List of gratitudes 2024

This year was a very intense one. My photo album with "selected photos of 2024" in my Facebook profile shows almost 450 pictures, almost double as in 2023 or 2022. Only 2019 was so intense as this year. This year was about Vienna: I was honored to have a JESH project at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, which gave me the opportunity to study in several libraries and institutions of Vienna. I was lucky to travel a lot this year again: in Erfurt, Graz, Belgrade, Ljubljana, Alba Iulia, Cluj, Balatonkenese, Esztergom, Rome (twice...oh, god), Brno. Published a lot of papers, probably too much this year. This was at least honored by the faculty and university. The last two month of the year was hard: I was struggling twice with some flu, sinusitis and I am writing these lines again in fever. Way too much work. Next year l will manage myself - but life will do it anyway - to rest more. I will certainly need a gym-trainer too.

Here is my list of gratitudes for 2024:

- happy for my friends, those few who are with me in Szeged, Budapest and those who are far in cities I lived or visited. Their number are growing. Especially grateful for my Vienna friends, who helped me enourmously. I love you all.

- happy and grateful for my colleagues, who helped me a lot in my recent, big publications. Young scholars with full hearth and ambition.

- greatful to be so lucky, to discover several new Roman reliefs or statues: as you are already know, not in excavations, but in private collections or museum depos. 

- greatful to see Rome, Lake Albano and so many other beautiful sites this year in the above named cities. I can't even list them. These beauties are the motors of live together with the kind meetings with friends during these trips

- greatful for the amazing concert of Coldplay.  It was my long time dream to see them live. I was singing their songs for days on metro, on the streets, in the train. Loved also the concert 

- greatful for the two short scholarships I won this year for 2025 and 2026 (sadly, only few months). The challange of the next year(s?) will be to find another, long-term scholarship or side-job (as most of Hungarian scholars have 2-3 jobs or financial sources - don't ask my opinion about this, you certainly know it).

- grateful and happy to visit for the first time Ljubljana and Slovenia: such a beautiful city and warm people. Hope to return soon. The same fantastic first time experience I had in Brno: a lovely city, which I want to visit again.

- greatful for my students, colleagues in Szeged and all around Europe and beyond. We always learn together from each other, which is rare nowadays.

Wish you all a happy new year and hope to see you soon!

 

List of gratitudes 2023

 Another year just passed. Tempus fugit, and this is getting more and more real if I count the numbers of white hair in my beard. But, that is still considered sexy and that is how the age of 36 should be. 

A continuation of the previous mad year of wars and transhumanism, we are now visibly entering the age of the anthropocene, shaped by more and more agressive political dualism (gnosticism as Voegelin argued) and a new wave of transhumanism, where AI is getting way too much importance. Not the tendencies we, from humanities like: and we should not.

 2023 for me was a dynamic, busy and important year.  The year was marked by my amazing trip in Andalusia, where I had real experiences of divination and epiphany. A trip which I will never forget. That marked my year: I was more joyful, had an incredible force of work and the year passed much faster as I expected. Here are some of the key moments of my year, for which I am grateful:

• Grateful for my family, friends (old and new from this year) for their support and patiance 
• Grateful for my amazing experience in Andalusia: the beautiful faces, eyes and sunset, that inspired me for the rest of the year
• Happy to visit this year Malaga (twice!), Cordoba, Fuengirola, Frankfurt, London, Varaždinske Toplice, Cluj, Madrid, Münster and Vienna again (6 countries)
• Glad for my friends from Balatonkenese and Veszprém for the amazing Balaton-exprience this year. 
• Happy that I was brave enough to transform my summer into a constant festival: I was at 9 concerts in 3 different events and festivals. Glad I listened again live Moderat and Nils Frahm, my never ending sources of inspiration.
• Happy that I get tenured at the Department of Religious Studies at Uni Szeged. It was a long journey, full with pain and sacrifices. But I think, it was meant to be.
• Grateful for my new project in Vienna and all the publications, collaborations I made this year. It was again, a very busy year
• I learned also from the unsuccesful applications we had (Lendület, OTKA): it made me stronger and we will try as much as we can to make it fancy enough. Soon or later, Mithras will arrive in Szeged, city of the Sunshine (!).
• Happy to meet new colleagues and friends in Münster and Madrid, two amazing conferences I attended this year. Reminds me that conferences worth only offline: face to face, with lived experiences and interactions. 
• Glad, I had 2-3 months in the year when I was going to gym with some relevant results. Sadly, in autumn I failed to continue. 

