A torchlight march was held in Budapest on Monday to commemorate the Hungarian anti-Soviet revolution on October 23, 1956.
The march started from the Budapest University of Technology and ended at Bem József Square near Margaret Bridge.
Addressing the marchers, Gergely Gulyás, head of the Prime Minister’s Office, said that “history has shown that we can only preserve our freedom and Hungarian culture if we stand together.”
Hungarians around the world have to know that they can count on the homeland, Gulyás said. “That is why we must do everything we can to protect the Hungarians in Transcarpathia,” he said.
“By paying our respects to the sacrifice of those who came before us and by remembering the hell they lived through after the revolution was stifled, we set standards. Remembrance is responsibility,” Gulyás said.
“The seemingly impossibly high standard of an incomparably more difficult time teaches us that liberty is still an asset and a blessing if, when looking at the free part of the world, we often have to say that this was not how we had imagined freedom,” he said.
Still, for a child born today, the opportunities open to them — despite all the existing difficulties and social differences — are still incomparably better than at any other point over the past century, the PM’s office chief added.
“We can be a growing and rising nation on a continent threatened by the loss of its identity,” Gulyás said.
He said institutionalised European cooperation was still vital even if the majority of European Union institutions today were not focused on serving, but rather on “taking captive” the bloc’s member states.
Via: MTI
Featured Image: MTI