Dear Visitors!

 

I am delighted to welcome you to the website of the Hungarian Cultural Centre in Istanbul, where we collected the memories and traces and memorials of Hungarians in Turkey. We designed this page in order to show all the architectural, religious and cultural memories of Hungarians located within the territory of the Republic of Turkey. The significance influence of the Ottoman-Hungarian, and later the Turkish-Hungarian relations on the language, culture and history of both nations is well known – and almost everyone knows that Imre Thököly, Francis II Rákóczi and Lajos Kossuth sought and found asylum in Turkish territory after failing in their respective fights for independence. On the other hand, little is known of what the Hungarians gave “in exchange” for this. Many soldiers seeking asylum after the 1848-49 revolution (e.g. Kmetty, Guyon, Tüköry, Bem, Kollmann, Dereckey etc.) joined the Ottoman army, fought, and some of them even gave their lives for the star-and-crescent flag. Ödön Széchenyi and his colleagues created the foundation of the modern firefighting in Istanbul and Aladár Kovács took part in the creation of the first ambulance centre of Istanbul, while Hungarian engineers played a serious role in developing Turkish architecture, water management and meteorology. We present these sometimes significant, sometimes small personal stories here, collected for you.

You can find the collection in a geographical order here: you will find the buildings, museums, memorials or cemeteries with Hungarian connection under the names of the cities. Entries include short descriptions, pictures, maps and external links.

The knowledge presented here is a result of many years’ work, in which a significant number of people helped us. Our project is mainly based on the book Hungarian Traces in Turkey (Magyar emlékek Törökországban) by Tamás K. Pintér and János Hóvári, which was published by Turkinfo Foundation in 2017, translated by Tarik Demirkan into Turkish; and we would also like to thank David Hendrix, Emre Saral, Andrea Gál, Bernadett Orosházi, Áron Sipos, István Tóth and Judit Ujszegi among others for contributing with pictures, information and translations.

We wish you a pleasant experience in browsing on our website!

Gábor Fodor,

Director

Hungarian Cultural Centre