The Office of Parliament has spent 6 million forints on preparations for a planned reburial of ethnic Hungarian author Jozsef Nyiro, the office informed MTI on Friday.
Parliament’s office released the figure in response to an inquiry by Agnes Vadai, lawmaker of the leftist group Democratic Coalition.
Laszlo Veress, the cabinet chief of House Speaker Laszlo Kover, said that Kover had been asked to be a patron for Nyiro’s reburial by a civil foundation, and noted that it was a Hungarian state responsibility to make arrangements for a burial place for the late author, adding that the parliamentary office had the authority to exercise all related rights.
Veress also stressed in his letter that Nyiro’s reburial was “not a political or ideological issue but an act of reverence”.
The ashes of the controversial author, who died in Madrid in 1953, had been brought to Hungary at the initiative of Hungarian parliament, and laid in state at Budapest’s National Cemetery on May 23.
He was to be reburied in his native Odorheiu Secuiesc (Szekelyudvarhely) in Romania four days later, but a Romanian court annulled the permit issued by the local authority, citing formal deficiencies.
Nyiro, a one-time Catholic priest, the author of several popular novels on Transylvanian life as well as a lawmaker during the WWII fascist regime of Ferenc Szalasi, fled from Romania to Hungary and then on to Spain in the late 1940s after the Soviet invasion.
