Eastern Magyars Erotic

The Eastern Magyars were the Hungarians who never made it to Hungary. When the main Magyar tribal confederation rode west and took the Carpathian Basin around 895, kindred groups stayed behind on the forest steppe between the middle Volga and the southern Urals, in today's Bashkortostan and Tatarstan in Russia. They held on there as a Hungarian-speaking people until the Mongol invasion of 1236, then scattered and dissolved into their Turkic-speaking neighbors, most likely among the ancestors of the Bashkirs and Volga Tatars.

What sets their story apart is that the western Hungarians remembered them. Chronicles in the Kingdom of Hungary kept a tradition of kinsmen left in the east, and in the 1230s Dominican friars went looking. Friar Julian reached Volga Bulgaria in 1236, met a Hungarian woman who had married into a town there, and followed her directions two days farther to her people. He could speak with them without an interpreter, some three and a half centuries after the split. His report calls their country Magna Hungaria, Great Hungary, and describes pagans who did not farm, kept great horse herds, drank mare's milk, and were well armed and hard to beat. A Mongol envoy was already among them. When Julian came back in 1237 he got no farther than the Rus principalities: Great Hungary had been overrun, and he went home carrying a Mongol ultimatum addressed to King Béla IV.

Their language was an early form of Hungarian, a Ugric tongue of the Uralic family whose nearest living relatives are Mansi and Khanty in western Siberia. It sat as an island among Turkic speakers: Volga Bulgars, Bashkirs, Kipchaks. Archaeology fills in the rest. The Bolshie Tigany cemetery near the lower Kama, and sites of the Kushnarenkovo and Karayakupovo cultures in the southern Urals, hold belt mounts, horse gear and burial face cloths with silver eye and mouth plates that match graves of the conquest generation in Hungary. Recent ancient DNA work ties the two populations together.

Other eastern branches are murkier. The Byzantine emperor Constantine VII wrote that after a Pecheneg attack one part of the Magyars, known to scholars as the Savard Magyars, moved east toward Persia, probably into the Caucasus region, and that the western Hungarians still exchanged messages with them in the tenth century. The ruined town of Madjar on the Kuma River has long been linked to them, though that connection is disputed. What survives today is mostly names. The Bashkir clans Yurmaty and Yeney echo the Hungarian tribes Gyarmat and Jenő, and in Hungary the cousins who stayed behind remain a live piece of national memory.