Greiner Lajos (Ludwig)

* Lichtentanne, 10 May 1796 – † Jolsva, 28 October 1882 / forester, Tatra explorer; ; Born near Zwickau in Germany, he studied at the Saafeld Gymnasium and then at the Dreisigacker Higher Forestry Institute. From 1816 to 1819 he was a forester at the Coburg estate in Baumgarten, and then passed his professional examination at the Mariabrunn Forestry Institute near Vienna in 1819. From 1819 to 1824 he was a forestry surveyor on one of Prince Lubomirski's estates in Poland. From 1824 to 1826 he studied mathematics, physics and chemistry at the Vienna Polytechnic. From 1826 to 1828 he was the manager of a forest estate in Grienberg, Austria. However, he spent the longest time in Jolsvá, where from 1828 he worked as the director of the Hungarian forest estates of Prince Ferdinand of Coburg (about 69 thousand hectares) until his retirement in 1874. In the meantime, he also temporarily held the position of director of the princely ironworks from 1836 to 1839. He was an excellent forestry expert who planned afforestation in the long term, while placing emphasis on the natural renewal of forests. He participated in the development of the first comprehensive Hungarian forestry law. His forest protection activities were of national scope, he organized the collection of forest tree seeds and the establishment of tree nurseries. He also created a tree height meter (Greiner's height meter). He compiled yield tables and made estimates of the wood stock in the highlands. He opposed the planting of a monoculture of spruce trees on the Murány Plateau, but this was done after his retirement. In addition to his forestry work, he made extensive hikes in the Tatra Mountains and tried to determine the height of the highest peaks using the triangulation method. He was the first to determine that the highest peak of the High Tatras was the Gerlachfalvi peak, disproving previous assumptions that it was the Lomnica peak, or perhaps the Krivány or the Jégvölgyi peak. He first published an article about this measurement in German in Buda in 1839 under the title Die Gelsdorfer Spitze, als die höchste Gebirgshöhe der Karpathen, and its Czech translation was published in 1851 in the Slovenské Noviny published in Vienna under the title Gerlachovsky chochol, jako nejvyšší jehlan v Tatrách. János Fabriczy (Poprád) repeatedly published his other Tatra height measurements in the columns of the New Hungarian Museum (Measured heights of the Central Carpathians and regions, 1856), and in the Bratislava Mitteilungen des Ungarischen Forstverein (Alphabetisches Verzeichniss der gemessenen Meereshöhen in der Central-Karpathen und deren Umgebung, 1857). His grave is located in Jolsva, in 1996 a memorial plaque was placed in the Jolsva town hall, and in 2006 a memorial room was opened in Nagyrőce. There is an obelisk in the forest between Vernár and Kriványpusztamező, which has an inscription in Hungarian. ; ; His main works: ; Beiträge zur Kenntniss und Verbesserung und des Forstwessens im Allgemeinen I-II., 1939, ; Gömör megye erdészeti vorzőszenai, 1867, ; Forestry conditions of Gömör (In: Description of Gömör and Kishont County – ed. by János Hunfalvy) 1867.