Geza Czirbusz

* Košice, September 17, 1853 – † Budapest, July 10, 1920 / Piarist monk, geographer, university professor, writer ; ; He graduated from the Premontre Gymnasium in his hometown in 1872 and completed his university studies in Budapest, where he obtained a teaching certificate in history and geography in 1884 and in German in 1890. In 1886 he received a doctoral degree for his thesis entitled The Bulgarians of Southern Hungary. His wide-ranging interests are characterized by the fact that he also studied art history, archaeology and philosophy, and he completed his theology privately and was ordained a priest in 1878 as a member of the Piarist order. Between 1875 and 1910, he taught in various schools of the order (Kecskemét, Kisszeben, Nagykanizsa, Temesvár, Veszprém, Szeged, Kolozsvár, Léva, Székesfehérvár, Nagykároly, Sátoraljaújhely, Nagybecskerek), often teaching French and philosophy in addition to his specialist subjects. From 1910, he became a public full-time professor of land surveying at the University of Budapest. He is also credited with founding the Southern Hungarian Ethnographic Museum. He was a very prolific author: the number of his scientific papers is more than 170, and his popular articles have not yet been counted. He dealt with many things, from geography, through ethnography and economics, to art history and archaeology. His appointment as a university professor caused great opposition and even uproar in professional circles, and the Hungarian Geographical Society even sent a delegation to the monarch to persuade him to withdraw the appointment. The distinguished geographer, later Prime Minister, Count Pál Teleki (1879–1941) was one of his greatest professional opponents. His colleagues were primarily dissatisfied with his exaggerated anthropogeographic and social geographical approach, which downplayed the geological and natural scientific aspects of geography. He often struck a harsh tone in his polemical articles, and his scientific papers were not always of sufficient professional quality. His merits include the renewal of the Hungarian scientific geographical language. ; ; Main works: ; Geography handbook for the complete geography atlas of Manó Kogutowicz (I-II.), 1904, ; The Germans of Southern Hungary, 1913, ; Albania and the Albanian Question, 1915, ; Anthropogeography (I-III.), 1915–1919.