THE MAGYAR MINI-MAGNUM

The name Fegyver és Gépgyár is not one that rolls easily off the non-Hungarian tongue; its acronym – FÉG – is not widely known, and Budapest is never thought of as a hotbed of riflemaking on a par with Steyr, Oberndorf or Liège. But for two decades between the wars, the city and the company were involved in some serious military rifle innovation.

- Terry Wieland

Some Hungarian Mannlichers are marked “Steyr,” while others are marked “Budapest.” The latter may have been manufactured by FÉG or by the Steyr factory in Budapest. The ’S’ denotes the M31 cartridge (8x56R) with its spitzer bullet.

In 1918, with the splintering of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Hungary became a completely independent state and, like any central European power in the rather fraught decades of the 1920s and 1930s, was seriously concerned with arming itself to defend its borders.

The events of those years in the countries that came into being in the dissolution of the empire – notably Austria, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia – are skated over in many history books, overshadowed by events in Germany. But the division of territory and the agreed-upon borders were highly contentious issues, to the point of armed conflict.

Hungary was an ancient state, but within the empire, its borders were rather vaguely defined. With that empire gone, it found itself beset by Romania, Czechoslovakia, and, to a lesser extent, Austria. Romania had been on the Allied side in the Great War (albeit briefly), but regarded huge chunks of historic Hungary as a legitimate war prize; Slovakia, which became the eastern portion of Czechoslovakia, had been known as North Hungary, and Hungary was eager to keep it rather than cede it to the Czechs. As for Austria, it had gone to war with Hungary as recently as 1848; after 1867, they were separate kingdoms under one monarch, and there was little love lost.