Honourable Presidents,
This is an interesting moment. The Prime Minister of a Member State of the European Union has received an award from the Turkic world. For twenty-four years I have been working for cooperation between Hungary and the countries of the Turkic world. I started back in 2000, when I visited Türkiye during my first term as Prime Minister. That was the first time that a Hungarian prime minister had visited Türkiye for sixty-seven years. Then, from 2010 onwards, we also established and deepened our relations with other Turkic states. We Hungarians, and I personally, feel at home among you. Another reason for accepting this honour is that we Hungarians are the westernmost of the Eastern peoples. We are unique in the sense that we migrated from the East to Europe together with many other peoples, all of which have since disappeared. We are the only ones left. This is how we became the westernmost of the Eastern peoples, maintaining this special historical and spiritual link with the Turkic world from which we came. Strangely enough, even Soviet times helped our relations, because, like us, you too were absorbed into the Soviet empire; and so together – despite the physical distance between us – we formed a community of shared destiny. In accepting this award now, I am accepting it on behalf of all those who over the past one hundred years have worked to ensure that friendship is maintained, and that relations between Hungary and the Turkic world are not a closed chapter, but a living network of contacts. Ármin Vámbéry, a famous 19th-century Hungarian scholar of Islamic culture who taught in Bukhara, recorded many Turkic sayings and incorporated them into the Hungarian literary tradition. I clearly remember one of these sayings from the 19th century: “Only the Devil speaks of himself.” If I understand this correctly, it means that self-praise is a dangerous thing. So I see this award not as a personal accolade, but recognition of the work of very many people. There is one word which you use often: “arkadaş”. Translated into Hungarian this means more than “friend”, and actually more like “brother”. And we are also brothers, because we have common ancestors – among them Attila, who was also our great king.
Honourable Presidents,
I am convinced that the Turkic world has a great future. We can all see that the world is in transition and that God is now determining the future place of countries and peoples in this new world system. I have already seen such a great transformation, at the end of the communist system in the early 1990s; and I have learned that in great transformations the most important qualities are self-awareness, self-confidence, vitality and will. In this regard the Turkic peoples are strong and we are strong. I believe that we all have a bright future ahead of us, and that the Turkic community will be one of the world’s most successful regions. I look forward to working with the Presidents towards this goal.
Thank you for this honour.