Minister for families: “We, Hungarians, carry the ever-lasting desire for freedom in our genes”

In Hungary’s 1956 revolution against Soviet rule, the ones with the power to act were those who “remained free” under the oppression forced upon them by a dictatorship, the family affairs minister said at the start of state commemorations marking the 65th anniversary of the revolution’s outbreak in Budapest on Friday.

Addressing a commemoration and wreath-laying at a memorial near the Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Katalin Novák said “it was the tragedies often tainted with blood in Hungarian history that led to 1956; the thousand-year period of Christian Hungarian statehood that had existed before 1956 gave Hungarians the strength and inspiration in the [1956] events which were a turning point that gave the nation its heart and posture”.

“We, Hungarians, carry the ever-lasting desire for freedom in our genes, just as we also carry with us the harsh reality that we can only rely on ourselves”, Novák said, adding that there had not been others for Hungary to count on in 1956.