Pole and Hungarian brothers be
popular Polish and Hungarian proverb
"Pole and Hungarian brothers be" (the Polish version) and "Pole and Hungarian, two good friends" (the Hungarian version) are English translations of a proverbial saying about the traditional brotherhood and camaraderie between Poles and Hungarians.
Texts
The saying's Polish text reads
The full, two-couplet Hungarian version reads
The Polish text may be translated
or, more literally,
A shorter Hungarian couplet
may be translated
or, more literally,
The saying's Polish version has two couplets, each of the four lines containing eight syllables. The shorter Hungarian version has a single couplet, each of the two lines also consisting of eight syllables. The Polish bratanek (in modern parlance, "brother's son", or fraternal nephew) differs in meaning from the Hungarian barát ("friend"), though the words look similar. The Polish version is commonly quoted by Poles. The Hungarian language has 10 versions, most of which are two-line, eight-syllable couplets.
History
Congeniality
The saying – a 16th- or 18th-century coinage by Polish szlachta (nobility) – reflects a long special relationship between Poland and Hungary. Poles and Hungarians considered themselves brothers in war and peace. They recognized that the two countries shared a similar political structure: a nobles' republic (the Polish Rzeczpospolita, the Hungarian natio Hungarica) with a democratic parliamentary system in which the state and king were controlled by a non-aristocratic noble class. The Polish word rokosz (a gathering to resist royal authority) derives from Hungary's Rákos, a field near Pest which was the medieval venue for mass meetings of Hungarian nobility.
“Pole and Hungarian brothers be” enters the record as popular Polish and Hungarian proverb. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Pole, Hungarian and brothers can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Pole and Hungarian brothers be” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.