Timur Lenk and the Spirit of the Hungarians

🖋️ Sdkfz251 · 📅 December 7, 2025 · 🏷️ Legend, Lengeds of the silk road, Uzbekistan

The East is not our ancestral homeland.The East is the place we always end up returning to — even when we aren’t looking for it. Brother Julian wandering toward Magna Hungaria (a half-legendary medieval homeland somewhere beyond the Volga); Ármin Vámbéry limping through Central Asia disguised as a dervish; our prisoners of war lost in deserts they couldn’t even name; the tomb of Timur the Lame; a Hungarian flag mysteriously appearing on the table of the Organization of Turkic States. None of this is about glory. None of it is about romance. It is about a never-ending game we keep being dragged into — a game politely called:

“Find Waldo — somewhere in Central Asia.”

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Timur Lenk and the Spirit of the Hungarians

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Afrasiyab Museum (Samarkand)

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Prologue

Prologue – Go or Die

2026-03-14

Quick post

In progress. Check back later – this series is growing.

Legend

Timur Lenk and the Spirit of the Hungarians

2025-12-07

Experience

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Epilogue

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The Forgotten Direction

There’s a saying: “Always remember where you came from, or you’ll never find your way home.” Hungarian history, however, functions more like a badly calibrated compass. We’re not entirely sure where we started, so we’re not entirely sure where we’re heading. We came from the East, washed ashore in the West, and ever since we’ve drifted somewhere between the two — writing in Latin letters, walking with steppe-shadows behind us, and forever debating whether we are Finno-Ugric or Turkic. Or both. Or neither. Perhaps just people who’ve been searching for so long that stopping now would feel unnatural.

The “Eastern thread” is like a drawer that never fully closes. Not because it hides ancient secrets, but because no one ever managed to shut it properly. Throughout history, Hungarians have gone east for every possible reason: some willingly, some by force; some as missionaries, some as soldiers, others as scholars or prisoners of war. They weren’t looking for enlightenment or forgotten origins — they simply went because, for some reason, the road always pointed that way.

In the end, this whole thing is not a heroic quest for origins but a very Central European reflex: when we don’t know something, we’ll go and find out ourselves. It’s basically a never-ending “Find Waldo” game set on an Eastern trajectory — the kind where the map changes faster than you can fold it back into your pocket.

“Hungarian ancestral homeland

Julianus the Friar — the One Man We Actually Have Facts About

Julianus the Friar is one of the very few Hungarians about whom we can say with certainty: in the 13th century he travelled East, and he actually ran into Hungarians. If you like, he was the first Hungarian to successfully complete the historical board game known as “Find Waldo!” — and he genuinely found him. Not in a legend, not in hearsay, but properly written down, in Latin. “They speak Hungarian,” they told him — and he didn’t just believe it; he heard it with his own ears. This is the moment Hungarian history likes to bring out whenever a fixed point is needed: one man who went far and returned with Hungarian words from beyond the horizon.

Then came the Mongol Empire — the kind that smashed states, wiped out peoples, and moved entire tribes from one end of its world to the other. As expected, it stirred the map like soup, scattered everything everywhere, and made Waldo disappear again. From this chaos grew the next story: that the Hungarians who remained in the East were relocated somewhere around Samarkand. There’s no solid evidence for this, of course, but the Hungarian imagination doesn’t require data — only possibility. If something was true once, perhaps it could be true twice.

Because at this point no one was talking about sacred homelands, the steppe, or spiritual origins. It was simply a case of someone hearing Hungarian speech very far from home — and noting it down.

Julianus the Friar

Ármin Vámbéry — the Linguist-Ninja in Dervish Disguise

Ármin Vámbéry was an entirely different genre: a half-paralyzed leg, full determination, and a dervish robe in which he tried to blend in as if it were the most natural thing in the world. In the 19th century, Central Asia was a blank spot — not only on the map but in knowledge itself. And the emirates of the region made sure it stayed that way; they wanted neither Russian nor British boots on their sand. Yet Vámbéry set out anyway, a one-man academic commando. He wasn’t trying to prove anything — he simply hoped that, one day, he might overhear a suspiciously familiar word.

Legend has it that at one point he was so bored he began humming a Hungarian folk tune. The travelers around him noticed the unfamiliar melody. Vámbéry didn’t flinch; he just shrugged: “I’m merely humming the Qur’an. You don’t recognize it?” And he walked on. He knew that survival sometimes depends on a single misplaced note.

When he finally returned home, he published his travelogue, and suddenly Central Asia became the new intellectual magnet — in Hungary and in Europe alike. And the locals do not remember him as a traitor or a spy, but with respect: as the man who first brought news of them to the outside world, becoming — indirectly — one of the catalysts of the region’s modern transformation.

But he never found Waldo.