Overall, it was a nice, active year. I hope for a similar one in 2024, where most of my time will be about Vienna-Szeged-Budapest, 3 conferences already confirmed and 3-4 BRILL chapters to write. 

Wish you all a beautiful and happy new year with kisses and hugs of Fortuna.

Beautiful moments from my 2023: 

List of gratitudes 2022

 Needless to say sadly, 2022 was now the third hard year we are facing since the pre-pandemic period. It seems that these maladies are comming like in old myths and histories, together one after another. The war did not affect us directly, but it does our everyday life and politics daily.

In this new madness which affects more and more the world and made an almost gnostic dualism in the West, an artificial "left" and "right" war (which actually is more complex), I tried to find sanity and my own islands of happiness in meetings, personal experiences, a record number of conferences and travelling. This year was so intense than the previous 2 together. Extraordinary in the accummulated experiences and academic achievements, but also very demanding for my body and soul. Next year I will put more effort to spend time with myself and will put aside the academic life, at least on nr. 2 or 3. 

I don't have illusions when it comes to the future year, that our global struggles as humanity will continue in 2023 too, but I do hope that these evil energies will not win and the energy of creation will conquer all of us.

Here is my list of gratitudes for 2022: 

• I am grateful for my family and friends, those few who always helped me in this year and those who are far from me, but we are in constant and living connection. Their physical and spiritual aid is priceless and represents the human fuel of life in a world of transhumanism. 
• I am happy to spend so many amazing hours with friends and colleagues in Split, Vienna, Budapest, Sibiu, Cluj, Bontida, Balatonfüred, Rome, Athens, Zagreb, Poetovio, Erfurt, Graz and Timisoara. Amazing experiences, although way too much for a year. 
• Glad to publish the major results of my previous 3 years research on Roman religion in the Danubian provinces (a book, a digital map and at least 11 studies). After my PhD, this was the most demanding and hardest job I done.
• Glad to see live again Moderat, GusGus, Molchat Doma, Acid Arab and many other amazing musical experiences in this summer. 
• Happy to see so many amazing museums and libraries in 2022 in Vienna and Rome especially. 
• Glad that I am alive and avoided major health issues, although I had several flues and viruses this year too. 
• Happy I still have a job in academia, which is more and more difficult today, especially for my generation. I feel lucky in many sense.
• Grateful for those who helped me in Szeged and Vienna to receive a habilitation stipendium, which allows me to have a decent life and research perspectives for the next 3 years. 
• Happy, that I found this year new friends and allies, although its not easy today to built up new relationships and friendships. I lost few colleagues this year too, who cannot accept my views on politics, biopolitics and other issues from this gnostic, dualist world.

Lets hope, we will have a peaceful year in 2023, or at least those who want wars and division will fail. 

List of gratitudes 2020

 This year was hard for everyone. For many of us from the first world (EU, USA but not only) this was the worst year since 1990.  However, in a longue durée historical perspective, it is obviously not even comparable to the most terrible years of the 20th century (1914-1918, 1939-1945 and many more, even in the 1990's for some countries). Our society was living in such a beautiful, calm and luxurious abundency, that we lost our connection with the reality of nature, the reality of life and the proximity of death. The reaction of the human race for this pandemic - not the first and not even the last one we face - was unusual and odd: on one hand it proved that we are now fully a global society, a unified homo sapiens  which resonates as one in deep crises too. It proved also, that science, politics and the new industry (industrial revolution 4.0) are strongly working together in a symbiosis where one can hardly separate the opinion of a politician, a specialist and an industrialist. This pandemic - although far from being the most severe and most dangerous in the last 100 years - provoked unprecedented changes in human history, which necessity will be put on the ballance of history in the future. We will see, if this paradigmatic year will change indeed the evolution of the homo sapiens and its relation with planet Earth. It is rare in history to have a great comet and the Jupiter-Saturn conjunction too in the same year: that would have been a clear sign for ancient societies that this year was a very, very unusual one. 

On a much more micro-level, the society was atomized, deconstructed, individualised, isolated and virtualised or digitized. Our feelings and interpersonal relations were transformed into digital zoom, google meets, teams and skype meetings. It was a hard year for everyone, in a way or another. For me personally it was a terrible one, but it could be much worse too. At least 70% of what I consider important in life (dynamic social life, meeting friends, interaction with university and academic environments, conferences, travelling, cultural tourism, nature, walking, urban life, research in the big libraries of my field) was digitized,  limited or forbidden in this year. It is enough to see my last year: 16.000 km in 4 countries, meeting 30-40 friends in dozens of cities. This year that was impossible. This created a strong anxiety in me, a struggle which I often failed to negociate in my inner world, not really famous for patience and stoicism. Online education is a total mess, a tragedy as well as online research which limited my work and made it impossible to finish many of my chapters of the book project I am working on. All my planned conferences was cancelled and I became basically a robot speaking with my power points 5-6-7 hours daily, spending 10-12 hours daily on digital media. Despite of this inner struggle - which was connected with the collective suffering of humanity this year - I tried to focus on some good things of this year for which I am very grateful. 

