Watching funeral processions in which pomp and pageantry were a key component was a frequent occurrence in the everyday life of residents of Budapest and other Hungarian cities between 1867 and 1914.Footnote 1 While their funerary paraphernalia and obvious displays of public mourning served the traditional religious function of memento mori for bystanders, with their spectacular character they also played an important role in enhancing the theatricality of the modern city.Footnote 2 The funerals of political leaders were different from the funerals of average people in that they attracted national attention to urban spaces. However, the historiography on nineteenth-century ceremonial funerals and reburials in Budapest has treated them as separate events focusing on their national significance without paying enough attention to the relationship to their specific urban context.Footnote 3 In other words, the connection between expressions of nationalism and patriotism and urban spaces which these events occasioned has often been left unexamined.
As the work of anthropologists András Zempléni and Anne-Marie Losonczy suggests, Hungarian nationalism is an explanatory category most useful when related to modern state- and nation-building efforts, while the concept of patriotism, intrinsically connected to the notion of a Hungarian homeland, is more appropriate for a discussion of the use of historical symbols. According to them, a differentiation between nationalism and patriotism – the latter being a concept which instead of being related to an imagined community composed of biological individuals as in the case of nationalism, is eminently spatial – is necessary in order to enable a ‘systematic study of the patriotic metaphors and rituals’ which came into being in the nineteenth century.Footnote 4 Their discussion of such important symbolic texts as Ferenc Kölcsey's Himnusz (the national Hungarian anthem written in 1823) and Mihály Vörösmarty's Szózat (Exhortation, 1836),Footnote 5 and the importance of funerals and reburials as symbolic rituals in the making of contemporary Hungarian patriotism,Footnote 6 is enlightening but fails to account for the role that the late nineteenth-century development and growth of Budapest and the Dualist political context played in the historical configuration of the latter. This article therefore highlights the importance of the Austro-Hungarian Dualist context and discusses the reburial and burial ceremonies of Hungarian leaders Count Lajos Batthyány, Ferenc Deák, Lajos Kossuth and Prince Ferenc Rákóczi II from the perspective of the relationship between nationalism, patriotism and urban spaces in the Hungarian half of Austria-Hungary.
This relationship evolved over time. Whereas earlier funeral ceremonies such as Batthyány's reburial in 1870 and Deák's funeral in 1876 still had a limited impact due to the fact that they took place in an urban space that had not yet acquired its would-be metropolitan features, the funeral of Kossuth (in 1894) and the reburial of Rákóczi (in 1906) turned into spectacular ceremonies, which with their long routes traversing the city's new boulevards aimed to connect symbolically modern Budapest to an ethnically defined Magyar nation and the Hungarian homeland. Along with the ethnic assimilation of non-Hungarian speakers,Footnote 7 the promotion of the use of the Hungarian language on stage, in public institutions and through schools,Footnote 8 and the changing of German and neutral street names into ones laden with national connotations,Footnote 9 ceremonial burials and reburials represented an important means through which Magyar nation builders and patriots tried to nationalize the city and connect it to the homeland. While these funerals allowed members of the nation to come together symbolically in the capital and connected mourners to the homeland, it was also through their organizers’ showcasing of urban modernity – as this article shows – that the nation was rooted in the city.
I will begin by drawing a broader comparative picture that looks at the wider connections between ethnic nationalism in the Austrian monarchy as a whole, and post-1867 political developments in Hungary. Then, I will discuss the specific circumstances and the historical context of each funeral analysed in this article. In the final section, I will discuss the nature of the connections these ceremonial funerary rituals established between the nation, the homeland and modern Budapest.
Ethnic nationalism and Hungarian nation building within the Austro-Hungarian context
The role of historical commemorations and the cult of national heroes in the making of modern nations has been, in the past few decades, the subject of a bourgeoning literature.Footnote 10 In the case of ethnic groups in central, eastern and south-eastern Europe living in nineteenth-century multinational states (namely the Austrian, Russian and Ottoman empires), the process of nation building required the symbolic takeover of provincial capitals and the infusion of their public places with national symbols. Unlike Britain and France, where London and Paris were already established state capitals which fulfilled the role of centres of national life, ethnic groups in the above-mentioned empires turned the takeover of a provincial centre and its transformation into a symbolic national capital into one of their most important goals for the future.Footnote 11
The importance of this project was obvious, for instance, in the case of Poles, Czechs and Hungarians living in the Habsburg empire and, after 1867, its successor state, Austria-Hungary.Footnote 12 The reburial of Adam Mickiewicz in Cracow on 4 July 1890 was, according to historian Patrice Dabrowski, ‘the public event of the decade, if not of the century: Poles arrived in record numbers to witness the procession and [the poet's] entombment in the crypt of the Wawel Cathedral. No larger manifestation of national unity had taken place since the January insurrection of 1863.’Footnote 13 The funeral was an excellent occasion for Polish patriots to take over symbolically the churches, streets, squares, railway station and other public spaces of Cracow and make people forget for a day that the city was not a de facto national capital but only the second biggest city of Galicia, a remote province of the Austrian half of Austria-Hungary.
