This is an interesting one, which I just found by googling “Jucika Halloween” to see if there were any thematic strips to post today. I learned:
- Hungary didn’t start celebrating Halloween until the early 2000s, so there wouldn’t have been any official Halloween comics made.
- The rights to the Jucika comics are kind of in limbo right now. There were no heirs, and nobody seems to know who owns it. It doesn’t become public domain until 2040, but that hasn’t stopped some artists from trying. The credited artist for this one is “KBT Studios”, and they seem to intend to pick up the mantle, unofficially for now.
As always, stay tuned here on !comicstrips@lemmy.world for a slow trickle out of Jucika comics, but if you want to find more, here’s a good post with a large collection that /u/JohnnyEnzyme@piefed.social posted last year: https://piefed.social/post/1258520
**Also, check out some Jucika fan art! https://piefed.social/c/eurographicnovels/p/2128207/the-best-of-jucika-fan-art-12-pieces-with-two-videos
**You can find more Jucika content in c/graphicnovels by using this search
Okay, that’s not exactly correct.
Hungary has celebrated All-Saints Day (or All Souls’ Day) for most of modern history, it being one of the more central Christian holidays. And like most Eastern Christian countries, that and the day of the dead (1st and 2nd of November) kind of blended together, so for us it’s a day or two of remembrance of loved ones who passed on.
Halloween (All Hallow’s Evening) is an invention of the Anglosphere, and is much more recent than the aforementioned Hungarian tradition, appearing around 1840, formed from the various Celtic myths and traditions mixing with Catholic events, much like Christmas. It isn’t Hungary that “doesn’t celebrate Halloween”, but in reality, most of the world doesn’t.
With that said… Hungary is mostly Roman Catholic and Protestant. The Anglican branch doesn’t have much foothold, and most of the aforementioned two groups don’t really consider them to be “true Christians” (and with that I can already see the “no true Scotsman” debate forming in the follow-up comments…).
Because of this, a lot of the Anglosphere influenced/created, religious-ish things are looked down upon in Hungary, to the point where “There’s no halloween in Hungary” has become a meme for the past ~15 years or so.
And while that is the general mentality, Hungarians have been aware of the tradition in popular knowledge since around the 1980s - some telenovelas even incorporated it as a “trendy new thing the young ones are doing”. In reality, in the 80s and 90s, very few would have a halloween party, mostly university/college students who tried to adopt western behaviours as a rebellion against the USSR’s enforced conformity.
The early 2000s brought on a new generation of children who’ve never experienced said Soviet oppression, who’ve had access to the internet, and of course the onslaught of Western media popularising the holiday. But, again, it’s still a very “posh” thing to do, so it’s mostly Budapest’s more affluential, suburban areas that participate in it.