “Nothing can stop us now! Nothing!”

  We celebrated with beer that János’s son brought to us, and I rode the horses to the nearby town of Tuzsér, where they were taken in by a family. Tigon and I climbed into János’s BMW and were rocketed away to his home. I clung to Tigon in the backseat, drawn toward sleep yet determined not to miss a single waking moment. At one stage the journey was broken by a fuel stop, during which I stumbled into the gas station convenience store and picked up a hot dog. The bright lights, sanitized walls and floor, and plastic-sealed “food on the go” were a startling novelty and a measure of how far I had come.

  In the morning the scale of János’s support became clear. He had already promised a public finale for my journey, and now spread out a map of Hungary to plot the route he had prearranged. I was to travel southwest across the great plain of Hungary, known as Hortobágy, then roughly along the meandering banks of the Tisza River to the center of the country before turning west to the Danube. “I have ridden every corner of this country by horse, and I can ensure that you will never have to ride on a road if you follow my directions,” he said proudly.

  The vision that János had for this last chapter of my journey was one of my caravan being escorted and hosted by Hungarian horsemen and -women along a network of tracks and trails, and where possible cross-country. He had friends and acquaintances ready to take me in and guide me through, and planned to ride with me whenever he could. He estimated it would take between four and six weeks to make it to the Danube.

  Although Hungary had been an eastern frontier for Catholicism since the eleventh century, and was indeed a sedentary society at the time of the Mongol invasion, it had for a much longer period of time been the western bulwark of steppe nomad culture. Forming the westernmost tip of the Eurasian steppe, its plains had, since antiquity, been roamed by nomads with their yurts, horses, sheep, and cattle in a fashion not dissimilar to those of the Mongolian plateau today. The Indo-Aryan Scythians were one of the first known nomads to reside in Hungary, and it is well known that in the fifth century the Huns, united under Attila, had used Hungary as their platform to invade the Roman Empire. Following them came the Avars, another steppe people who are believed to have introduced the stirrup (which had been developed in Asia) to Europe. Modern-day Hungarians are thought to be descended from the last known nomadic people from the east to migrate to the Hungarian plains, the Magyars.7 There is an ongoing dispute about the origins of the Magyars, whose language is more closely related to the Finno-Ugric group than the Turkic languages that predominate on the steppe. It is safe to say, however, that they came riding out of their homeland somewhere in the vicinity of modern Bashkiria—also known as Bashkortostan—near the southern Urals of Russia. Under their leader, Arpád, the Magyars officially founded the nation of Hungary in 896 and spent the best part of the next century raiding deep into Europe, defeating armies of Italy, France, and Germany.

  I had long read about the nomadic history of Hungary but hadn’t held out high hopes of finding Hungarians with whom my journey resonated. By the time the Mongols invaded, Magyars had not been nomadic for almost three hundred years. This reflected a unique feature of Hungary—on the fine line between temperate Europe and the Eurasian steppe, it had always been a kind of bridge between two worlds, characterized by a fusion of both sedentary and nomadic customs. In the long run, a settled way of life had come to dominate, and in the twenty-first century Hungary was firmly part of the European Union, gravitating—politically at least—to the West, and more renowned for its grand cultural capital, Budapest, than for its steppe heartland.

  Yet there was little doubt that János’s support for me came because I was honoring the heritage of his own ancestors by riding horses from Asia into Europe. With time I would learn that among many Hungarians, wounds from the Mongol invasion had long healed, and for them the Mongols, Huns, Scythians, and Magyars had all coalesced into a broad brotherhood of horseback, nomadic peoples.

  Emblematic of the significance that my journey held for János was that he didn’t hesitate to tell me where I should hold the ceremony for the end of my journey. “There is only one choice, if you really want to make it the Hungarian way. And that is Opusztaszer. There I will really be able to make you a hero!”

  The first of my hosts in Hungary was a man very familiar with Opusztaszer. I met Tamas Petrosko half a day’s ride from Tuzsér. Wearing traditional regalia, he rode toward me in a saddle draped with a full sheepskin, tail and all. In his sixties, he had slightly sunken shoulders and a hard, toughened frame rounded out by a belly.

  “You come the Magyar way! I also ride this route!” he said in a patchwork of English and Russian, leaning over from his horse and giving me a hug.

  In 1996 Tamas had been part of a small group of Hungarians who carried out a 4,200 km journey in honor of the great migration of his people. With a backup truck carrying supplies, they had ridden horses from Bashkiria in the southern Urals through Russia and Ukraine before crossing through the Carpathians onto the Hungarian plain. The end of their journey had been celebrated with a ceremony in Opusztaszer, which, according to Tamas, was the “spiritual center” of the country. It was in this nondescript town on the sandy steppe, just 90 km east of the Danube, that the Magyars’ leader, Arpád, had officially founded the modern nation.

