Hungary and Iran.

from Eva S. Balogh at Hungarian Spectrum. 


"On November 16,  I happened upon an article in Magyar Nemzet that surprised me greatly. It announced the presence of Ali Ahani, deputy foreign minister of Iran, in Hungary. Magyar Nemzet learned about his visit from an Iranian source. MTI, the Hungarian news agency, reported the official visit of Ahani only the next day. It looked as if the Hungarian Foreign Ministry wasn’t too keen on advertising the Iranian diplomat’s presence."  The rest here.

Magyar Posta and Iran Post have released a joint stamp. The Hungarian issue uses the same designs as the Iranian stamps due to be released on 31 December 2010. 

Jazygians, a people of Alan origin, arrived in the Kingdom of Hungary accompanying the Turkic people, the Cumans, fleeing from the Mongols advancing in the early 13^th century, in 1239. The Jazygians who settled here from the start had their centre in present-day Jazygia, but ethnic groups of varying sizes also made their home in other parts of historic Hungary, for example, Jászfalu (Komárom county) and Udal (Bars county). Linguistic records suggest that the Jazygians belonged to the Indo-Iranian tribe of Indo-European peoples, and within that to the Iranians of the steppes. Their original name az/i acquired the initial j sound from Slav or Turkic Chuvash sources. The Jazygians are thus linguistically related to today’s Iranian people.

In the 19^th century contact between the two countries became frequent thanks to the work of great travellers and researchers. Alexander Csoma de Kőrös spent a couple of years in Teheran and mastered Persian on his way to India and Tibet. The life’s work of Arminius Vámbéry is more closely associated with Turkology, but in the early 1860s he also visited Persia. He wrote a highly enjoyable, sarcastic and humorous travelogue of his impressions, capturing Iran in a 19^th-century, romantic light. Among the Hungarian travellers to Iran, the shining star of Hungarian Oriental studies was the 20^th-century Aurel Stein. The scientist conducted excavations at several locations in Western Iran in the 1930s.