Deep Culture, Deep Kurultáj: Turanism, Muscular Nationalism, and Heritage Nostalgia in Hungary

The Kurultáj is a biannual Central Asian cultural festival that takes place in central Hungary. Rooted in the Turanism movement, which ethnically and historically links Hungarian culture to the ancient nomadic warriors of Central Asian steppe, the Kurultáj is part cultural festival, part countercultural movement, and part populist political performance. This festival, along with Turanist ideology, was co-opted within Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s anti-European rhetoric, Eastern Opening policy, and broader heritage populism. Turanism relies on heritage nostalgia, which is also crucial to revisionist populist discourse, which makes it ideal fodder for a Hungary in the midst of an identity crisis. With myriad traditional games and physical practices – including horse wrestling, bull-whipping demonstrations, and invented martial arts, among other eccentricities - the Kurultáj, hailed as the pinnacle exhibition of Turanism, is both ethnonationalism and heritage nostalgia on display. Using Clifford Geertz’s (1972) interpretation of ‘deep play’ as a framework for understanding cultures, we examine how Turanist physical culture and heritage nostalgia is used within Orbán’s strongman politics to influence the Turul generation, a disaffected cohort of ‘deep Hungarians’ grasping for a sense of identity and national pride within the disorder of globalisation, modernisation, and European integration.