Word: magyars
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ACCORDING to legend, the Hungarians are descended from Noah's grandson Magyar. The Magyars of Hungary bear no ethnic kinship to their Slavic neighbors in the Balkans, and of all Europe's peoples are related only to the Finns and Estonians. Latecomers to Central Europe, fierce fighters and skillful horsemen, they were driven southward over the centuries from their early home on the slopes of Siberia's Ural Mountains, and in 895, under the leadership of their tribal chief Arpad, crossed over the Carpathian Mountains into the great plain that is now Hungary...
Crossroads. A vast (100,000-square-mile) basin watered by two great rivers, the Danube and the Tisza, and completely ringed around by mountains, the Magyars' new home was a richly fertile and well protected fortress, but no sheltered hideaway for the shy or the meek. Located at the crossroads of the historical highways along which the crusaders of Christendom would press toward the East and raiding Asian conquerors would drive south and west in endlessly repeated waves, the Danube basin had already been overrun and evacuated by dozens of conquerors before Arpad arrived. To ensure their own survival...
...states of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia were created out of what had once been St. Stephen's realm. Rumania got a large slice, and the Hungarian nation was reduced to a puny third of the Carpathian basin where Arpad had made his home a millennium earlier. Its predominantly Magyar population of 8,354,400 was 75% Roman Catholic, 20% Calvinist, and the balance Greek Orthodox, Uniate, Lutheran and Jewish. In 1919, amid the anarchy of defeat and humiliation, a disciple of Lenin named Bela Kun, freed from a Russian prison camp and sent back to Hungary on a false passport...
Uncle Tom made news behind the Iron Curtain. A new edition of Uncle Tom's Cabin, the classic anti-slavery novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe, went on sale in Budapest as the newspaper Magyar Nemzet assured its readers that "in Truman's America they try to hide this book...
...soloists are uniformly good. Polyna Stoska of the Metropolitan Opera gave a rich voice and the appropriate gypsy-like gestures to the part of the Magyar princess. Raymond Smolover is almost as effective in the title role. Walter Aikman and Frederic Gwynne are both outstanding; Aikman for his perfect diction and gestures as "the swine king," and Gwynne for his witty characterization of the country lawyer, replete with lifted eyebrows and sly smile. Gwynne's facial antics keep the audience's attention for several scenes, and his sole in "Ninana" is delightful, despite his untrained voice...