Krisztián Csaplár-Degovics (ed): „These were hard times for Skanderbeg, but he had an ally, the Hungarian Hunyadi”: Episodes in Albanian-Hungarian Historical Contact. Acta Balcano-Hungarica, 1 (MTA BTK, Budapest 2019). ISBN 978-963-416-184-4

From the press of then independent Hungarian Academy of Sciences, with interesting articles on rarely acknowledged academic connections.

Click here for the introduction & table of contents (courtesy of Krisztián Csaplár-Degovics)

As a blurb (courtesy of the Krisztián Csaplár-Degovics)

Present book is the most important publication of the Hungarian Albanology of the last hundred years. The reader of this book will find that Albanians and Hungarians have, over the last five hundred years and more, come into more than merely superficial contact: their histories are closely intertwined. The authors have looked into how the relationship between Skanderbeg and John Hunyadi may be reconstructed from historical sources; how the Araniti family rebuilt their lost power in areas of Hungary occupied by the Ottomans (16^th century) and how Muslim and Catholic Albanian military commanders found themselves facing each other on the seventeenth-century battlefields of Hungary. Using archive sources, we discovered how the Catholic Albanian church intellectuals born in the area of present-day Kosovo contributed to the first formulation of Albanian national characterology in the seventeenth century, and the role of one of these, Toma Raspassani, in the life of Buda after the liberation. In the period of Austria–Hungary, we examine questions connected to Lajos Thallóczy, Ferenc Nopcsa and the history of the city of Shkodra, invaded in 1913 that are almost unknown to Albanian historiography. In the interwar period, we present new findings on Albanian–Hungarian state relations and the royal betrothal of Ahmet Zogu and Geraldine Apponyi. The part on historical contacts closes with two chapters that offer something new for those interested in diplomatic relations. These survey the history of diplomatic contacts between Albania and Hungary and Kosovo and Hungary. The first concerns the period 1946–1949 and the second, the last three decades following the political transitions. The latter is also an important document of the times, because it comes from the pen of an active ambassador, and constitutes a major contribution towards enabling this book to serve as a kind of third volume of Illyrisch-Albanische Forschungen (1916).

In addition to exploring Albanian–Hungarian historical contacts, one of our aims as we compiled the book was to make a contribution to the history of academic and cultural links. There are chapters on the circumstances of how Albanian studies in Hungary became an area of scholarship in its own right, the studies of Albanian flora by Hungarian botanists over more than a century and archaeological links between Albania and Hungary.

The authors are among the finest in their fields. Their studies reveal new research findings, many of which will cause a sensation in the world of Albanian studies. The book is thus a distillation of contemporary Hungarian work on Albanian studies and also a salute by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences to the joint Albanian–Hungarian and Austro–Hungarian past.

Book can be obtained in Budapest (http://pennakonyvesbolt.hu/), and ordered here: http://pennakonyvesbolt.hu/kapcsolat

Plese direct English language inquiries to Ms. Erzsébet Bárdi:  bardi.erzsébet(at)btk.mta.hu.