Elemer Balogh

* Székesfehérvár, 6 Feb. 1866 – 16 Apr. 1938 / Reformed bishop, church historian; ; He completed his high school in Budapest, and his theological studies in the same place and in Edinburgh. For 3 years he was an assistant pastor at the Scottish Mission in Budapest, and during this time he also obtained a Hungarian-German teaching qualification. From 1895 he lived in Budapest as a pastor and then bishop. Under his organization, the Calvin House was built in 1912, and the ref. church in 1913. During the ecclesiastical district reorganizations after the revolution, he was elected bishop of the Dunáninnen Ref. Church District in 1921. He was well-respected in Hungarian intellectual life in Czechoslovakia, and for several years he was the president of the CSMTIMT. ; – His biographer, Imre Narancsik, calls his knowledge polyhistorian: “a historian, linguist, who understands and speaks 15 living and dead languages. He deals with antiquities, art history, ethnography, and is still interested in the natural sciences, and is well-informed in all areas of theology”. Before 1918, his writings were published in the Athenaeum, the Teológiai Szaklap, the Terzetségtudományi Közlöny, the Protestant Review, The Quarterly Register and the Hungarian Protestant Church History Archive. At that time and after 1918, he also wrote studies in English and German. He dealt with the history of the prot. galley Arabs for a long time, and collected a large number of documents, and published a volume of pictorial documents in English in 1899 and in Hungarian in 1900. He was a diligent book collector, leaving most of his library of over 25,000 volumes to the Ráday Library in Bratislava and a smaller part to the theology in Losonc. He was also active in the field of Czech-Slovak-Hungarian relations research. ; ; Works: The Martyrs of the Reformed Faith of Bratislava 1674–1676, 1899, ia. in German, 1899, The Martyrs of the Gospel in the Hungarian Evangelical Protestant Church's Decade of Mourning (published by B. E. with contemporary pictures), 1900, A Brief History of the Bratislava Ref. Parish, 1913, The History of the Galley Arabs, manuscript, probably in the Ráday Library, Czechoslovak-Hungarian Historical Relations, 1931, in English and German: 1925. ; ; Literature: Narancsik Imre: B. E., Reformatus Világszemle 1936/2, Životopis E. B.-a (translation of Narancsik Imre's writings by Jozef Lukáè), 1936. ;

T. L.