The Adventures of Hungarian Scholars in Bashkiria (Expedition Work of Gábor Berecki and László Vikar)

In the 1970s, the Hungarian scholars Gábor Bereczki and László Vikár, the first is a linguist and the second is a musicologist, were invited by the USSR Union of Composers to visit those autonomous republics of the Volga region that were open to foreigners in order to collect folk songs of different ethnic groups. It seems that a copy of these records were left to the local researchers. The Hungarians travelled to Bashkiria four times. This article sums up their reflections, relying on the memoirs each of them published at the end of the XX and the beginning of the XXI centuries. As far as Bereczki is concerned, these are his remembrances and the letters he sent to his colleague, the academician Péter Hajdú, about his fieldwork. Vikár just published his fieldwork notes. Both these interesting books were written in Hungarian, so that they are not available to a wider audience. This article reminds the conditions of their fieldwork, the most serious problems the sholars had to face and their most interesting remarks about each people they met. The biggest problem they met was the Bashkir’s hospitality: they had to eat and drink two or three times a day at lavish meals for which their bodies were not ready

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