Czechs made attempts to nationalize Prague's public spaces on several occasions. The burials of Karel Havliček (1856), Božena Němcová (1862), František Palacký (1876) and František Rieger (1903) were cleverly exploited by Czech patriots for propaganda purposes. According to historian H.L. Agnew, Havliček's funeral ‘brought together many of the Czech figures of 1848 in one of the first manifestations of the Czech movement under [Habsburg] neoabsolutism’.Footnote 14 Six years later, Božena Němcová's funeral was another occasion for displays of Czech national solidarity in Prague.Footnote 15 Although both Palacký's and Rieger's funerals turned into impressive celebrations and spatial takeovers of Prague's public spaces, it was Havliček's tomb in the Prague Cemetery which became the symbolic focus of much anti-German and anti-Habsburg feeling. Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, as Czech historian Jan Havránek points out, Havliček's ‘Prague grave was visited by nationalist demonstrators and the song “Spi Havlíčku v svém hrobečku, Čech se Němce nebojí (Sleep Havliček quietly in your grave, the Czech is not afraid of the German)” [became] very popular’.Footnote 16 As these examples illustrate, the arsenal of Czech nationalists stretched from the symbolic takeover of urban squares and avenues on the occasion of prominent funerals to the turning of tombstones into markers of the nation in urban cemeteries into markers of the nation in urban cemeteries.
During this same period, Hungarian nation builders also vied to turn Budapest into a national capital, and, similar to their Czech and Polish counterparts, used the funerals of important political and literary figures and their burial in the city as important vehicles to achieve this goal. In contrast to Cracow or Prague, however, the meaning of national funerals and reburials in Budapest gained an added and more complex dimension due to the fact that after 1867 Hungary emerged as a ‘legally equal’ partner of Austria within the Dual Monarchy, enjoying complete autonomy in its domestic affairs.Footnote 17 It is this particular domestic freedom that Hungary and Budapest (as its capital city) benefited from during the years of Austro-Hungarian Dualism, which makes an examination of the connections between nationalism and funerals in the Hungarian metropolitan context important. Because of Hungary's particular situation within the monarchy as a whole, and the quick assimilation of Germans and Jews, conflicts over the takeover of public spaces were caused less by intra-urban ethnic conflict, as was the case in many other Habsburg cities (Prague, Cracow, Lemberg/L'viv and Trieste come easily to mind here), as much as by political disagreements between supporters of the Austro-Hungarian Compromise and the political forces that desired to create a fully independent Hungary.
The signing of the Austro-Hungarian Compromise between Ferenc Deák and Count Ferdinand Friedrich Beust in 1867 (and recognized by Emperor Francis Joseph through his decision to become crowned as king of Hungary) created a new situation within the Habsburg empire. Two decades after the Hungarians’ short-lived 1848–49 war of independence against Vienna, the empire re-emerged as a federal state composed of two separate geographical and administrative entities identified in the parlance of the times as Cisleithania (a legal euphemism which stood for Austria) and the kingdom of Hungary (sometimes referred to as Transleithania).Footnote 18 As a result of the Compromise, a separate Hungarian government also came into existence in Buda-Pest, which, readers should note, was not a united city until 1873.
From a domestic political perspective, however, the Dualist agreement led to a split between the 67ers, led by Deák, who set up a separate Hungarian government in Budapest that, in exchange for complete autonomy in internal matters, supported the common imperial and royal structures and was loyal to the emperor/king, and the 48ers, later also known as the Independence or 48 party, who, although represented in the Hungarian parliament, were opposed to the Compromise and strove to distance themselves from it. Inspired by the pronouncements of Lajos Kossuth – the former governor of Hungary who had been living in exile since the Hungarian Revolution's defeat – about the negative consequences of the Compromise,Footnote 19 members of the Independence party berated Deák and his supporters for giving up Hungarian sovereignty.Footnote 20 While accepted by a majority of Hungarian voters,Footnote 21 the Compromise also created room for the independence-minded opposition to criticize Deák and his government from a nationalist standpoint. It was this context that shaped the meaning of the first important reburial that took place in Buda-Pest after 1867: that of Count Lajos Batthyány, the prime minister of the first responsible Hungarian government appointed in the turmoil of the 1848 events,Footnote 22 and who, in the aftermath of the revolution's defeat, was executed by firing squad on 6 October 1849.Footnote 23
Batthyány's reburial: the city as actor and stage
The call for Batthyány's reburial was made soon after the Compromise.Footnote 24 His body was already buried in the city, in a vault of the Franciscan church in Pest, where he was secretly laid to rest soon after his execution. His reburial, however, offended the feelings of Emperor/King Francis Joseph and the Austrian government in Vienna. Therefore, Batthyány could not be given a state reburial. Instead, it was the city of Pest that stepped in and offered to organize the funeral ceremony.Footnote 25
While the Hungarian government's hands were tied by its oath of loyalty to Francis Joseph and by the legal bounds of the Austro-Hungarian Compromise, the municipality of Pest, as a domestic legal entity, enjoyed a much greater autonomy in this respect. Hungarians opposed to the Compromise were eager to celebrate Batthyány as a symbol of Hungary's martyrdom in its unsuccessful struggles in 1848–49 for independence from Vienna. The executive council of the countrywide Honvéd Association (Országos Honvédegylet) of the numerous 1848 revolutionary war veterans’ associations which were established in Hungary throughout the 1860s convened its first national convention in Pest in 1868. Pál Királyi, one of the convention's organizers and a member of both the Hungarian parliament and the municipal council of Pest, was most active in urging the organization of Batthyány's public reburial.Footnote 26 Other vocal supporters of the ceremony were Imre Ivánka, an effective recruiter of soldiers for the ad hoc created Hungarian army (honvéd sereg) in Transdanubia in the spring of 1848 and one of Batthyány's right hands during the 1848 events, and the mayor general of Pest, Alajos Gamperl.
