NATIONAL HISTORICAL MEMORIAL PARK AT ÓPUSZTASZER
Based on an obscure reference in the late-thirteenth-century Gesta Hungarorum by an anonymous author, who claimed that the first "national assembly" of the conquering Hungarians was held here, the locality of Pusztaszer in the vicinity of Szeged became one of the principal sites of the 1896 millennial festivities. A monumental memorial column was erected with a statue of Árpád.
This column henceforth became the focal point of yearly celebrations held in memory of the nomadic Hungarians. The event was sponsored by the Árpád Association and then by the Turanian Society, founded in 1902 and 1910 respectively. Historical Hungarian dishes were served up and military tournaments and traditional dances presented. A series of archaeological excavations were also initiated in search of the "grave of Attila". There were even proposals to establish a Hungarian Walhalla statue park (finally realized in 2000). When the panoramic painting the Conquest of Hungary by Árpád Feszty was brought home from London in 1921, it was offered to the Árpád Association of Pusztaszer. By the 1930s the Árpád festival had become a gathering place for elements of the extreme right (parties such as the Hunnic Alliance and MOVE).
In 1949 the new Communist regime appropriated the site, eager to give evidence of its national roots. Ferenc Erdei, a representative of the plebeian/peasant current within the party, initiated a new series of Árpád festivals, and the Feszty panorama was reinstalled and restored in 1967. The site was renamed the National Memorial Park in 1980. After the change of regime the site grew in importance, and in 1990 it was visited by Árpád Göncz, the first post-Communist President of Hungary. The Memorial Park was the site of the 1993 IV Great Scythian Historical Congress (organized by an émigré association located in Cleveland). Starting in 1997 a festival called Hunniális has been held on June 27th each year. In 2000 during the millennial celebrations, a new statue park was inaugurated by Ferenc Mádl, then President of Hungary.
THE GRAVE OF ATTILA
According to the academic standpoint Attila's grave is basically impossible to find. This, however, does not impede some (professional or amateur) researchers in claiming to know where the Hunnic king's grave should be. Not only one settlement claims the glory for itself: among others is the village of Zsadány in the south of the Great Hungarian Plain, while there are more presumed sites for the grave in the Pilis Mountain and in the area of the Danube Curve. According to the research pursued by Péter Noszlopi Németh, on the top of Árpádvár (Árpád Castle), a hill which is scarcely 500 meters high, in the neighborhood of Dobogókő, there stood the castle of Árpád, and before, that of King Attila.
However, the most relevant bastion of the cult of Attila is probably Tápiószentmárton, where tourism intensified significantly since the cult of Attila has begun to flourish. In the vicinity of the settlement close to Cegléd, which has 5000 inhabitants, the famous Scythian golden deer, the most relevant find of iron-age goldsmith craft in the Great Hungarian Plain, was discovered in 1924. After this discovery, enthusiasm about prehistory got a huge impulse in the area; however, the inhabitants of Tápiószentmárton had to wait until 1993, when finally the entrepreneur János Kocsi acquired the Kincsem Park functioning in the Blaskovich Castle and the ex-Soviet military airport and created a spa fulfilling all the requirements around the so-called Attila Hill. This uneven mound is the source of supposedly beneficient currents of energy, and the paying customers can bathe hours per day in the prehistoric energies.
PILIS
Some people are so mesmerized by the hills of Pilis that they create entire theories about the magical powers of the Northern-Hungarian Mountains. Nowadays it is Dobogókő, and the Pilis Mountains themselves, which preoccupy alternative scholars most.
Dobogókő, or, as quite a number of people believe, the heart chakra of the Carpathian Basin, has become a proper place of pilgrimage for believers of esoteric healing and Hungarian prehistoric religion. The meeting points of these two subcultures are the táltos (kind of shaman) churches. András Kovács, head of the Hungarian Táltos Church, discovered bit by bit in the beginning of the 1990s what it is like to heal with ancient energies, and what striking similarities can be found between energetics, ancient Indian cures and the methods of the prehistoric Hungarian táltos. The believers of the táltos energy flowing in the Pilis combine successfully the newly discovered pow-wows and herbal cures of the Boldogasszony (Holy Virgin) cult with Oriental energetics.
The cultic role of Pilisszántó started to develop in the past four or five years, thanks to the mayor, József Szőnyi, who has held this position since 1990. The cult of the "stone with a cross" of Szántó is due to his provision. This stone was found in the late '90s in an old cemetery, where a medieval church was supposed to have stood before. We can find the Cross of Pilis at the foot of the Pilis Mountains, which was built by the local government from offerings and donations in 2003. The old Pauline monastery is also being rebuilt from donations. The first man of the village shares the conviction about Paulines that the only Hungarian-founded monastic order transmitted some elements of the prehistoric Hungarian religion. In the old cemetery of Szántó, some years ago even a Pauline cross was planted.
IF MIDDLE AGES ARE NOT OLD ENOUGH – FIND PYRAMIDS
In April 2006 Texas-based entrepreneur Semir "Sam" Osmanagic started excavations near a village named Vysoko in Bosnia, and on the slope of a 213 meter high hill he discovered a set of surprisingly regular stone-blocks. Together with the group of amateur archaeologists digging with he, he got convinced that these stone blocks are the work of human hands and the surprisingly regular shaped hill is in fact a pyramid built 10-12 thousand years ago, the "Pyramid of the Sun." Osmanagic made the headlines as "Indiana Jones of the Balkans," and the "Valley of pyramids" in Bosnia-Herzegovina became a site of pilgrimage for amateur archaeologists from Egypt to America. While the professional archaeologists explain the under-earth stone blocks a natural formations, local entrepreneurs have been quick to cash in on the interest, knocking out pyramid-themed souvenirs.
see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosnian_pyramids
