At the commemoration, festive speeches were delivered by Gergely Gulyás, Minister for the Prime Minister’s Office, Roman Catholic Bishop János Székely and Csongor Csáky, Chairman of the Rákóczi Association.

According to Mr. Gulyás, “Trianon’s lesson is that the nation is even more important than the country”.  We held up to the test of the first hundred years and it is the task of the century ahead of us to endure and gain strength, the Minister said.

Catholic Bishop János Székely said that the unjust decision made a hundred years ago continues to cause distress. Determining fair borders would have been much easier, he pointed out, adding that it causes pain that the faith of this small people was not of interest to the victorious powers.

In his festive address, the Chairman of the Rákóczi Association said that “What we do today is not only our obligation as a nation but also a Biblical command, because as the Word says, ‘I remind and thereby awaken you’. This gives us strength to lift our bowed heads, look towards the future and build a future together, with one will”.

The festive commemoration saw the culture of the virtual time capsule launched by the Rákóczi Association in early May under the name Magyar vagyok 2020.

The Rákóczi Association requested the National Bank of Hungary to conserve the time capsule together with the many thousand messages it contains. The time capsule was received by Ferenc Gerhardt, Senior Advisor to the Governor and former Deputy Governor of the National Bank of Hungary at the event.

We asked Hungarian people to submit their messages addressed to the future, beginning with “I’m Hungarian”, on the website www.magyarvagyok2020.hu until 4 June 2020. The time capsule, containing the messages of thousands of Hungarian people, will reopen in twenty years’ time, on 4 June 2020.

An extraordinary recitation of the National Anthem was played at the event. On the recording, the 64 lines of the Hungarian National Anthem were recited by 64 high school-aged Rákóczi Association members from symbolic locations in each of the 64 historical counties of Hungary.

A hundred years after the Trianon decision, we wish to affirm that although the peace diktat caused us grief and loss, we have cause for joy because we have not disappeared from the map, we have not perished, and we can look towards the future with confidence.

The event was concluded with the clip “Magyar vagyok”, by the Kiss Kata Band (Kiss Kata Zenekar).