Since Batthyány had not been pardoned by Francis Joseph for his anti-Habsburg deeds, the municipality of Pest had to find a reason different from a celebratory and commemorative one for the exhumation and reburial of his body. The reason city officials offered was, therefore, according to one historian, ‘an obvious subterfuge’.Footnote 27 Invoking sanitary risks, a municipal decree issued in early 1870 forbade further burials in the vaults of Pest's churches; referring to this decree later that year, and after receiving the agreement of the deceased's family, the municipality ordered the removal of Batthyány's remains from the Franciscan church and their reburial in the Kerepesi Cemetery, located then still outside the city limits.Footnote 28
The exhumation of Batthyány's remains took place on 7 June 1870, in the presence of Királyi and other city officials. They transferred the deceased's remains into a bronze coffin, which was displayed for public viewing throughout the next day. A Catholic service took place on the morning of 9 June. In addition to the organizers, the service was attended by Batthyány's widow, his children and members of his extended family, MPs, other officials, delegates sent by several towns and civil associations as well as by members of the paying public. Although members of the government also attended the ceremony, they did it as private persons and not in their official capacity. The final oration was given by Czirjék Piry, the head of the church's Franciscan congregation. ‘In a patriotic spirit’, Piry recalled the nefarious circumstances that impeded the proper burial of Batthyány's remains and talked about the deceased in words that were – according to one eyewitness – an expression of ‘national piety’, honouring thus the memory of the martyr.Footnote 29
In the afternoon, the coffin holding Batthyány's body was taken from the church to its final resting place as part of a funeral ceremony that drew a crowd of 100,000 mourners. Contemporary reports estimated that out of this number no less than 30,000 people travelled to Pest to attend the event. Members of the municipal councils of Pest and Buda took Batthyány's remains to a hearse pulled by six horses stationed in front of the church. The funeral procession was opened by a municipal sergeant and four hussars. They were followed by almost 2,500 representatives of Pest's guilds – each arranged in rows of four and carrying black mourning flags. Next in the procession marched 4,100 members of Pest's various philanthropic and funerary associations and 1,200 representatives of the firemen, students, employees of the railway company and the Pest and Buda trade associations. A group of 16 Pest burghers wearing Magyar dress and mounted on horses covered in black funeral paraphernalia followed next. They carried three flags displaying [in turn] the heraldic symbols of the country, the city of Pest and the Battyány family. A large number of war veterans led by Ivánka and a veteran hussars’ captain were next in the procession. They carried an 1848 Hungarian flag draped in black veils. Representatives of the counties carrying their county flags followed them. The middle part of the procession was formed by members of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, the Kisfaludy Association of Writers, the university, members of both houses of the Hungarian parliament, members of the Hungarian government including Ferenc Deák, other important public figures, members of the aristocracy and the high clergy, and the municipality of Pest led by the mayor general.
It was only after this procession, made up of almost 10,000 people, passed that Batthyány's hearse came into view. The hearse was surrounded by 24 Pest burghers with sabres drawn, followed by an additional 100 burghers carrying lit torches. Members of the Batthyány family were sitting in six carriages – all evenly decorated and pulled by two horses – which followed the hearse and the Pest burghers. After them there also marched a large group of Pest workers who had their red flags covered with black veils. They were followed by a group of municipal hussars, marching in pairs, and three music bands comprised of over 100 musicians, who concluded the procession.
It took over one hour for this large procession to pass the tens of thousands of spectators lined along the Kecskeméti, Múzeum and Kerepesi Avenues. Along the route of the procession, stores were closed and buildings were covered with black flags. Here and there, primitive stands had been erected by those on the sidewalks to allow for a better view. Those who wanted to get an even better sight of the procession were let in for a small fee by apartment owners to watch the funeral procession from the windows of their flats, while some even made it to the rooftops of these buildings.
Once the procession arrived at the cemetery, Batthyány's coffin was taken from the hearse and lowered in a provisional grave, where Zsigmond Barna, the chief public notary of Pest, gave the final farewell in a short speech.Footnote 30 By having Barna give the final oration over Batthyány's body, the municipality emphasized once again that the latter was buried by the city of Pest and not by the government. The whole event brought Pest to the fore, the prominent presence of city officials and civic associations at the funeral highlighting the fact that Hungarian patriotism and piety were cherished and nurtured by them.
In terms of its scale and symbolism, Batthyány's reburial was reminiscent for many of Francis Joseph's coronation as king of Hungary in BudaFootnote 31 – organized by the makers of the Austro-Hungarian Compromise just three years before. The dates were also symbolic: Francis Joseph's coronation took place in Buda on 8 June 1867, while, as we have seen, Bathyány's coffin was presented for public visitation in Pest on 8 June 1870. Mourners sympathetic to the ideals of 1848 could therefore present their homage to Batthyány – the martyr – on the same day when Francis Joseph – the murderer – was crowned, to join Batthyány and the ‘Hungarian nation’ on their way to the cemetery the day after.
