COUNT JENŐ ZICHY’S FIRST TWO EXPEDITIONS ON THE TERRITORY OF RUSSIAN EMPIRE (1895–1896): THEIR GOALS AND OUTCOMES

Count Jenő Zichy’s (1837–1906) expeditions in the Russian Empire in the 1890-s aimed to find the ancestry of the Hungarian nation and its route to the Carpathian Basin (regarded as “the Hungarian land-taking”, or “Honfoglalás”). Interest to large-scale expeditions wasn’t the news in Zichy’s family: his father Ödön Zichy was one of the biggest sponsors of the Austro-Hungarian North Pole expedition (1871–1874); count’s cousins Ágost and József Zichy traveled all over Asia in 1875–1877. Count Jenő Zichy was the president of the National Industry Association and actively participated in preparation of exhibitions in Hungary. Thus, he was greatly involved in organization of the large-scale Millennium exhibition in Budapest in 1896, part of which was planed as an ethnographic village. There was a request to display artifacts for the part of Hungarian pre-history, and as there existed long tradition associating Hungarian ancestry with the territory of the Russian empire, the exhibitions were organized. The Caucasus and Central Asia were chosen as the two main directions of the searches because of, first, a widely known letter by Sámuel Turkoly, and, secondly, the ideology of Turanism. In 1895 a research team led by count Zichy spent more than 3 months in the Russian Empire, visiting several places in the Caucasus, the Transcaucasia and Central Asia. There participated an archaeologist Mór Wosinszky, linguist Gábor Bálint and historian Lajos Szбdecky-Kardoss, who also kept a journal of the expedition. Items collected during this first expedition were not enough for exposition of the above-mentioned ethnographic village, and count Zichy went to the Caucasus and Central Asia again, at the end of 1895 - beginning of 1896. Ethnographers Béla Pósta, the curator of ancient artifacts of the Hungarian National Museum, and Jankó János, took part in research and publishing of the collections from these first expeditions. After this work both of researchers decided to participate in the third count Zichy’s expedition, which took place in 1897–1898.