Identity and Culture in Ottoman Hungary

The book offers a balanced and realistic account of the coexistence of different peoples and cultures in Ottoman Hungary. It refrains from either repeating the commonplaces of the sixteenth-century antiturcica literature, or sharing the overtly positive Ottoman-image of the early modern age. The studies of this multidisciplinary book deal with three groups of topics: the historical, literary and art historical approaches combine their methodological merits to paint a colourful picture of Hungary facing or under Ottoman rule. A case study discusses the decay of medieval art heritage, underlining the shared responsibility of the conquerors and the local community. After the re-occupation of Buda (1686), the library of the müfti of Buda passed into Christian hands. The discovery of the catalogue in the Marsili Collection in Bologna is of high importance. Some texts deal with the complexity of Ottoman identity and with the role of the Ottoman establishment in such processes. Cultural exchange is of extreme importance, in conjunction with the changes of identity. Other studies reveal the significance of Hungarian–Ottoman confrontations in the slow emergence of Hungarian national consciousness or deal with the multiple identities of individuals and communities. The authors consider a wide scale of loyalties which – among Christians – bound individuals and communities in the same manner to language, culture, religion, (imagined) comancestry as to the territory, the patria, the country, and the empire. We discover similar tendencies on the Ottoman side, where an abundance of identities coexisted, influencing each other. The book pays special attention to the cultural memory of the Ottoman age, more precisely, to the swift memory loss that followed the rebuilding of the country after it had been reconquered from the Ottomans (Gergely Tóth). Within a few decades following Hungary’s subjection to Habsburg rule the everyday experiences of the Ottoman era had faded away a