Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and his wife, Anikó Lévai have paid their tributes at the grave of the martyr Prime Minister of the failed 1956 anti-Soviet uprising, Imre Nagy who was reburied 30 years ago on June 16th, 1989.
PM Orbán posted the pictures on his Facebook page, with only two words: “Gloria victis” – Latin for glory to the defeated, an inverse of the Latin saying woe to the conquered.
Across Hungary and in particular Budapest, the 30th anniversary of the reburial of 1956 martyr Prime Minister Imre Nagy was marked with an outdoors concert on Heroes’ Square.
Imre Nagy (1896-1958), who headed the revolutionary government during Hungary’s failed anti-Soviet uprising was executed along with two other revolutionaries, Pál Maléter, defense minister of the Nagy cabinet and newspaper editor Miklós Gimes.
Rmx.news points out that they were sentenced in a mock trial that only lasted one week and during which the judge warned the lawyer defending them that if he kept up the vigorous defense, he could easily find himself among the accused.
They were hanged on June 16th, 1958 and buried in unmarked graves in the outermost lot of a cemetery on the outskirts of Budapest. During the 1989 wave of revolutions that swept across the European countries of the former Soviet bloc, their remains were recovered and reburied during a ceremony that began in the same Heroes’ Square.
The event, attended by hundreds of thousands of people was a pivotal moment in modern Hungarian history, during which a then 26-year-old opposition politician, Viktor Orbán demanded that Soviet troops leave Hungary for good.
Photo credit: MTI