It is necessary for every student who graduates at MA level in Kazakhstan to participate in an extra credit generating program at any foreign university – preferably in relationship to the topic of their thesis. Their government provides the scholarship as a backup in every case, but its sum depends not only on the grade average of the students, but on the amount of their participation in the life of the university, in conferences and on their number of publications. The higher a student performs, the better opportunities they have to select a high quality program from the list of universities offered. There also exists the opportunity for students to select universities individually, who then based on a letter of invitation, can receive them officially. That is the way, how two senior students, Zarina and Gul'zat, arrived at our University from the leading university of Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan, from the Lev Gumilyov International University, Department of Archaeology and Ethnography. Based on the advanced eastern connections network of our Archaeology Department, they got the information about the opportunity of our professional training, which contains medieval archaeology and art history lectures, therefore their choice fell on our University.

During the ten days of the training they could learn about the early medieval archaeological finds and interrelations in Euro-Asia and the Carpathian basin in English and Russian from our University professors (Ágnes Bencze, Balázs Major, Attila Türk) and from three lecturers invited from other institutions (Gabriella Lezsák, Vera Majerik and Zsolt Vágner). Gul'zat's interest lies in the art history of Central Kazakhstan in the early Iron Age, while Zarina's thesis deals with the early medieval archaeology of Kazakhstan, therefore both of them highly benefited from the new approach in analyses and demonstrations of the finds that were novel for them, but at the same time constituted a link to their fields. They had the opportunity of learning a lot about the unique finds from the Hungarian age of conquest, which are available only here.

It was typical for University from Kazakhstan to pursue higher educational training opportunities further East, while our University was frequented by students almost exclusively from the West. With this event we might have opened up a significant gate leading not only to Kazakhstan, but to the East in general, and hopefully we will receive interested students from the Arabic speaking countries at our trainings in the near future.

Dániel Büki