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New Canadian publication on 1956
September 19th, 2010
The proceedings of the international conference which took place at the University of Ottawa in October 2006 to mark the 50th anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution have been published by the University of Ottawa Press. The conference was part of a series of activities in the fall of 2006 including concerts, films, exhibitions, and other commemorations undertaken in collaboration between national cultural agencies, universities, and community organizations. The Canada-Hungary Educational Foundation (set up in 2005 to create awareness for this anniversary and Canada’s generous response to the refugee exodus) participated in a number of these activities as reflected on many pages of this website, which was itself a 50th anniversary project. We are pleased to publish here a review by Ottawa writer and former CBC journalist Kevin Burns of this new collection of essays. Read the review...
The 1956 Hungarian Revolution. Hungarian and Canadian Perspectives was officially launched at the University of Ottawa on November 2nd 2010.
A Brief History of Hungarians in Canada
Hungarian Settlers
Hungarians have lived in Canada for over 120 years. The first Hungarian immigrants were farmers and most of them came to Canada during the 1880s and 1890s from the United States. The majority settled in what today is the Province of Saskatchewan and formed a number of small communities, including Békevár, Kaposvár, Esterházy and Otthon. Paul Oscar Esterházy (born Johannes Packh) played a key role in encouraging the first Hungarians to immigrate to Canada. Read more...
Canada's Hungarian Communities a Century Ago
Nándor Dreisziger
See Professor Dreisziger’s biography here
1905 was an important year in the evolution of Canada. It was in that year that the provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan came into being; they were carved out from the Northwest Territories that had been administered until then from Ottawa. Although there had not been a similarly dramatic event in the history of Canada's Hungarian community that year, we can say that 1905, or at least the middle of the first decade of the twentieth century, also saw important developments in the evolution of this country's Magyar ethnic group. This article will describe the state of Canada's, more precisely of the Canadian West's Hungarian colonies a century ago. Read more...
Address to the Commemoration in Winnipeg of the 50th Anniversary of the Hungarian Uprising: 22 October 2006
In October 2006 the Hungarian Canadian Cultural Society of Winnipeg organized an event to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution and the arrival of a large number of Hungarian refugees to Winnipeg. At this event Dr Emőke Szathmáry, Anthropologist, geneticist;
President and Vice Chancellor of the University of Manitoba 1996-2008 gave a keynote address about the history of Hungarians in the Province of Manitoba. In this address she notes that the first Hungarian settlement in Canada (in 1885, a couple of years earlier than the ones usually cited as the first in Saskatchewan) was near Neepawa in what was then called Hungarian Valley and later became known as Hun's Valley – which became its official name in 1977 and is still listed as such in Geographical Names of Manitoba (2000, University of Manitoba Press).
We are grateful to Dr Szathmáry for giving us permission to publish her speech here.
The Erosion of the Hungarian
Linguistic Presence in Canada, 1991-2001
Nándor Dreisziger
Hungarians have been arriving in Canada in substantial numbers since the end of the nineteenth century and their numbers have climbed in Canadian census figures throughout most of the twentieth. These figures — whether identified as "Canadian residents born in Hungary," or "Canadians of Hungarian descent," or "Canadians with Magyar as their mother‑tongue," or "Canadians speaking Hungarian in the home" — have tended to grow, Read more...
Hungarians in the Canadian West
Nandor Dreisziger
ABSTRACT. Although Hungarians have been active in the settlement and development of the Canadian West since the closing years of the nineteenth century scholarly research on them did not really begin until the early 1970s. Since that time a number of academics have done work on this subject and have published the results of their findings in articles and books. This study surveys the state of scholarly investigation of the Hungarian Community of the Canadian West, explores some of the themes voiced by researchers, and comments on the need for further scholarly work in this field.
To read article in pdf format click here.
The Sopron Chronicle
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This section of our web site deals with an interesting aspect of the whole Hungarian refugee movement to Canada. The students, staff and family members of the Sopron School of Forestry in Hungary were forced to flee their homeland in 1957 when the anti-Soviet Revolution failed. Read more...
The Hungarian Refugee Student Movement of 1956-57 and Canada
Canadian Ethnic Studies/études ethniques au Canada. 30, No. I (1998): 19-49.
Peter I. Hidas
A country's brain drain usually benefits other countries. Such was Hungary's case in 1956. According to a contemporary report based on police records over 3,200 university and college students, 11.2% of the total, left Hungary permanently as a direct consequence of the Hungarian revolution of 1956. Read more...
Hungarica Canadiana
A Summary of Archival Sources
John Miska
The material known as Hungarica Canadiana goes back to the 1880s, when a group of Hungarians in Pennsylvania, U.S.A., had expressed interest in relocating to Canada and settling in the Canadian prairies. The first documents, mainly Parliamentary Cabinet discussions, and extensive correspondence between the Canadian Government and Paul O. Esterházy, a settlement agent in New York, are housed in the National Archives of Canada. Read more...
Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek
We received the following items from Steven and are happy to put them up on our site. Steven is a (Hungarian and Austrian)-Canadian who has published much in the area of comparative literature and cultural studies and has taught both in Canada and a number of countries around the world, see his curriculum vitae at http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweblibrary/totosycv
We are only listing his publications of relevance to Canadian Hungarians here. Read more...
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