Deák's burial: a Dualist event
While in Batthyány's case it was enemies of the Dualist agreement and the municipality of Pest who were actively involved in the organization of his reburial, the situation was different in the case of Ferenc Deák, the architect of the 1867 Austro-Hungarian Compromise, who – when he died on 28 January 1876 – was mourned by both Vienna and Budapest. Before being taken to the cemetery, Deák's body was laid in state for three days in the Palace of the Academy, near Széchenyi's Chain Bridge, which since 1848 had connected Pest with Buda. It was there that Queen (Empress) Elizabeth of Austria-Hungary paid homage to him in person.Footnote 32 As historian Alice Freifeld writes, ‘in memorializing Deák, . . . Queen Elizabeth . . . melded the national grief into an identification with Dualism’.Footnote 33 The involvement of the imperial couple in Deák's funeral ceremony was also made obvious through the separate wreaths sent by Emperor/King Francis Joseph and Empress/Queen Elizabeth, which were publicly displayed in the Palace of the Academy and, respectively, the windows of a nearby flower shop. Although in an attempt at patriotic mythmaking newspaper reports celebrated Deák as the ‘Father of the Homeland’ (Haza Atya), the imperial presence at the funeral and the commemorative meeting held in the Viennese parliament made it hard to forget that he was also the principal architect of the Austro-Hungarian Compromise. This ambivalence was also reflected in competing claims, which, while referring to Deák as the ‘Dead of the Nation’ (A Nemzet Hallotja), concomitantly depicted his death as a loss suffered by the dynasty, the country and the human race at large.Footnote 34 In the spirit of the last, many obituaries emphasized not just Deák's national merits but also his humanity.Footnote 35As one editorial summed it up:
[Deák's] memory is a big legacy, which is shared by millions, and a part of it is claimed by foreigners as well, since such a prominent figure cannot belong only to the lucky homeland in which he was born and to which he devoted himself, but belongs to the whole of humanity, whose public fame he enhanced. Like Cincinnatus who belongs not only to the Romans, . . . but to the whole world; and like the memory of Washington who is not treasured by free America alone, but belongs to us as well; the public stature of Ferenc Deák is such a world legacy that we need to share it with all the other people [in the world].Footnote 36
In spite of a cold, overcast and foggy day in early February, Deák's stately funeral – financed by the Hungarian parliament – attracted a similarly large crowd as Batthyány's reburial did six years before. Benefiting from the Hungarian State Railways’ reduced fare specially announced for the day of the funeral,Footnote 37 tens of thousands of provincials from all corners of Hungary, many foreigners and a large Viennese delegation passed through Pest's main railway station, flocking to the city centre. Deák's coffin was taken from the Palace of the Academy to the Kerepesi Cemetery. The funeral cortege followed a pre-established itinerary along Pest's main thoroughfares. Unified since 1873 with Buda – its mostly German-speaking urban counterpart on the other side of the Danube – under a common administrative framework as Budapest, the Hungarian capital, already showed the sign of notable change as the government's plan to turn it into a modern metropolis was implemented. As on the occasion of Batthyány's reburial in 1870, the capital's sidewalks were occupied by countless onlookers held back from getting in the way of the funeral procession by rows of soldiers. The gas streetlamps – lit because of the fog – were covered with black flags, and most commercial activity stopped for the duration of the ceremony. Balconies of the monumental buildings overlooking the funeral procession's itinerary had been covered with crepe; from them, black rugs hung down with large white crosses and Deák's portraits pinned on them. Some of the stores that were kept open were also covered with black drapes.Footnote 38
After a religious service held in the Palace of the Academy, the funeral procession took off with a motley crew of delegations from all over Hungary, including miners and sailors, and three music bands in the lead. High-ranked members of the military, several archdukes and representatives of the municipal council marched before Deák's hearse, which was pulled by six black horses. Students from both Budapest and Vienna surrounded the hearse with their lit torches. The long ribbons of the funerary wreaths hanging from the hearse were held by eight members of the Hungarian parliament. They were followed by family members, Hungarian ministers, members of the Hungarian parliament and the Austrian Reichsrat and foreign consuls. Another music band and 10 mounted dragoons concluded the procession.Footnote 39
The procession was watched by thousands and thousands of people who stood on improvised scaffoldings erected along the sidewalks. Some even brought ladders with them, which they climbed to gain a better view. There were also spectators on the unfinished buildings lining the procession's itinerary, as well as on roofs, at windows and on balconies. Many of them used the streetlamps, park fences and the iron cages protecting the saplings planted along some of Pest's brand-new boulevards as impromptu climbing devices.Footnote 40
It took one and a half hours for the funeral procession to reach the cemetery. While the crowd could freely watch the procession on its way to the cemetery, only paying spectators were allowed inside. There, Deák's coffin was placed in a recently erected mortuary chapel, next to Batthyány's mausoleum, completed in 1874, and the final religious ceremony attended by the family and many state and religious officials then took place. After that, the doors of the chapel were sealed and those who were allowed into the cemetery quickly dispersed.Footnote 41
Many of Deák's supporters later described his funeral ceremony as not having been grandiose enough. They wanted to make up for the simplicity and starkness of his funeral by erecting a mausoleum and a statue to him. The national opposition, however, was critical of both projects. In response, Prime Minister Kálmán Tisza, the leader of the United Liberal party which had succeeded the Deák party in its role as defender of the Dualist agreement just the year before, ‘vociferously defended the Compromise and the wisdom of Deák as its architect’.Footnote 42
In spite of the erection of the Batthyány mausoleum in 1874 and plans for the erection of such future monuments for Deák, the links between post-Compromise nationalism and the public spaces of a quickly modernizing Budapest were still not very strong during the 1870s. It was not national but religious symbols such as black flags and mourning crepe which visually dominated the streets and boulevards during Deák's funeral. Depictions of the funeral in the press also emphasized the variety and heterogeneity of the participants: members of the imperial household, ministers, foreign dignitaries, the heads of all of Hungary's religious denominations, members of the Polish, Croatian and Viennese delegations, sailors from as far away as Fiume and Trieste, as well as a mix of Budapest burghers and peasants from the villages located in the immediate vicinity of the capital.Footnote 43 In spite of the symbolic cypress leaf sent from his emigration in Turin by Kossuth, overall, the opposition kept a low profile at Deák's funeral. However, the ceremony's ability to draw large crowds who could be impressed by the occasion was not lost on them. Therefore, 18 years later, at the funeral of Lajos Kossuth, the uncontested leader – in absentia – of the national opposition, the infusion of urban space with national and patriotic symbols would turn into an important goal for the domestic leadership of the Hungarian Independence party.
