Liberation of Kossuth from Kutahya, September 1st 1851

Title

Liberation of Kossuth from Kutahya, September 1st 1851

Description

Representation of the liberation of Lajos Kossuth in Kütahya, Turkey. He was national hero of the Hungarians. He was a Hungarian lawyer, journalist, politician and Governor-President of the Kingdom of Hungary during the revolution of 1848–49. He was widely honored during his lifetime, including in the United Kingdom and the United States, as a freedom fighter and bellwether of democracy in Europe. Kossuth's bronze bust can be found in the United States Capitol with the inscription: ;Father of Hungarian Democracy, Hungarian Statesman, Freedom Fighter, 1848–1849;. Kossuth followed the ideas of the French nation state ideology, which was a ruling liberal idea of his era. Accordingly he considered and regarded everybody as ;Hungarian; -regardless of their mother tongue and ethnic ancestry - who lived in the territory of Hungary. He even quoted King Stephen I of Hungary's admonition: ;A nation of one language and the same customs is weak and fragile;‪. Kossuth's ideas stand on the enlightened Western European type liberal nationalism. He watched with anxiety every opportunity of freeing his country from Austria. An attempt to organize a Hungarian legion during the Crimean War was stopped; but in 1859 he entered into negotiations with Napoleon III, left England for Italy and began the organization of a Hungarian legion, which was to make a descent on the coast of Dalmatia. The Peace of Villafranca made this impossible. Now there is a Kossuth Museum in Kütahya, Turkey.

ca. 1820

Artist

Gildemeister

Historical Description

The area of today's Turkey has been populated since the Paleolithic. The name of the Turks comes from Central Asia. The immigrants from whom Turkey got its name were the Oghusen and came from the area around the Aral Sea. The Turkish settlement of Anatolia began with the arrival of the Seljuks in the 11th century AD. Around 1299, Osman I, Gazi (1259–1326) founded the Ottoman dynasty named after him, from which the name of the Ottoman Empire (also called the Turkish Empire) ) derives. After the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, the Ottomans ruled over large parts of the Middle East, North Africa, the Crimea, the Caucasus and the Balkans. After the expansion of the Ottoman Empire into Europe was brought to a standstill near Vienna and the Ottoman army was defeated there on Kahlenberg in 1683, the empire was pushed back further and further from its European territories to the tip west of the Marmara Sea, between Istanbul and Edirne. The national movements that emerged from the 19th century onwards led to a gradual fragmentation of the empire, the occupation of Turkish North Africa by European powers and finally the defeat in the First World War resulted in its ultimate decline.