Algerian Vocational School Students in Jászberény, Hungary in the 1970s

This paper examines the everyday experience of Algerian students studying in Hungary in the 1970s, which is a scarcely studied field. As the topic is peripheral, contemporary news articles and oral history interviews with former teachers and students are the only useful sources, complemented by the TESCO documents of Hungarian National Archives. Hungary started opening to the Third World countries in the 1960s, as part of the new Eastern Bloc foreign policy led by the Soviet Union, which tried to find new alliences and markets in the decolonised countries. It investigates how Algerian students could integrate to Hungarian society and school system that time. It is a fortunate coincidence that a folder with the inscription “TESCO Algerians” with valuable papers related to the education of Algerian students has survived in the Jászberény vocational technical school’s archive.[1] The paper argues that there were main intercultural differences between the students and Jászberény locals, by drawing a lively picture of the Kádár era from a special microhistorical perspective. It suggests that the People’s Pepublic of Hungary wanted to position itself as a supporter of the newly independent Algeria in its nation building.