Joseph Bossanyi

* Szenice, 4 March 1853/55 – † Németpróna, 4 December 1946 / Roman Catholic priest, historian, linguist, naturalist, amateur entomologist ; ; In Slovak literature, his name also appears as Bošiansky. He graduated from high school and the seminary in Nitra, and later studied Latin and Greek at the University of Budapest. He was ordained a priest in 1877 and taught Latin, Greek and German at the Piarist high school in Nitra from 1877 to 1882. He was a deacon and parish priest in Nitra from 1882 to 1898, and also taught. Later, between 1912 and 1925, he was a teacher at the local high school in Privigyén. He spent the last decades of his life in Németpróna. He was an enthusiastic promoter of tourism, but he was also active in philanthropic organizations. In 1890, he founded a woodcarving school and workshop in Nitrafenyves for the poor, where they made wooden children's toys. As an amateur naturalist, he primarily studied the fauna (beetles and butterflies) and flora of the Madaras Mountains, the Upper Nitra region, and especially the Kľak in Facskó. He described a local variant of the Apollo butterfly (Parnassius apollo) from the Trenčín-Teplic region. His writings were published in the yearbooks of the Trenčín County Natural History Society and in the Entomological Journals.