Egy fél életmű: Szabó Pál Zoltán történeti földrajzi koncepciója

Erdős, Zoltán (2025) Egy fél életmű: Szabó Pál Zoltán történeti földrajzi koncepciója. FÖLDRAJZI KÖZLEMÉNYEK, 149 (3). pp. 188-198. ISSN 0015-5411

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Abstract

Between the two world wars, the entire Hungarian intelligentsia was concerned with the question of how Hungarian identity could be defined and what historical issues lay before the Hungarian nation. Contrary to the dominant trends of Ethnohistory and the Geistesgeschichte School, by the mid-1920s, the geographer Szabó Pál Zoltán had developed his own unique historical-geographical concept. According to his starting point, the landscape always determines the fundamental aspects of the culture that develops within its framework. Its central location and diverse geographical conditions provide a unique historical role and, at the same time, give a distinctive character to the Carpathian Basin, within which Pécs, as one of its most important centers, stands out. It is no coincidence that the „two-thousand-year-old city”, throughout history’s turning points, repeatedly housed a sophisticated culture, embodying a bourgeois civilization. The landscape almost predestined the city to become a prominent cultural center of the region and simultaneously enrich European civilization with its unique values. In the late 1940s, Szabó turned away from cultural historical questions, focusing exclusively on geographical issues; his earlier historical-geographical works proved to be ideologically unacceptable. Nevertheless, Szabó Pál Zoltán is not only recognized by geography for his significant contributions but also within historiography and public discourse, elements of his concept focusing on the „five bourgeoisie of the Pannonian Plain” and the „gate of the Balkans,” as well as the „two-thousand-year-old city” are consistently detected.

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