Kossuth's burial ceremony in Budapest: the funeral as token of national opposition
As in the case of Batthyány's reburial in 1870, Kossuth's death in Turin, Italy, on 20 March 1894, created the opportunity for the organization of another major funeral reviving the memory of the 1848 revolution in Budapest. However, the return of Kossuth's remains to Hungary was opposed by Emperor/King Francis Joseph. An imperial-royal decree issued in 1889, in anticipation of Kossuth's death, forbade the official participation of the Hungarian government at the burial. Francis Joseph's view on the matter did not change by the time Kossuth died five years later. According to the former, Kossuth was a rebel who could not be pardoned. Pressured by the Hungarian government (which was in turn pressured by the national opposition), the emperor/king nonetheless accepted the repatriation of Kossuth's body on the condition that the funeral ceremony be kept private and be financed by non-governmental sources. Under these circumstances, the municipality of Budapest again stepped in and offered to organize the funeral.Footnote 44 Kossuth's body was therefore transported from Turin to Budapest and buried on 1 April 1894, in the Kerepesi Cemetery in a provisional tomb located between the mausolea of Batthyány and Deák.Footnote 45
The burial, however, was preceded by riots, which took place in Budapest weeks before the arrival of Kossuth's body. Reacting to the government's ban on state institutions’ involvement in the funeral, on 23 March 1894, groups of nationalist students and supporters of the Hungarian Independence party stormed the buildings of the National Theatre and Opera in order to force their administrators to close both the institutions and display black flags as signs of mourning. Students also broke the windows of the Somossy Orpheum and forced the owners of houses that were not decorated for the funeral to display such signs.Footnote 46 Mounted units of the Budapest police loyal to the government charged the unruly crowd and killed one bystander; the street disturbances stopped only when members of the Independence party, the municipality and Kossuth's family publicly appealed to the city's inhabitants to refrain from violence since that could lead to the issuance of an imperial decree prohibiting Kossuth's body from reaching Budapest altogether.Footnote 47 Torn between its loyalty to the emperor/king and a desire to appease the opposition, the Hungarian government led by Prime Minister Sándor Wekerle was contradictory and hesitant. Out of loyalty to the emperor/king, the Hungarian government forbade the official participation of its ministers and other state officials at the funeral, but it did not discourage their involvement as private persons.Footnote 48
Kossuth's body reached Budapest on 30 March 1894, after a funeral ceremony which just days before had already gathered 300,000 onlookers in the streets of Turin. After making it to Budapest, Kossuth's coffin was taken from the western railway station to the National Museum, where it lay in state for two days. It was from there that on 1 April the funeral procession made its way to the Kerepesi Cemetery. According to Arthur May, a historian of the Habsburg monarchy, no less than half a million people watched Kossuth's funeral ceremony.Footnote 49 In contrast to Deák's funeral procession, which took the shortest route to the cemetery, the itinerary of Kossuth's was longer. Kossuth's funeral hearse was preceded by 18 carriages carrying hundreds of funerary wreaths from his family, supporters, various counties and municipalities and a range of patriotic and veteran associations from all over Hungary, the procession making its way through the assembled crowd along a long loop that included Budapest's main new thoroughfares and boulevards. As novelist Gyula Krúdy, a witness of the funeral, recalled, Kossuth's hearse took a ‘detour through half of the city’ before arriving at the cemetery.Footnote 50 As in the case of Deák's funeral 18 years earlier, onlookers dressed in black occupied the sidewalks, the balconies and windows of the buildings in front of which the funeral procession passed. Most of the buildings, streetlamps and the Greek columns of the National Museum were also covered in black crepe.
However, what made Kossuth's funeral distinct from Deák's was the different use of the religious symbols of mourning. The black dress of the participants in the funeral ceremony and the black draperies that covered the city not only signified the recent loss of Kossuth but were used as potent visual symbols to mourn the failure of the revolution to create an independent Hungary. In other words, the colour black was read religiously as well as nationally in this case. Similarly, the singing of Kölcsey's Himnusz and Vörösmarty's Szózat, the national anthems used by members of the Independence party,Footnote 51 and the participation of over 3,000 mourning women and a large group of 48er veterans in the funeral cortege symbolically connected turn-of-the-century Budapest to the failed revolution of 1848–49.Footnote 52
Kossuth's burial in Budapest in 1894 also played an important role in the resurgence of a Kossuth cult with a deep impact on the shaping of public urban spaces. After 1894, Hungarian ‘officials, councils, municipalities and institutions’ eagerly competed with each other ‘to name streets and squares or to memorialize his memory in public reliefs and sculptures’. It was (as historian András Gerő emphasizes) the municipality of Budapest that started this competition by renaming Hatvani Street as Kossuth Street in the days preceding Kossuth's funeral.Footnote 53
Moreover, Kossuth's burial in Budapest and not his home town of Monok was used by members and supporters of the Independence party to strengthen the symbolic links between the national cause and a fast-developing urban environment. Although modern Budapest came into being as a result of the work of the Board of Public Works, a government organization, established shortly after the Austro-Hungarian Compromise, funerary speeches in 1894 established a different lineage. According to writer Mór Jókai, who gave the final funeral oration over Kossuth's coffin in the National Museum, Budapest of 1894 could proudly claim that it became what Kossuth had planned it would become in 1848.Footnote 54 Similarly, in a speech addressed to the Budapest Municipal Council a week before the transportation of Kossuth's body to Budapest, Vice-Mayor Károly Gerlóczy emphasized that the capital could honour Kossuth's memory by staying true to his saying that ‘Budapest is not only the centre of the country, but it is and will continue to act as the loyal guardian and nurse of the national spirit and tradition.’Footnote 55
In contrast to Deák's funeral, at which orators focused on the future by extolling the opportunities opened up for Hungary and Budapest by the conclusion of the Austro-Hungarian Compromise, Kossuth's burial allowed members of the government, the parliamentary opposition and other supporters of Hungarian independence to draw a powerful connection between the present and the past. It was this historicism harnessed to the service of the national cause that was taken to new rhetorical and ceremonial heights 12 years later when Budapest served again as an important stage in the reburial ceremonies of Prince Ferenc Rákóczi II.
