Aurel Stein: The Hungarian Scholar Who Rediscovered the Geography of Eurasia

Blanka Benkő-Kovács

Founder - Political Advisor, International Security and Defence Policy Expert

“I have had a wonderful life and it could not be concluded more happily than in Afghanistan which I have wanted to visit for sixty years.” Few sentences could capture Aurel Stein’s life more precisely. When Sir Aurel Stein died in Kabul in October 1943, at the age of eighty, he had finally reached a country he had been trying to enter for decades and much of his scholarly life. Afghanistan was not only an extraordinary journey for him, but the country also lay near the geographical centre of the territory that had occupied Stein for more than half a century.