Hungarikumokkal a világ körül

With the crew of the Hungaricums Around the World, one of the mission of our team is to map Hungarians all over the world, to commemorate Hungarian people and their legacies. Over the past three years we have visited countless countries where we have had incredible adventures.

In addition to discovering different cultures and people, we have found Hungarian footprints all over the world. To bring our memories closer to our viewers and anyone interested, we have created an interactive world map to place our most important journeys.

Each puncture point has a brief description of the Hungarian aspects there. For readers interested in history, this map will be a real treat, and we will be constantly updating as our series evolve.

The routes we explored during our recent trips include the expeditions of Sámuel Teleki, the travels of Ármin Vámbéry, the adventures of Sándor Kőrösi Csoma and the route of Aurél Stein.

This can be accessed by clicking on the Map menu in the top right corner of our website (www.hungarikumokkal.com). To make it easier to use, we’ve made a video of how the map works. Although the sound of the video itself is in Hungarian, we’ve written an English subtitle for those who don’t understand Hungarian.

Enjoy our map!

The name of Alexander Csoma Kőrösi is familiar to many people in Asia. The memory of the linguist is preserved on plaques in places he has previously visited, such as Aleppo, Tehran or several towns in India. But there are also places where Kőrösi has never been, yet his admirers remember him.

In Vietnam, in Vung-Tau, a stupa is held to commemorate the Orientalist. In 1972 the stupa was built under the intervention of Rudolf Petri, a monk and professor at the Alexander Csoma des Körös Institute for Buddhology in Budapest.

Kőrösi, born in Transylvania in 1784, studied in Nagyenyed and Göttingen. He had already formulated the idea of visiting the Hungarian homeland back in his university years. In 1819 he cut his way to head east by already speaking 13 languages. He first traveled to Istanbul via Bucharest, from where he had to leave quickly due to the plague epidemic, and he wanted to settle in Egypt to improve his Arabic language knowledge. However, the plague epidemic in Egypt caught him up, so he had to leave soon. He eventually reached Zangla on an adventurous journey, where he spent nearly a year studying the Tibetan language.

He continued his journey, spending three years in Kanam and five years in Calcutta. During this time, he completed the Tibetan-English dictionary, the first in this field. By this time the Orientalist had spoken 20 languages.

On his way to Lhasa in 1842, he became ill with malaria. He died in Darziling, where he was laid to rest in a European cemetery. The stupa raised in Vietnam commemorates the memory and work of Alexander Csoma Kőrösi, although he has never been to Vietnam.