Hungary broke into world press with something unexpected

According to index.hu, American magazine The Atlantic wrote an article titled Big in Hungary: Whips and Axes – An ancient style of fighting makes a comeback.

The author knows that the history of Baranta can be traced back only to the 90s, when the fans of bygone Hungarian eras invented it.

Atlantic wrote the following: “The name Baranta, I later learned, derives from an old Hungarian word meaning, roughly, “to maraud.” Today, it refers to a fighting style based on a hybrid of Hungarian folk dancing, Mongolian wrestling, and the imagined combat skills of its practitioners’ warrior ancestors. Kata Babinszki, a student of European ethnology at the University of Pécs who is writing her master’s thesis on Baranta, told me that the practice dates to the early 1990s. At that time, small groups of Hungarians began delving into their country’s past, looking back to its history as part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, to its time as a formidable medieval kingdom, and even to the period when Hungarians—or Magyars, as Hungarians call themselves—were tribal horsemen rampaging across the edges of eastern Europe and possibly central Asia.”