- I am happy that in February I spent two weeks again in Berlin, meeting amazing friends (old and new too) there again. I love that city and a big part of my heart is already there since ten years now. 

- glad that I had at least 1,5 month to teach in real life in early spring. That cannot be replaced by online spaces

- glad that I met in February my friends and colleagues from Szeged. I hope that we can spend more time in the future 

- happy for my few, but good friends from Sibiu who helped me a lot in these difficult times with their presence, company and patience. That helped me through this year. 

- glad that I spent so much time in parks, nature, forest. I had some really nice moments there, helped me during lockdowns. 

- glad I visited some local touristic sites and the Szeklerland (Székelyföld) too

- happy for the most spontaneous meeting with my Alterego and his family. That was a shocking meeting in Csikszereda.

- I was lucky to spent some long nights with friends in search of Jupiter, Saturn and the comet Neowise.

- I am happy for my 10 small articles and studies which are in press now. Although it is not the product of 2020, my book on András Bodor was finished in this year too. 

- I am happy for some new gastronomic experiences I made home, lot of new music, films discovered. 

- greatful that in the time of crisis I realised who are those really close to me and who are the people who fail to stay close in these difficult times. 

- glad that despite of my hypochondria and few hundreds of euros spent on medicine this year I am still alive at least, even if I am not healthy anymore. 

I hope for myself and all of us for a better, happier year with real hugs, real interaction and lot of physical meetings too.

List of gratitudes 2019

Every year of a life is a small, individual journey, which needs a retrospective summary and personal sum up. The advantage of having a birthday in the very end of the year is that special day in the last few years is always a great opportunity for kind, calm and sweet nostalgia of the past year.  2019 was a hard, but not unusual year with important and nice – small or big – moments of happiness, but also with lot of stress, lot of minor conflicts and challenges in my personal life and life-journey. I have travelled around 16.000 km in 4 countries. It is a year, which continues strictly the big events of 2018 and there were no major changes in my life in this year, however my unsure health issues certainly will need a more careful attention next year.

Here is my list of gratitude for 2019:

• -          I’m thankful for visiting Erfurt in January and meeting my old friends there, finishing finally the journey of my PhD certificate too
• -           I’m grateful for my friends and dear colleagues in Sibiu and Szeged, some of them helped me a lot and certainly will represent an important pillar in the following year too in my uncertainties and quests
• -          Grateful for my work and project on András Bodor and the opportunity to study his heritage. This project gave me also the possibility to visit twice this year London and to spend 10 days in Oxford. Happy to have amazing friends in London, Greenwich and now in Oxford too
• -           Thankful for my friends in Budapest – old and new too. It is a city I feel as my second home since many years, although it is a transit city in my life since a decade now. Somehow, similar to Cluj, city I visited often this year too.
• -          Happy to meet this year some really nice friends in Bucuresti and Constanta too
• -          Thankful for the amazing opportunity to visit again Rome, the Urbs, city of cities spending there a month. After 3 years it was again, fascinating to feel, touch, smell and study the Grande Bellezza of my life. Grateful for my research in the German Archaeological Institute and to some new and old friends from Rome too, who made my stay there marvelous.
• -           I feel happy to visit this year Pompeii with some friends: an amazing, unforgettable moment for me
• -          happy to finish and publish two popularizing books, 2-3 articles and reviews, although most of my big works I proposed for this year is still under work
• -          incredibly grateful to meet again – for the third time – pope Francis in Bucuresti and Nils Frahm in Budapest
• -          Grateful for my students and their energy. I had some seminars, where I met again the feeling of catharsis
• -           Finally, grateful for my family, for their patience which is often challenged.

This year marked also some intense ideological conflicts with some colleagues, friends or others. Often, virtual life is different from reality and our fast, changing society is also in a transitional period of changes. Hopefully, these quests I have as individual and the macro-issues as we face as humanity will get a bit clearer next year at least.

I wish for myself and for all of you more awareness, slow-time and good health and the amazing message of S. Hawking: just keep talking.