  Tamas’s quest had by no means ended there. On return from his journey, he had been inspired to set up a tourist park in honor of his Hungarian ancestors. I would spend several days with him on a sweeping property that featured yurts, a Mongolian ovoo, and a shaman’s hut marked at the entrance by the skulls of a horse and a cow. Out in the field flocks of long-haired Hungarian sheep and a herd of horned Hungarian cattle grazed. It was Tamas’s dream to inspire young Hungarians to incorporate the spirit of their nomad ancestors into their identity—an aim that he fulfilled with summer camps where children came to ride and live as nomads might once have done.

  In the context of greater Hungarian society, Tamas may well have been considered an eccentric, but as I rode onward over the coming days and weeks, I came to think it would not be an inflation of the trut
h to suggest that he was part of a groundswell of Hungarians—albeit a minority—who were not merely conscious of their nomadic heritage but hungering for a connection to the life of their horse-borne ancestors.

  In Hungary, where there were no mountains or deserts and there was plentiful grass and water, my meetings with these people took over from the geographical challenges as the driving narrative of my journey. Joining me from Tamas’s farm, for instance, was István Vismeg, a burly high school physical education teacher with unkempt, shoulder-length black hair and a hint of the East in his eyes. In a wild ride through backstreets, along forest trails, and across fields, he took me to a monument near the town of Sárospatak that had recently been built on an ancient Magyar gravesite. It was a pyramid onto which was embellished a mosaic of the path of Hungarians from horseback warriors who migrated from the East to settled Christians.

  “Archaeologists discovered this important graveyard fifty years ago—they believe there was some kind of battle here when Arpád conquered the Carpathian Basin, but it was only two years ago that this site was rescued from farmers. Our governments have hidden and disrespected our history … they’ve protected the buildings of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, yet left the graves of our founding fathers to be plowed over,” he told me.

  The collapse of the Iron Curtain had provided freedom for Hungarians to reevaluate the Communist version of history, which had emphasized Hungary’s rise as a sophisticated European society and treated nomads with some hostility. Now, as the country shifted its allegiance to the West, there was a determination to rediscover and preserve the unique nomadic identity of Hungarians before the tide of European cultural and economic norms swallowed the country.

  From Sárospatak in Hungary’s northeast, István guided me through rolling countryside to the historic town of Szabolcs and handed me over to my next host, a short, rotund man named Geyser. A self-proclaimed shaman, Geyser greeted me with a ceremony complete with drums and chanting in the center of a thousand-year-old earthen fortress. I camped there and celebrated into the night with Geyser, István, and a saddle maker who specialized in Arpád-era saddles. After many glasses of the national drink, pálinka—a kind of schnapps—Geyser became even more animated. He argued a point with the saddle maker that the true Hungarian origins were to be found in the Huns, rather than the Magyars, and began beating his drum and chanting. “The Hun way! You have come the Hun way. We are Huns! One sky, one big blue sky, the Huns, the stars, the sky. Earth, water, sky.”

  Among Hungarian horsemen and -women there was a raft of conflicting opinions about which era of history embodied the most authentic Hungarian culture—not unlike the competing philosophies I’d witnessed in Kalmykia among those striving to revive a sense of culture and identity. Another character I met who was convinced of his Hunnic origins was Kassai Lajos. Kassai had resurrected the art of horseback archery and turned it into an international martial arts discipline. Through years of research he had developed bows and archery techniques reflecting various nomad eras. He had become somewhat of a cult figure, with thousands of followers and his own institutionalized training center, called The Valley. Watching him galloping and shooting off six arrows in just ten seconds, hitting the target every time, one could only imagine the intimidating sight of a group of Mongols or Magyars charging into Europe. Ironically, this horseback archery skill was one that Mongols had since lost. Among Kassai’s many ambitions was to travel there and reintroduce the art.

  When I rode out from Szabolcs and waved goodbye to Geyser, I was still only four days’ ride into my Hungarian journey. Ahead lay a further five weeks of encounters that are too numerous to recount here. Suffice it to say that the entourage—arranged by János—proved to include individuals ranging from wealthy businessmen to academics, stud farm owners, and simple farmers; though they often held opposing views, all had their own unique way of incorporating something of the steppe culture into their modern lives. Among these many people, one man in particular, Peter Kun, had a profound impact on me. My encounter with him was the kind of watershed moment I had not expected but nevertheless always hoped for.

  At the time I met with Peter, I had ridden seven long days from the Ukrainian border, at first as far west as Tizsadob in Hungary’s northeast, then rapidly south with János. On my second afternoon with János we rode out under the glare of the sun onto a vast golden plain. Squinting hard, I could make out the appearance of cattle and sheep inching across the horizon, cutting in and out of focus in the wobble of heat mirage.

  We had reached the Hortobágy—a vast plain of eastern Hungary considered the last great remnant of arid grasslands in the Carpathian Basin and home to the only remaining mounted herdsmen of Hungary. The Csikós, as they are known, are to this day predominantly graziers of cattle and sheep, renowned as skilled horsemen who, among many tricks, can make their horses lie down on command—a tactic the Mongol army was famed to have done in order to remain unseen.

