ABSTRACT
Why have Hungarians thought of highwaymen as national heroes for over two hundred years? How could they, at least at certain times and under peculiar political and social conditions, transform the negative figure of this criminal into a widely popular celebrity? This paper investigates how the Hungarian betyar (highwayman), a unique nineteenth-century criminal, was understood and even mystified in Hungarian culture and how he was represented in literature and the media. It attempts to show how ordinary, middle-class people, intellectuals, and journalists, constructed the figure of the betyar, how they infused him with emotions, and how he embodied the characteristics of a hero with different ideological ideas. We will also reconstitute the political and cultural milieus that constructed the Hungarian rural brigand as a cultural icon from the 1830s, the formative period of national revival, until the late twentieth century.