Ármin Vámbéry’s Memorial in Bukhara

TSAR TOURS (One-Way POW Program)

In the early 20th century, Hungarians once again set off toward the East — though this time not alone, and certainly not by choice. After the siege of Przemyśl, tens of thousands of soldiers of the Habsburg Monarchy were taken prisoner. Among the defenders were Székelys from Transylvania, Czech infantrymen, Ruthenian farm boys, Croatian lads from the Adriatic coast, Galician Jewish intellectuals, and even Bosnian Muslim soldiers praying toward Mecca on the frozen stones. When the Russians finally marched in, it was as if they had captured an entire empire — a living map where languages, flags, belief systems, and accents blended together.

Przemyśl didn’t simply fall — it came apart. In miniature, it played out what would happen to Europe a few years later.

Landscape After the Second Siege of Przemyśl (1915)

And by then, the entire crowd had effectively become property of the Tsar’s empire. The Russians decided that the soldiers of the Habsburg Monarchy needed to be taken very far from the front. Some were sent into the frost of Siberia; others to the sands of Inner Asia, where even water is more legend than substance. And so the trains began to roll — TSAR Tours, the original one-way prisoner-of-war program.

What they offered was simple:
“one-way ticket, questionable catering, no return.”
In Siberia you could freeze; in Uzbekistan you could dry out. The diaries don’t speak of ancient kinship or spiritual Eastern vibrations — they speak of lack of water, bad food, and the eternal truth that Russian cuisine doesn’t become your favorite even if it’s the only option for ten years.

There was no secret Hungarian village, no brotherhood of peoples, no romance — and not even Waldo. Just an empire that put you wherever there happened to be space. And if this sheds light on anything, it is this:

Not everyone searches for the road to the East. Sometimes you’re simply taken there.
And you stay — until someone, somewhere else, decides what happens next.

The Austro-Hungarian Prisoners of War Memorial in Tashkent (1920)

The Tomb of Timur the Lame — or Why You Shouldn’t Open Everything

The Russian Empire finally collapsed in 1917, and the Bolsheviks took power. They liked TSAR Tours so much that they kept the whole program — they simply repainted it red. The trains continued heading east, now carrying not only prisoners of war but Koreans, Cossacks, Volga Germans, and every kind of “unreliable element” one could imagine. For the empire, it didn’t matter who belonged where — the point was simply to move them far, far away.

And where there are prisoners, officers inevitably follow; and where officers settle in, sooner or later scholars appear as well. That’s how a certain Gerasimon ended up in Uzbekistan. Not to be confused with his modern namesake — this Gerasimon was still a scientist, not a Russian general. On June 19th, 1941, he decided that since he was already there, he might as well take a look inside the tomb of Timur the Lame.

The local elders warned him that opening it would unleash a war the likes of which the world had never seen. But curiosity pushed the scientist harder than caution ever could, and so the tomb was opened.

Gerasimov Lifts the Skull of Timur the Lame (June 19, 1941)

Three days later, Operation Barbarossa began. Things did not go particularly well for the Soviets. The locals simply said: “We warned you.” Whether the legend ever reached Stalin, no one knows. But one fact stands: in 1942, just before the great winter counter-offensive, Timur the Lame was reburied. Within a few months, TSAR Tours filled up again: the Hungarian 2nd Army, the Romanian 3rd and 4th Armies, the Italian 8th Army, and the German 6th Army all practically vanished from the map. By then the steppe was no longer a romantic past — it had become a mass grave.

And only one mythical element remained: that Hungarian fate is regularly swept eastward by history — but not because we are meant to find anything there. Simply because someone always decides to send us.

And if there is a moment when the question arises — can Waldo still be played in this landscape? — the answer is yes. Only here, the difficulty is not finding him. It’s wondering whether he’s still anywhere to be found at all.

The Mausoleum of Timur the Lame

The Soviet Union Collapses, the Steppe Speaks, and Waldo Calls Back

By the time the 1990s arrived, even as schoolchildren we sensed — from stray newspaper clippings and the final minutes of the evening news — that the world was rearranging itself. Maps were being redrawn, flags replaced flags, and the empire that had once felt “eternal” suddenly shattered into pieces. The Soviet Union ceased to exist, and Uzbekistan became an independent state — for the first time in history, at least partly in a way that wasn’t imposed by foreign conquerors.

The land of deportations, POW trains, and desert exile found a new political voice. The Organization of Turkic States emerged, and today Hungary not only observes from a distance but participates as an official observer — with a flag at the table. This is no longer a Turanist daydream or a soft-focus Eastern nostalgia. It is a diplomatic fact.

The Collapse of the Soviet Union

Meanwhile, economic ties began to appear as well. Hungarian companies brought energy (MOL), finance (OTP), pharmaceuticals (Richter), agriculture, and water-management expertise. The region was no longer a blank spot but an opportunity: a market, a partner, and strangely familiar — even if we had never set foot there.

And since you can take the nomad out of the steppe, but you can’t take the steppe out of the nomad, the question eventually arose: what if we actually went there?

At first we hesitated — because for a long time this land was not the place of choice but of coercion. But then… it was as if Waldo called to us. Not asking, “Can you find me?”
But rather: “Do you want to play?”

And we did — we wanted to play.

So after long planning, we set out.
But that is another story.

There is this game.!