Rákóczi's reburial festivities in Budapest: the funeral as national(ist) spectacle
The leader of the unsuccessful Struggle for Freedom (Szabadságharc) waged between 1703 and 1711 by troops recruited from north-eastern Hungary and Transylvania against the Habsburgs, Rákóczi was branded a rebel by the imperial authorities. At the end of the war, unlike many of his aristocratic supporters who laid down their arms in exchange for the clemency of the emperor (who pardoned them and allowed them to keep their estates), Rákóczi and a group of his most committed followers fled Hungary looking for refuge abroad. A law adopted under pressure from Vienna by the Hungarian Diet in 1715 declared all refugees outlaws and legalized the confiscation of their properties. Rákóczi, Miklós Bercsényi, Count Antal Esterházy, Miklós Sibrik and several other émigré landowners were thus barred from returning to Hungary. After a period of peregrination in Poland, France and the Ottoman empire, Rákóczi passed away in April 1735 in Rodostó (today's Tekirdag, Turkey)Footnote 56 as a forlorn exile.
After the conclusion of the Austro-Hungarian Compromise in 1867, the sensitive issue of the repatriation of his remains resurfaced in Hungarian politics. In 1873 and 1874, more than 50 Hungarian counties and municipal authorities sent petitions to the Hungarian parliament requesting the return of Rákóczi's remains to the homeland. However, the response of successive Hungarian prime ministers committed to Dualism was evasive and hesitant. From the mid-1870s to the early 1900s, the issue was periodically raised by members of the Independence party who turned it into a matter of debate in the Hungarian parliament. Their attempt to bring Rákóczi's remains back home faltered every time, as the ruling Liberal party (the heirs of Deák) declined to take a decisive step on this matter. During the 1890s, however, supporters of the Independence party intensified their pressure on the government. Kossuth's 1894 funeral in Budapest served as a spark for fiery exchanges between members of the ruling party and the opposition. The latter wanted to connect the repatriation of Rákóczi's remains with the festivities of the Hungarian millennium, scheduled to take place in 1896 and celebrating 1,000 years of Hungarian presence in the Carpathian basin. As the mayor of Kassa (today Košice, Slovakia) wrote in the name of his municipality to the chamber of deputies of the Hungarian parliament as early as on 29 May 1894, Rákóczy's remains should be returned on the occasion of the millennium to Hungary and buried in the Kassa cathedral to turn it into a centre of pilgrimage that would attract the ‘sons of the nation, to learn the love of the homeland’.Footnote 57
However, the leading members of the Independence party could not agree on where to bury Rákóczi's remains. For a while, they considered burial in a National Pantheon, planned to be erected on the slopes of the Gellért Hill in Budapest. This was considered a better way of turning Rákóczi's tomb into a centre for national pilgrimage than laying his remains to rest in the Kassa cathedral. The Kassa MP, however, argued that in order to teach patriotism and nationalize the masses it was important – in the name of the decentralization of the work of nation building – to establish not just one, but ‘several Meccas’ serving as destinations for ‘national pilgrimages’.Footnote 58
Once the millennium passed without seeing the return of Rákóczi's remains, and the plan of erecting a National Pantheon on the Gellért Hill did not materialize,Footnote 59 the supporters of Kassa as the final resting place for Rákóczi gained the upper hand. By the early twentieth century, the question was settled in favour of this city in north-eastern Hungary. What was not settled, however, was the issue of repatriation itself. In 1903, the municipality of Kassa organized a series of festivities to commemorate the bicentennial of the outbreak of the Hungarian War of Freedom. Several members of the ruling Liberal party attended the events but went there with empty hands. Therefore, supporters of the Independence party organized a large popular assembly in the autumn of 1903 on the Vérmező (the former place of public executions, facing the Castle Hill in Buda), clamouring again for the nullification of the 1715 law which proscribed Rákóczi and the return home of his remains.
The buildup of anti-Habsburg pressure at popular, municipal, county and parliamentary levels finally prompted Emperor/King Francis Joseph to give in and sign, in March 1904, a decree nullifying the content of the law adopted in 1715 and allowing for the repatriation of the remains of Rákóczi and a group of his followers to Hungary and their reburial at state expense. From that moment on, the liberal government led by István Tisza took an active part in diplomatically facilitating the return of the remains. However, Tisza was soon swept out of office by a coalition made up of members of the Independence party and various other smaller nationalist parties from the ranks of the parliamentary opposition, an event which caused a major constitutional crisis in the Hungarian half of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. Francis Joseph did not recognize the legality of the elections and introduced a state of emergency in Hungary. The crisis was solved only in 1906 when the same coalition of opposition parties was reinstated in power by him on the condition that it renounce its demand of creating a separate Hungarian army and recognize the legality of the Compromise.
It was in the aftermath of this political crisis that the repatriation of Rákóczi, Bercsényi, Esterházy, as well as several members of Rákóczi's family and many other lower-ranked members of his entourage, took place in late October 1906. Members of the opposition made up for their defeat by organizing a spectacular pageant on the occasion of the return of these remains to Hungary and their passing through Budapest.Footnote 60
After his death in 1735 in Rodostó, Rákóczi's remains had been buried in a French Lazarist monastery in Istanbul. In 1889, his tomb was opened and his remains were unofficially identified by two Independence party politicians. The result of their undertaking was kept secret for a while, to be revealed to the public in serialized articles published in the historical journal Századok (Centuries) by Independence party MP Kálmán Thaly, one of the organizers of the expedition.Footnote 61 Therefore, when almost two decades later, the government gained permission for the organization of Rákóczi's repatriation, this same MP was chosen to lead a larger governmental delegation charged with the exhumation and ceremonial escort of the remains back to Hungary. After completing a long journey by sea and land from Istanbul to the Hungarian border, the remains reached Budapest's western railway station on 26 October 1906, where, in contrast to the situation 36 years before at Batthány's reburial and 12 years before at Kossuth's funeral, they were met officially by all members of the Hungarian government.
