Pap, N. (2023). The Late Victims of the Battle of Mohács. Notes for the Mohács Symphony [Review of the book Mohács Symphony. Studies on the new research achievements on the Battle of Mohács 1526, edited by Sz. Varga & A. Türk]. Modern Geográfia, 18(2), 35–45. https://doi.org/10.15170/MG.2023.18.02.03
The book includes several papers that will significantly advance the cause of research on Mohács, 1526. They contribute to the progress of the scientific programme “Mohács 1526–2026: Reconstruction and Memory”, which has been carried out over the last five years by the consortium of the ELKH Centre for Humanities and the University of Pécs. However, the findings of some of the authors are worthy of discussion, which is why this article has been written. The arguments presented in the text concentrate on two main areas: the first part of the text deals with the debate on the geographical features of the Mohács Plain and the areas and roads used by the armies marching through in 1526. The second part focuses on the political distortions of memory associated with the battle sites: how the Kádár party-state used Mohács for its own purposes in the 1970s and how it created a new ‘geography of memory’. The critique does not, however, cover all the papers in the volume, but only those that are in some way related to the two themes above.
Keywords: Battle of Mohács, military landscape, memorial geography, military geography, Mohács
