Turul Bird Statue (Budapest)

The Turul is a mythological bird of prey, mostly depicted as a Falcon, in Hungarian tradition and Turkic tradition, and a national symbol of Hungarians. The Turul is probably based on a large falcon. The Hungarian language word turul meant one kind of falcon and the origin of the word is currently thought to be most likely Turkic (Clauson 1972: 472 (Róna-Tas et al. 2011:2: 954-56)[2]), which is the language of origin of over 10% of words in modern Hungarian lexicon and the exonym "Hungarian" and the word "Hun". Toġrïl or toğrul means a medium to large bird of prey of the family Accipitridae, goshawk or red kite] In Hungarian the word sólyom means falcon, and there are three ancient words describing different kinds of falcons: kerecsen [Greek κερχνηίς] (saker falcon), zongor [Turkish sungur = gyrfalcon] (which survives in the male name Csongor) and turul. In Hungarian tradition, it presumably originated as the clan symbol used in the 9th and 10th centuries by the ruling House of Árpád.