Discursive Tactics and Political Identity: Shaping Hungarian Greek Catholic Identity at the Turn of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

After a brief historical and theoretical introduction to the issues of Greek Catholicism in Hungary, the author presents their identity-creation process by way of analysing the Memorial Album published in honour of a pilgrimage to Rome in 1900. Studying the visual and discursive symbolism of the decorative album, the author considers it to be a symbolic representation of a community and an important step in the gradual creation of a Hungarian Greek Catholic identity. Finally, the author points out that the 100 year-old political process and its symbolic manifestation gained new importance as the formerly propagated uniform socialist identity disappeared in the wake of the political changes of 1989–1990.