In order to enhance the spectacular character of the reburial ceremony, the National Coalition decided to model it after the last princely funeral which took place in Transylvania in 1648. To enhance further the accuracy and splendour of the historical recreation, the notables who marched in front of the funeral hearses of Rákóczi and his followers wore the period costumes of seventeenth-century Hungarian aristocracy.Footnote 62 Because the Matthias church, up in the Castle Hill in Buda – initially chosen as the location for the ceremonial catafalque – was rather difficult to access, the authorities chose the recently completed St Stephen's Basilica in Pest as the place where Rákóczi's coffin was laid in state for public visitation.
The return of Rákóczi's remains served as an occasion for outbursts of nationalist pathos in the public sphere. As an editorial published in Fővárosi Közlöny, the official organ of the Budapest Municipal Council, stated, ‘as amidst the tear and the joy of millions, returns to his homeland from distant shores on the Sea of Marmara, the eternal talisman of the love for the homeland, the disintegrated remains of [Ferenc] Rákóczi], foreign people are looking at us with admiration as the same millions pray [on their knees]’. Rákóczi's reburial was also used to celebrate, publicly and wishfully, the transformation of Budapest into a Magyar metropolis. As the same editorialist put it:
[T]here was only a small city here two hundred years ago, perhaps not even a city but a mere colony of foreign burghers . . . but now two hundred years later eight hundred thousand Magyars run to [Rákóczi's] coffin, under the arches of St Stephen's Basilica. By now the Germans have left our country, the pro-Habsburgs (labancz) have put down their weapons, and hearts are burning everywhere as the light of campfires; there is no one else here, just Magyars, and every heart finds communion in the love for the homeland.Footnote 63
The next day, Rákóczi's remains and those of his immediate family were taken from St Stephen's Basilica in a spectacular procession on Budapest's boulevards to the eastern railway station and transported to Kassa, where they were buried in the local cathedral after being included one more time in a spectacular ceremony, which enthralled thousands of residents and visitors to the city.Footnote 64 Another coffin bearing the remains of Thököli, the leader of a late seventeenth-century anti-Habsburg conspiracy, which were repatriated together with those of Rákóczi from the Ottoman empire to Hungary, was taken farther north to Késmárk (today Kežmarok, Slovakia), and ceremoniously buried there.
Funerals and patriotic mythmaking in modern Budapest
During the period of Austro-Hungarian Dualism, the reburials and funerals discussed in this article were highly politicized, each ceremony being used for patriotic mythmaking, if understood in different ways. The political division between supporters of the Compromise and those who opposed it was reflected in the different meanings attached to each funeral ceremony. While Deák's funeral emphasized his role as architect of the Austro-Hungarian Compromise and his connection to the nation and the world at large, Kossuth's funeral and Batthyány and Rákóczi's reburial ceremonies promoted a strong commitment to the nation, the homeland, and the Hungarian revolutionary tradition, in the form of an idealization of the pre-Compromise revolutionary past. While Deák's funeral represented a model of liberal nation building torn between national and dynastic patriotism,Footnote 65 the other three were occasions to define Hungarian patriotism as exclusively related to the cause of national independence and worship of the homeland.
There were many reasons for this. Already in 1875, shortly before Deák's death, Hungarian domestic politics saw a turn away from the civic-minded and moderate views of the makers of the Compromise to a more virulent form of ethnic nationalism.Footnote 66 The embrace of this more radical Magyar nationalism by the government, concomitantly with the new nationalist public mood during the 1890s and the 1900s, obscured the patriotic merits of those who had made the Austro-Hungarian Compromise possible. In the competition between members of the governing Liberal party and supporters of the oppositionist Independence party to outdo each other in regard to who was the better guardian of the national idea, Hungarian patriotism defined as loyalty to the homeland became the common ground where supporters and enemies of the Compromise could meet each other.Footnote 67
But what about the specific impact of this Hungarian patriotism on urban spaces? There were two major kinds of impact: symbolic and material. The symbolic impact was especially important. According to Zempléni, in the symbolic patriotic imaginary ‘the presence of the dead of the nation is a guarantee of the presence of the patria (the homeland)’.Footnote 68 The reburial of Batthyány in 1870, the funeral of Kossuth in 1894 and the burying of their bodies in mauolea erected in the Kerepesi Cemetery, as well as the funeral pageantry organized in Budapest on the occasion of the repatriation of Rákóczy's remains in 1906, allowed the nation to be symbolically imagined as a whole in the city. The presence of the representatives of the urban guilds and delegates of the counties at Batthyány's reburial in Pest in 1870 stood for the symbolic union between city and nation, which was enacted for everyone to see in the capital, a union which was repeated and re-enacted once again, not so much at Deák's funeral in 1876 where all of Austria-Hungary was represented, but in 1894 and 1906 at Kossuth and Rákóczy's funeral ceremonies. In other words, the reburial of Batthyány and Rákóczi and the burial of Kossuth symbolically telescoped the whole nation into the city.
