Jacob Mikanowski at Harper’s Magazine discovered the Rovás script while staying in Hungary last summer.
Rovás is everywhere
I first noticed these runes myself when I saw a few strange symbols tattooed on a policeman’s calf in Budapest. These, I discovered, were rovás, the curious, lenticular script of Old Hungarian. Few can read the characters, but they are increasingly the alphabetic calling card of the far right. Once I started looking for them, rovás were everywhere. They were used for street signs and public announcements in towns and villages governed by extreme wings of Fidesz.
They were on T-shirts, bumper stickers, and stray bits of graffiti. They were above a museum toilet, on a book jacket, and on the packaging for a runic alphabet soup. I even saw a men’s magazine, a blond model kneeling provocatively on the cover, with its title and headlines rendered exclusively in runes.
Rovas Info comment: this men’s magazine cover page is just an artwork from Rovasdesign. Unfortunately, it was not going to be printed. However, it was used in a political performance by rioting the voters with a far-right newspaper stand vision from the future year 2022.
Many Turanists and amateur historians believe that the rovás arrived in Hungary from Central Asia along with the Huns. More skeptical scholars think they are a Renaissance invention, the work of a forger bent on establishing the antiquity of Hungarian writing. Others maintain that they are peculiar to the Székelys, an ethnic group related to Hungarians who reside in Transylvania. The question of the true origins of the script, not unlike those of Hungarians themselves, has inspired stacks of antically footnoted monographs. It seems impossible to settle. But by now the rovás are part of the nationalist imaginary, the hieroglyphics of the ancient Turanian-Magyar race. They’re so pervasive, in fact, that even the political opposition has begun an effort to reclaim them for its own purposes.
One day, wandering across Budapest, I saw a graffiti tag spray-painted in runic letters at the base of a bridge spanning the Danube. People were taking pictures of it, but no one could tell me what it said. Weeks later, after transliterating it into Latin letters and checking my dictionary, I got the secret message: “Orbán is a motherfucker.”
The rovás are a frequent sight around the capital, but certain events bring them out in even greater abundance. A week after broiling in the hot sun at Bugac in the center of the country, I took a train to Hungary’s northern border. Rovás were visible in practically every compartment, on backpack patches, bags, and especially on T-shirts, where they spelled out kárpátia, the name of the band most of us were traveling to see.
(Harper’s Magazine – original article)
Rovas Info comment:
The author wants to tell us that the strong Eurasian connection in writing systems which is supported by scientific research works is only an amateur theory. On the other hand, the Hungarians use the Rovás script as living script. Now the rovás is now visible not only for Hungarians, but for the readers of Harper’s Magazine as well.
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