It is not known on what basis the head of state claims that he is a distant relative of former smallholder politician Dezső Sulyok – writes Népszava. With the help of historian László Karsai and a family tree expert, the paper came to the conclusion that no publicly available data supports what the President of the Republic Tamás Sulyok had previously claimed, that Dezső Sulyok was a distant relative on his father’s side.
“Dezső Sulyok was a distant relative of mine on my father’s side, his intellectual heritage, his unconditional support for democracy, is still decisive for me to this day,” said President Tamás Sulyok in an interview with the Arsboni legal magazine in 2018, while still president of the Constitutional Court. Neither then nor since, Sulyok did not elaborate on the exact kind of relationship he has with Dezső Sulyok, a significant figure in the political life between the two world wars, the former leader of the Independent Small Farmers Party.
Nevertheless, Hirado.hu this year he also described it as a fact at the beginning of Marchthat Tamás Sulyok’s grandfather was the brother of Dezső Sulyok, and this information is also on the Wikipedia page of the head of state and the former small farmer.
Népszava’s attention was first drawn to the fact that there is no trace of family ties among the publicly available data by a historian reader. Historian László Karsai also checked the reader’s claims with the help of a family tree expert at the newspaper’s request. They also came to the conclusion that
Tamás Sulyok’s grandfather and Dezső Sulyok are not brothers, and there is no sign that the two families were related apart from the identity of their names.
On what basis can this be concluded?
- According to the registry data, Sulyok Dezső was born in 1897 in Simaházapustán, Veszprém County, the head of state’s grandfather, János Sulyok, was born in 1871 in Halimba. So there was a 26-year age difference between them.
- Dezső Sulyok’s father was a mill tenant Antal Sulyok, and his mother was Izabella Szigeti. According to public documents, the father of the head of state’s grandfather is unknown, he was born out of wedlock together with his siblings, his mother was Katalin Sulyok. In other words, their mother is not the same.
- According to contemporary documents, Dezső Sulyok’s father, Antal Sulyok, was 13 years old when the head of state’s grandfather was born, so it is unlikely that they were half-siblings.
- Since the father of the head of state’s grandfather is not known according to the available documents, they presumably received the family name of their mother, Katalin Sulyok, which is how their last name became Sulyok.
Népszava contacted the Sándor Palace and asked the head of state to provide information on why and on what basis he claimed that he was related to Dezső Sulyok, but so far they have not received an answer. We also contacted the head of state regarding Népszava’s claims, and we will report on it as soon as we receive an answer.
In an interview last summer, the President of the Republic said about his father that after 1945 he was sentenced to death because of a personal vendetta against a Communist Party secretary, and had to hide for years. Historian László Karsai in his article published on Hvg.hu on the other hand, he recently found out that László Sulyok was noticed by the authorities because of the above-mentioned article entitled Flag-breaking, and in fact he was wanted because they wanted to clarify what role he played in the Arrow movement.
Tamás Sulyok called Karsai’s writing a genderless attack, and called his father “a socially sensitive, patriotic, philo-Semitic man”. “There was, and still is, a family legendarium that preserved the stories about my father, as I stated before,” he said.
In his article for Telex, historian Krisztián Ungváry analyzed in detail why the president told untruths about his father’s past.