What did King Stephen do on 20 August that we still celebrate after a thousand years?

It is a well-known fact that 20 August is the day of St Stephen, the celebration of the foundation of the Hungarian state and the establishment of Christian Hungary. It would therefore be logical to link this date to an important event, such as the siege of the Bastille for the French (14 July) or the reunification of Germany (3 October). But 20 August was fundamentally different from what we, Hungarians all over the world, are celebrating today. How is this possible?

The founding of the state took decades

For us Hungarians, it is difficult to explain to a foreigner why we have three important national holidays that are also public holidays. Let alone to, say, an Englishman, where there is no such thing as a national holiday (although some consider the monarch’s birthday to be one), Helló Magyar writes. There is 15 March, which was the day the revolution of 1848 and 23 October, when the people of Pest swept away the communist regime. Both are tangible, precise dates, and when celebrating, we often focus on the highlights of the day.

However, in a national sense, nothing much happened on 20 August to give this holiday a special character. King Stephen, for example, did nothing on this day specifically related to the founding of the state. The founding of the state itself did not take place in one day or even in one year, but took a longer period of time. The general consensus among historians today is that the foundation of the state did not begin under Stephen, but under his father, Géza, and that it did not end with the reign of our holy king either, since our young state almost disintegrated between 1038 and 1044.

So what happened on 20 August to celebrate the founding of the state? To do that, we have to go back to 1083 (well after Stephen’s death). In 1083, as a major foreign and domestic political success for the House of Árpád, five saints were consecrated, although not necessarily with papal approval (the Pope was imprisoned in the Castel Sant’Angelo, as the Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV conquered Rome at a height of the conflict between church and state).

Protestants did not like August 20

For the young Hungarian state, it was an important diplomatic help that its saints, including a monarch, were finally admitted to the ranks of Christian European states. This was an event of about the same importance as our accession to NATO in 1997 or the EU in 2004.

According to Gábor Klaniczay, a professor of the Department of Medieval History at ELTE, these canonisations did not take place at the same time, but on separate dates: the two monks were canonised on 17 July, Stephen on 20 August, Gellért on 24 September, and Imre on 5 November.

Our national holiday is therefore the date of the canonisation of King Stephen on 20 August. This is why, for example, there was a major conflict between Protestants and Catholics in the 19th century over the observance of the holiday, as the former did not want to celebrate their nation on a Catholic holiday.

The founding of the state has been commemorated with fireworks since 1927. Since the change of regime, it has been the officially recognised red-letter national holiday of our country.

Find the original article in Hungarian on Helló Magyar.

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