At least according to this article - probably behind a pay wall - The Call of the Drums by Jacob Mikanowski which appeared in the August 2019 edition of Harpers.
A short excerpt:
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By the end of the nineteenth century, the search for Hungary’s Hunnic past had gradually coalesced into a theory called Turanism. (The name ultimately derives from Old Persian, in which Turan meant something like “the land of darkness” and designated a fringe region of the Sassanid Empire inhabited by unruly nomads.) Part political movement and part religious revival, Turanism was big-tent nationalism in the style of pan-Slavism and pan-Germanism, born of Hungary’s nineteenth-century imperial ambitions. It held that the Hungarian people hailed from Asia, were related to Turks and other Central Asian peoples, and that their nomadic and pagan history should serve as the basis for Hungary’s cultural life and foreign policy, rather than being subordinate to the concerns of their nominal Austrian Hapsburg overlords.
After Austria-Hungary’s defeat in World War I, Turanism became an ideology of resentment, serving as inspiration to Hungarian fascist movements. It offered a way for Hungarians to become equal competitors in the racialized violence of the interwar years—in a world in which Nazis were proclaiming their historic mission as leader of the Aryan nations, it made sense for Hungary to cast a wide net in search of friends. In the Turanist imaginary, Bulgaria, Turkey, and Japan were all possible allies whose support could be used to claw back the greatness (and territory) that had slipped away after Hungary’s defeat. Beginning with the postwar communist takeover of Hungary, however, Turanism was banned. Its leading journals ceased publication, its institutes were shuttered, and its scholars (such as they were) were silenced. Activists prominent in the movement’s glory days of the 1930s either left for exile or died in obscurity.
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In recent years, Fidesz functionaries have fanned out across Turkey and Central Asia, bearing the Turanist message with them wherever they go. The secretary for culture, Géza Sz?cs, long active in fostering closer cultural contacts between Hungary and “Turanian” peoples in Central Asia and Siberia, visited Kazakhstan in 2010 for a security conference. “We should not wish to be secondary in Europe,” he told the crowd. “We should promote ourselves in Asia.” In 2013, the director of the National Institute of Oncology ordered a genetic study of a member of Hungary’s founding royal family, hoping to connect their line to the ancient Huns. (That official, Miklós Kásler, has since been appointed minister of human capacities—a cabinet position combining authority over education, sports, culture, and health care—and announced the formation of a scientific institute designed to find definitive proof of Hungarians’ supposed Eurasian origins.) László Kövér, the speaker of Parliament who spoke at the Kurultáj, makes frequent reference to Hungary’s historical connections to Attila and, in a September address to the Parliamentary Assembly of Turkic-Speaking Countries, which Hungary formally joined last year, expressed his pleasure at being accepted by “our Turkic brothers.”
Even more significant, however, has been the Turanist enthusiasm of Orbán himself. Throughout his political career, Orbán has proved to be a master of symbolic politics, especially as they pertain to the most emotionally resonant periods in Hungarian history. He has built a museum dedicated to the crimes of Communism and adjusted the statuary near the Parliament building by diminishing the prominence of left-leaning leaders. In 2011, armed with a parliamentary supermajority, Orbán pushed through a new constitution in which the Holy Crown, a jeweled diadem that once served as the coronation crown of Hungarian royalty, was officially declared to embody the “continuity of Hungary and the unity of the nation.” A year later, the government invited a Hungarian folk singer and her Tuvinian singer-shaman partner to perform a special “purification ceremony” on the crown, meant to endow it—and by extension the whole country—with positive energy. László Kürti, a professor of political science at the University of Miskolc, has written that this consecration, mixing as it did pagan and Christian symbolism in the very heart of the state, marked the beginning of “a new civil religion with neo-shamanism at its core.”
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