Reader feedback: Happy little old Hungarian lady

Re: "Autonomy" trips response, Volume 11, Number 3, January 24-January 30, 2005

I believe they [the Hungarian minority in Southern Slovakia] have cultural autonomy. In Levice, where my mother-in-law lives, she speaks Hungarian, cooks Hungarian food, follows the Hungarian Christian Calendar and follows lots of other practices that identify her as more Hungarian than Slovak.

Her parents bought a house in Hungary then it became Slovakia, then it became Czechoslovakia, then it became Slovakia again. The only thing that has remained constant in this shifting equation of life is her culture that she has clung to like a dying man to a raft.

Fact - she believes she is Hungarian. Fact- she has a Slovak passport. Fact - she doesn't care. Fact - she is happy. Fact - she believes that times will change and the equation will shift again sometime in the future for as she so rightly says, all is flux, but in this the truth remains the same forever.

So, she's an example of one happy little old lady, who needs no politician to tell her about cultural autonomy, because she's had it since she was a child.

Cultural identity is something we have and if [you are] not satisfied with it then change it.

Bryan Reynolds,
UK

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