Turul

Also Known As: Hungarian *turul*, a falcon; from Turkic *toġrïl* / *toğrul*, a large bird of prey; called *astur*, a falcon or goshawk, in the earliest surviving account
Region/Culture: Central and Eastern Europe
Mythos: Hungarian Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: A crowned bird of prey that enters human sleep to announce a bloodline and then rides that bloodline’s shields and banners into war.
Role in Mythos: It is the dynastic ancestor and heraldic badge of the Árpáds, the kindred that ruled Hungary from the ninth century until 1301.
Relation to Humans: Its single recorded encounter with a human being is a dream visited on the pregnant Emese, mother of Álmos, and it is remembered as a protector of that child rather than a threat to anyone. Everyone else met it as a painted device on a shield or a standard, which is to say as a claim about who had the right to rule.

A woman asleep on the grass east of the Carpathians, and a falcon coming down through her dream. Four hundred years of Hungarian kingship would be traced back to that one night, and not one of the men who wrote it down ever claimed to know what the bird actually was.

Her name was Emese. Her husband was Ügyek, and the anonymous notary of King Béla who recorded the dream around the year 1200 was so determined to be a historian about it that he supplied a date, 819. He supplied no name for the bird. In his Latin it is an *astur*, a falcon or goshawk, and the vision comes to her “in the form of a falcon that, as if coming to her, impregnated her and made known to her that from her womb a torrent would come forth and from her loins glorious kings be generated, but that they would not increase in their land.” The son she carried was named Álmos. The notary explains his own pun with a straight face: *álom* is the Hungarian word for a dream, so the dreamt child is the Dreamt One. Álmos fathered Árpád. Árpád’s descendants held Hungary until the line ran out in 1301.

The dream ends there. The chronicler never says what Emese did when she woke, only what she had been told: a torrent out of her body, glorious kings out of her loins, and then that flat little qualification, that they would not increase in their own land. It is a promise with a border drawn through it, delivered eighty years before the Hungarians crossed the Carpathians and made the land theirs.

The word *turul* arrives later still. Simon of Kéza, a cleric at the court of Ladislaus IV, finished his chronicle in the mid-1280s and wrote of Attila that the banner he carried on his own shield “bore the likeness of a bird, which in Hungarian is called *turul*, with a crown on its head.” Simon carried the same bird forward into the Hungarian present, naming Árpád son of Álmos son of Előd son of Ügyek as a man *de genere Turul*, of the Turul kindred, and reporting that the crowned falcon went with the army until the days of Duke Géza, the last pagan ruler and father of Hungary’s first Christian king. Two chronicle passages, two centuries apart. That is the honest size of the medieval record.

What the bird looked like has to be assembled from painters and metalworkers rather than from writers. The Chronicon Pictum, illuminated in 1358, shows it over and over in gold leaf and hot vermilion: a compact raptor with a hooked bill and a small crown, wings half-open on Attila’s shield, streaming from a lance-head above the Huns at the walls of Aquileia, standing on the shields of Álmos and Árpád and Taksony. The shape is older than the paint. Tenth-century Magyar graves have given up pairs of silver hair discs, worn braided into a woman’s hair and hanging at about breast height, stamped with a bird of prey whose wings spread flat to the rim, the metal thin and light enough to warm through in the hand. Modern Hungarian writers usually settle on the saker falcon, the *kerecsen*, as the living model. The chronicles name no species, and the disc-makers were not ornithologists.

Neither is the name Hungarian. *Turul* comes out of Turkic, from *toġrïl* or *toğrul*, a word for a medium to large bird of prey, a goshawk or a red kite; the derivation sits in Clauson’s dictionary of pre-thirteenth-century Turkish and in Róna-Tas and Berta’s *West Old Turkic*. Hungarian preserves three old raptor words of that stock, *kerecsen* and *zongor* alongside *turul*, all of them carried west with the horse nomads. So was the story. Conceptions by a descending bird belong to a wide steppe pattern rather than to one people: the Secret History of the Mongols has Genghis Khan’s future mother-in-law dream of an eagle settling on her hand with the sun and moon in its claws, and in parts of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan falcons have been carried into the yurt during childbirth on the belief that their eyes drive off what preys on women in labour.