These ceremonies also turned Budapest into a fulcrum of national and patriotic energies. In her discussion of Kossuth's funeral ceremony, Martha Lampland relates that ‘after Kossuth's death, a movement was begun to transport to Budapest clumps of soil from all the sites where the blood of patriots was shed during the [1848] War of Independence, to be mixed with the soil of Kossuth's grave’. Though the proposal failed to take effect, a number of boxes of soil were still sent to Budapest. According to a contemporary newspaper editorial identified by Lampland,
the soil samples were taken from the site of [one of Hungary's medieval] national assembl[ies], . . . the birthplace [in Kolozsvár] of King Mátyás, who ruled in the 15th century, from the site of a famous exchange between King Endre and his younger brother Béla in the 11th century, and from graves from the pre-Christian period of the tribal leader Árpád.Footnote 69
Even more potent relics were brought to the capital in 1906, when the remains of Rákóczi and his fellow exiles were ceremoniously paraded on Budapest's boulevards. St Stephen's mummified right hand, kept since the early 1770s in the royal church in Buda Castle and paraded since the 1890s every 20th of August in Budapest, in commemoration of St Stephen's role in the Christianization and therefore implicit preservation of Hungary for posterity, served the same role of symbolically recreating the unity of the nation in the Hungarian capital.Footnote 70
While, as the organizer of Battyány's reburial in 1870, Pest showed its loyalty to the Hungarian nation in opposition to Buda (which served as the place of Francis Joseph's coronation in 1867, and was ethnically more German than Hungarian), after the unification of the two cities in 1873, the ethnically Hungarian character of Budapest was secured through government-sponsored campaigns of ethnic assimilation. What still needed to be symbolically connected to the nation and its history were the spaces of the modern city. As we have seen, the funeral of Kossuth in 1894 led to the renaming of Hatvani Street, a major artery of Budapest after him. The decision to name major avenues after Rákóczi and Thököly was also taken by the municipality on the day of the translation of their remains through Budapest.Footnote 71 As an even more significant reflection of their physical impact on metropolitan space, all the funerals discussed here contributed to the creation of new monuments. The first step in this direction was made in June 1870, when the municipality of Pest became the organizer of an urban funeral that connected the city to a suburban cemetery. Indeed, after Batthyány's reburial on 9 June 1870, and the erection of a mausoleum in his memory in 1874, the Kerepesi Cemetery was integrated into the urban fabric of a unified Budapest to take up in later years the symbolic role of a National Pantheon.Footnote 72 Ferenc Deák got his first monumental statue in the city in 1887, symbolically facing the Palace of the Academy where he had lain in state 11 years before. During the twentieth century, the erection of statues dedicated to Kossuth proliferated,Footnote 73 to the point that today very few Hungarian cities do not have one.Footnote 74 Monuments consecrated to Rákóczi also dotted the urban landscape of many cities. Moreover, the Kossuth mausoleum in the Kerepesi Cemetery, erected in 1909 in the vicinity of Batthyány's and Deák's, and Rákóczi's tomb in the Kassa Cathedral were also turned into national shrines.
As the presence of multitudes at each of these events proves, the reburial of Batthyány, the funerals of Deák and Kossuth and the reburial ceremony of Rákóczi's remains distinguished themselves from other contemporary funerals both through their scale and through the interest that they engendered. During the ceremonial processions, urban traffic stopped on Budapest's main arteries, and public institutions and most of the stores were closed. With their temporary interruption of the flows of metropolitan life, public funerals made time stand still. The slowing down of the frenetic pace of urban life allowed for the establishment of a connection between the present and the past. The sight of the 1848 veterans at Batthyány's reburial ceremony in 1870 and Kossuth's funeral in 1894 or the historical reenactment of a seventeenth-century princely funeral in the case of Rákóczi's reburial in 1906 gave contemporaries a fleeting sense of their own temporality and – as the national opposition hoped – provided them with a moment to reflect on the connections between their present and the nation's past.
In connection with the latter, and especially after the 1873 unification of Buda and Pest and the start of both state- and municipality-supported massive urban development programme which gave rise to modern Budapest,Footnote 75 the funeral ceremonies of Deák, Kossuth and Rákóczi also served an important role in highlighting and drawing the attention of inhabitants and visitors to the city's new boulevards, as well as old and new monuments such as the Palace of the Academy, the National Museum, the National Theatre, the Opera House, the new building of the Hungarian parliament and the newly completed St Stephen's Basilica.
Unlike Batthyány's reburial and Deák's funeral, which were less photographed, the 1894 burial of Kossuth and the 1906 reburial of Rákóczi were immortalized in thousands of photographs, many of which were reprinted in the local and international press. As art historian Dorothy Barenscott writes in a recent article, ‘the plethora of photographic images of Kossuth and his funeral that circulated at this time allowed the specter of revolutionary loss and reassessments of the 1867 Compromise between Austria and Hungary to reemerge in the public and private spheres of Budapest’.Footnote 76 While images of Kossuth had been banned from Hungarian official media since 1849, his funeral allowed for such images to re-emerge, in powerful fashion, in the public domain. According to Barenscott, ‘Kossuth's funeral was photographed from every conceivable angle by nearly every one of the several hundred working photographers at the time, remaining to this day one of the most photographed events in Hungarian history.’Footnote 77 Moreover, as she further points out, ‘the photographs, while closely documenting the [funeral] procession, also imaged the buildings, technologies and streets associated with the modern building program and the economic aims of the burgeoning second capital city of the Austro-Hungarian Empire’.Footnote 78 Although press descriptions of Battyány's and Deák's funeral ceremonies also emphasized their urban context, with visual renderings of these funerals gaining prominence in the media of the time (Rákóczy's reburial in 1906, for instance, was recorded on film as well), the buildings and boulevards of modern Budapest came to feature even more prominently in them. Nationalism, thus, became inserted in a modern urban context while the technological and urban modernity of Budapest allowed patriotic mythmaking to gain more traction. Past and present melded together on these occasions, with the nation becoming a mediatic presence in the city.
