This volume — an anthology-like collection of essays and studies — revisits the phenomenon of Orientalism from a distinctly Central European perspective. While engaging with the influential framework of Edward Said and his argument that the “Orient” often functions as a cultural construction rather than a geographical reality, the book moves beyond simply reiterating this paradigm. Its structure — loosely inspired by the strategic rounds of the Hungarian card game ulti — offers an original way of navigating the topic, guiding the reader through historical and cultural layers that make the West–East dichotomy far less straightforward in the Central European context. Drawing on the region’s unique historical position, the essays show how Central Europe has long occupied an ambivalent space: often perceived from the West as a semi-peripheral “East,” yet historically intertwined with the Ottoman world and other eastern cultural spheres. From this paradox emerges a discourse that occasionally mirrors Western Orientalist patterns — what the author terms “cumulative Orientalism” — but is shaped above all by centuries of frontier contact and shared historical experience in a region that, with limited Habsburg-era exceptions, did not develop a classical colonial tradition. The author — a Hungarian scholar working at the intersection of linguistics, history, cultural analysis, and religious studies, with research experience in Syria, Malta, and Central and Eastern Europe — approaches the subject from multiple perspectives, inviting readers to reconsider Orientalism through its historically layered perspectives.