  It was just as we idled up to a well and Tigon returned to his old trick of bathing in the drinking trough that Peter Kun came cantering in. Sitting straight-backed astride an Arab horse, his long hair neatly tied in a ponytail, the thirty-five-year-old cast his almond eyes at once to my horses, then to Tigon.

  “Your dog is tazi! And your horses are dzhabe!”

  I nodded in disbelief. Not a soul had recognized the very specific Kazakh breeds of my animals since I left their homeland more then eighteen months earlier.

  It was not a lucky guess. Claiming to be descended from the nomadic Cumans, who had fought the Mongols before fleeing to Hungary for refuge, Peter had had a fascination for everything nomadic since he was a child. As a university student he had excelled in ancient Turkic history, learned to speak Mongolian and Kazakh, and at the age of seventeen spent a year living in Mongolia. He had gone on to complete a doctorate comparing Hungarian and Mongolian horsemanship and had produced a popular documentary about the Kazakhs of remote western Mongolia.

  Peter had been offered a job in the Hungarian embassy in Ulaanbaatar but instead decided to follow what he called a “true Hungarian life.” He had bought up cattle, sheep, and horses and moved to a traditional Hungarian homestead on the Hortobágy. Peter now split his time between lecturing at a university and tending his herds. “In Mongolia and Kazakhstan I can go to feel something of how my ancestors once lived. At the university in the city I can teach about our Hungarian heritage, and here on the puszta”—the Hungarian term for the steppe—“I can really live in line with my origin,” he told. Leaning down out of the saddle, he plucked a piece of wormwood plant and brought it to his nose. “When I smell this wormwood, I feel like I am back out on the wild steppes of Kazakhstan and Mongolia … and that’s because this is still the big Eurasian steppe, the same one where you began.”

  Riding onward, Peter and I passed shepherds tending to sheep and cattle, and lonely old barns and ranches with reed-thatched roofs. There were also traditional wells that operated using a weighted lever to extract water, nodding against the sky like majestic old oil well pump jacks. In such open and flat terrain the sky was dominating, and beneath us the earth a mere crust. From time to time, fine clouds of choking dust and pulverized dung wafted through.

  With no paths, roads, or fences, we rode five abreast—János, his son Marti, Peter, myself, and Ogonyok, who had decided of his own volition to join us in the front. János, being his exuberant self, led us into a full gallop, and for a few fleeting moments it felt as if we were flying effortlessly over the land. Embodying the sentiment of all Hungarian horsemen I met, János veered over next to me and shouted: “The day there are fences in Hungary is the day that this is not my country. I will leave.”

  An hour or two brought us to Peter’s ranch. It was a huddle of horse and sheep yards, with a barn and house cast like an island in a pale brown sea of steppe. A Kazakh yurt stood out front. At first I spotted what appeared to be a pile of old matted sheepskins lying in the shade of its northern wall, but these p
resently rose and transformed into the figures of two indignant-looking dogs the size of small bears. They were a breed known as komondor, which is a corruption of the Hungarian term for “Cuman’s dog.” Their long white dreadlocked coat, the likes of which I had never seen, was so thick, it was rumored even wolves were unable to penetrate to the flesh.

  After János and his son had loaded their horses into a waiting trailer and departed, Peter brought me a piece of rope, slung it over my forearm, and began to tie a knot. I knew in advance what his special demonstration was going to be. On the very first night of my journey, now more than three years ago, a Mongolian herder, Damba, had spent an hour teaching a knot that he assured me I had to know. A kind of reverse bowline, it could be tied with lightning speed, always held fast, and no matter what force was applied, could be quickly and easily untied. It was an indispensable knot I had used for everything from tethering horses to tying improvised reins and fastening pack loads.

  During my first winter on the steppe I had begun to realize the cultural significance of the special knot. In Kazakhstan, herders had looked on with astonishment and asked where I had learned it; it was, after all, a Kazakh knot. In Kalmykia, more than a year later, I encountered the same reaction from a Kalmyk craftsman, who termed it a Kalmyk knot. Now, just as I predicted, Peter tied the very same knot and claimed it for his own people: “You know, we say that if you don’t know this knot, then you are not a horseman … In western Hungary, beyond the Danube and the great Eurasian steppe, no one knows this knot. We call it the Cumanian knot.”

  After a meal of mutton and a good serving of pálinka, I lay down to rest on a sheepskin in Peter’s yurt. Outside, the wind gently pushed against the felt walls. A horse somewhere cleared its nose, and a bleating sheep stirred. Through a narrow gap in the felt of the ceiling, glimmers of moonlight filtered down, illuminating a wolf skin, horsewhip, and bow that hung from the wall. Next to me, his head resting on an old stirrup, Tigon was fast asleep and in a dream, paws twitching.