The archaeological research of the last decades revealed that around the beginning of the Middle Iron Age, at the end of the 7th century BC, the territory of Northeast Hungary and Western Slovakia and the eastern part of today’s Czech Republic were hit by an extensive series of attacks. Approximately 20 fortified settlements are known today where bronze arrowheads, found along pristine hillfort walls, bear witness to devastating sieges that occurred almost simultaneously. The most spectacular evidence of the Early Iron Age attack series in the territory of Hungary is the fortified settlement at Dédestapolcsány–Verebce-tető, located at the fringes of the Bükk Mountains. Hundreds of early Scythian-type cast bronze arrowheads have been discovered there, scattered along the northern wall of the defensive earthworks surrounding the inhabitation zone. Recently, as part of a new research project, we have conducted a shooting experiment using reconstructed Scythian-type bows and arrows to obtain additional information about the efficiency of the bows and arrows used in the siege, as well as about the probable progress and details of the event.

In totalitarian systems, it would be difficult to find a Shakespearean play that lends itself better to political thematization than Macbeth, and the theatrical reception history of this tragedy in East-Central Europe is certainly indicative of how it has been employed to reflect on the current antagonisms of the country. Gradual but significant changes occurred in this reception during the past twenty-five years, after the fall of the Iron Curtain. Even if it has become a critical commonplace that the various modes of social and artistic expression had to redefine themselves after the changing regime in the former socialist block, we must observe the socio-political constraints of the period in which I would like to survey the history of Macbeth productions in Hungary. Before 1989, the theatrical scene in East-Central Europe was the field where perhaps the most intensive artistic experimentations were always combined, through the "double talk" or double coding of covert intellectual messages, with political awareness and subversive ideological critique. The theatre gradually developed a capacity to operate the mechanism of semiotic overdetermination or overcoding on two levels. 1 Other than the semiotization of every object on the stage, this overcoding functioned on a second level in the time of political censorship, since spectators and critics were constantly on the watch, looking out for meanings that could turn the theatrical representation into political allegory or a criticism of some aspect of the establishment. From the 1990s onwards, the theatre, like literature and cinema, gradually started to lose this political potentiality that could always guarantee some success if the performance was radical enough. This was, however, not only a loss of revolutionary opportunities, but also an emancipatory change, since the artistic expression no longer had to meet the expectations of a political horizon. The real liberation of the theatre was not only in the fact that it was no longer censored by the apparatus of party ideology, but through the break with the compulsory double talk of politicization that, for many, was the touchstone of artistic quality.

This article is a contribution to the hitherto scant literature on learning a historical minority language and on language ideologies in the context of a study abroad program in Hungary, Debrecen. I analyse the language ideologies of the decision makers in Hungary and in the Debrecen Summer School in relation to the teaching of Hungarian to the neighboring peoples. Drawing on interactional data of participants from Romania, the perspective of learning Hungarian as a historical minority language is examined. The present article combines a historical approach with language ideologies by focusing on an institution offering language education. Language ideologies are presented as they appear in the larger historical discourses, contemporary documents, and media interviews. I briefly outline the major turning points in the history of the institution which also reflects the changing language ideologies and cultural politics of Hungary. The qualitative discourse analysis of interviews and the conclusion of this ethnographic study demonstrate that language ideological positions in relation to the teaching and learning of Hungarian have been firmly located in historical and cultural contexts. Discourse analysis of various data demonstrates that, on the one hand, the course providers have espoused competing ideologies of who the learners should be as well as how to present the country and the culture, while, on the other hand, showing that the learners have had to negotiate prejudice and stereotype rooted in discourses about the often burdened history.

The persistent employment of excessive violence on the early modern English stage was studied by Renaissance scholarship for centuries in diverse but rather formal or historicist ways, and this critical focus received no new impetus until the corporal turn in critical theory after the 1980s. Before the poststructuralist, or, more precisely, the postsemiotic and corposemiotic investigations, critics tended to categorize bodily transgression as part of the general process of deterioration that lead to the decadence and all-enveloping perversity of the Stuart and Caroline stage, or they merely catalogued the metamorphoses of iconographic and emblematic elements of the memento mori, the ars moriendi, the contemptus mundi, the danse macabre or the exemplum horrendum traditions through the imagery of violence, mutilation and corporeal disintegration. The reception history of Shakespeare’s first tragedy exemplifies the general hostility towards extreme violence, an attitude which was established by the technologies of canon formation in the eighteenth and nineteenth century.

In any urologic cancer surgery, lymph node dissection and its processing play a significant role in staging and management of the patients. Accordingly, precise handling of the dissected lymph nodes is important for histopathological work-up. The authors have developed a lymph node plastic tray shaping the abdomen and pelvis in which the dissected lymph nodes are placed in its determined location. This can be applied for any urologic cancer surgery. The research was designed to test the usage of a new histological tray. The objective was to assess how helpful it was for the surgical team and in the pathological process. The newly developed lymph node tray has been applied in 150 urological cancer surgeries and its efficacy and outcome have been evaluated in all these cases by involved doctors and assistants. This new tray simplifies lymph node removing and identification (staging), making it safer and quicker in any uro-oncological surgery. It facilitates the work of the pathologist and the flow of reliable information along the surgeon-pathologist-oncologist team. With usage of the tray, lymph node dissections are more structured by methodical means compared to any of the present methods.