On campaign the bird went in front. Painted on a shield face or fixed to a standard, it took the wind and the early light before the column behind it did, cracking and turning on its pole above several thousand riders who could see it from a long way back. It never fought anything. It was there to be looked at, and to say whose army this was.

Almost everything else that circulates as Turul lore was assembled much later, and by named people. The reading of the bird as a shamanic soul-guide perched in the branches of a world tree, joining sky and earth and the country of the dead, comes from Arnold Ipolyi’s *Magyar Mythologia* of 1854, a Romantic reconstruction of a pagan Hungarian religion put together by the same nineteenth-century impulse that gave the country its war god Hadúr. The monuments are younger again. Gyula Donáth cast the Turul that grips the northeast corner of Buda Castle in 1903, and in 1907 the bronze at Bánhida near Tatabánya, whose wings span fifteen metres. After the Treaty of Trianon the bird turned political: the interwar Turul Association was the largest and most influential of Hungary’s radical right student organisations, militarist, irredentist and openly antisemitic, and Turul statues became standard furniture of the territorial revision cult. Something close to 195 of them still stand in Hungary, with dozens more in Romania, Slovakia, Serbia and Ukraine, and local governments still hold votes about whether to take particular ones down. A bird that entered the record as one sentence about a dream now generates council business.

Its powers are narrow and, on their own terms, enormous. It sees forward, and it says what it sees, which is how a torrent and a line of kings get promised to a woman who has not given birth yet. It transfers legitimacy, so that the descent from bird to Álmos to Árpád becomes the reason a particular family and no other may rule. It guards, at least in the sense that the infant conceived under its wings survived to found a dynasty. And it marks: on a shield or a flag it identifies an army as the property of one bloodline, which in the ninth and tenth centuries was worth more than a weapon.

The limits are just as sharp. Nobody in the record ever sees it awake. It acts in sleep and on painted surfaces, and it does nothing anywhere else, so there is no ritual to summon it, no bargain to strike with it, no way to fight it and no story in which anyone tries. It belongs to one kindred and cannot be borrowed. And it aged out of use with that kindred’s conversion: as Hungary settled into Christian kingship the falcon was pushed aside first by the double cross and then, around 1200, by the red and white striped shield of the Árpád arms. The bird came into a sleeping head, said its piece about the grandchildren, and left the rest to heraldry.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Turul?

The Turul is a mythological bird of prey, usually understood as a falcon, that serves as the ancestral emblem of the Árpád dynasty and a national symbol of Hungary. It appears in the medieval Hungarian chronicles as the bird that visited Emese in a dream and as the crowned bird on Attila’s shield and banner. Its name comes from a Turkic word for a large raptor.

What happens in the legend of Emese’s dream?

Emese, the wife of Ügyek, was already pregnant when a divine vision came to her in a dream in the form of a falcon. The bird told her that a torrent would come forth from her womb and that glorious kings would be born of her line, but that they would not multiply in their own land. Her son was named Álmos, from *álom*, the Hungarian word for dream, and he became the ancestor of the Árpád kings.

Was the Turul an eagle or a falcon?

The earliest account calls it an *astur*, a falcon or goshawk, and the word *turul* itself derives from Turkic *toġrïl*, a term for a goshawk or a large bird of prey. Later Hungarian writers commonly identify it with the saker falcon, the *kerecsen*. Medieval illuminations and tenth-century metalwork show a compact hook-billed raptor with broad outspread wings, and the sources never name a species.

Why does the Turul appear on Attila’s shield?

Simon of Kéza, writing in the 1280s, recorded that Attila’s banner and shield bore a crowned bird called the *turul* in Hungarian, and that the Hungarians carried this badge until the time of Duke Géza. The claim belongs to the medieval Hungarian tradition that made the Huns the ancestors of the Magyars and Attila a forebear of the Árpáds. The Chronicon Pictum of 1358 illustrates the scene repeatedly.

Why are there so many Turul statues in Hungary?

Most of them are modern. Gyula Donáth’s Turul on Buda Castle dates from 1903 and his fifteen-metre-wingspan bronze at Bánhida from 1907, and the bird was adopted heavily by nationalist and irredentist movements after the Treaty of Trianon, including the interwar Turul Association. Roughly 195 statues stand in Hungary today, with dozens more in neighbouring countries, and individual monuments remain politically contested.