Joseph Blaskovics

* Ímely, June 12, 1910 – † Prague, July 6, 1990 / Turkologist, literary translator, associate professor ; ; He began his school studies in his native village, graduated from the Benedictine Gymnasium in Komárom (in 1929), completed teacher training in Bratislava (in 1931), and then unsuccessfully tried to enter Charles University in Prague. From the 1930s, he was a public school teacher in his native village, then in Nyárasd, and finally in Galánta between 1938 and 1946. In 1943, he graduated from the Szeged Teachers' Training College in mathematics and physics by correspondence, and later enrolled at the Pázmány Péter University in Budapest, where he studied oriental studies with Gyula Németh, Gyula Germánus, and Lajos Fekete. However, after the end of the World War, his studies in Budapest were interrupted, and he completed them in Prague in the late 1940s. In the meantime, he was a mathematics and physics teacher in Bazin from 1946 to 1947, and then in the Főrév district of Bratislava from 1947 to 1950. From 1950 until his death, he lived in Prague, where he founded the Hungarian Studies Seminar at Charles University together with Péter Rákos in 1951, and launched the Turkology Seminar in 1955. He laid the foundation for modern Czech Turkology with his textbooks and studies. He translated works of fiction written in Turkish, Azerbaijani, Tatar, Kazakh and Bengali into Czech and Hungarian. As a researcher, he primarily dealt with issues of the relationship between the Ottoman Turks and the Hungarians during the period of occupation. In the second half of the 1970s, he translated and published the Turkish-language version of the supposed Hungarian Ósgeszta, the Tárih-i Üngürüsz (History of the Hungarians. Bp., 1983). One of his main works (The correspondence of the pious sultans and the noble Transylvanian princes – György I and II Rákóczi – on the issue of the Kingdom of Košice) still remains in manuscript. He also worked hard as a popularizer of the Hungarian language, wrote the basics of Hungarian grammar for the Czechs and organized Hungarian language courses in Prague. In 1957, he was elected an honorary member of the Turkish Academy of Linguistics, in 1973 the President of the Republic of Turkey awarded him a certificate of honor, and in 1978 he received the Sándor Kőrösi Csoma Memorial Medal. The main square of his native village was named after him in 2005 and a plaque was placed in his honor on the wall of the local cultural center. ; ; His main works: ; Dějiny turecké literatury (History of Turkish literature, in English, German and Bulgarian) 1953, ; Türkische Handschriften der Universitätbibliothek in Bratislava (Turkish manuscripts in the University Library of Bratislava), 1961, ; Rimavská Sobota v čase osmanského panstva (1974 – published in Hungarian in 1989, then in 1995 under the title Rimaszombat és vidéke a török hódoltság koraban), ; Érsekújvár és vidéke a török hódoltság koraban, 1989, ; Az Újvár ejálet török adóssözséssai, 1993, ; Blaskovics Memorial Book (selection of writings not published in a volume), 1995.