Kalman Kittenberger

* Léva, October 10, 1881 – † Nagymaros, January 4, 1958 / zoologist, teacher, hunter, Africa researcher ; ; He came from a poor industrialist family. He completed his elementary and secondary school studies in his hometown, but from high school he transferred to the teacher training college in Léva, partly for financial and partly for disciplinary reasons. Here, his natural history teacher, Jenő Kriek, taught him how to prepare animals and he recommended him to the MNM as an assistant taxidermist for some pay, but this money was not enough to continue his studies, so he took a teaching job in the southernmost tip of Transylvania, among the Csángós of Hétfalus in Tatrang, where he could at least indulge his passion for hunting. He first visited Africa in 1903 as the companion of Arzén Damaszkin, a landowner from Bács and the taxidermist of the hunted game. The costs of the trip (and Kittenberger's one-year salary) were covered by the MNM in exchange for the material collected there. This trip – as he later reported – was very adventurous, even life-threatening, as on one occasion he only escaped an attack by a lion thanks to luck. Damaszkin, seeing the difficulties, soon returned to Hungary and left only his equipment there, thanks to which Kittenberger was able to continue collecting, although he also had to fight various diseases (e.g. malaria). In the following decades, he reached the equatorial region of eastern Africa, the richest and most interesting areas from a zoogeographical point of view, five more times. From 1902 to 1906 he collected and hunted in the forests of Kilimanjaro and the steppes and savannas of the area, in 1906–1907 in the Danakil Depression, and from 1908–1912 in the steppe areas of the eastern coast of Victoria Nyanza. In 1913–1914 he worked in the eastern half of Uganda, but at the outbreak of war he was interned by the British and deported to India, from where he was only released after the end of the war in 1919. (His collection and notes were confiscated and he never got them back.) In 1925–1926 he collected and hunted again in Uganda, in the primeval forests surrounding the Ruwenzori, and finally in 1928–1929 he visited the western regions of Uganda once again to study the life of big game and birds. He spent a total of 16 years on the black continent. He added more than 60,000 specimens to the MNM's African animal collection, of which 300 were new species (about 40 species bear his name). When he returned home from captivity in 1919, he tried to earn enough money by writing articles to support himself. At that time he became the editor and later the owner of the hunting magazine Nimród. In 1930, he unsuccessfully applied for the position of director of the Budapest Zoo and Botanical Garden, so the editing of Nimród continued to be his only serious source of income. In 1948, after 28 years, the communist authorities set him aside, and even took away his hunting weapons. The family of a tragically deceased hunting companion, Ödön Kovács, offered him accommodation in Nagymaros, and he even married his friend's sister, Lívia. During the 1956 revolution, one of the wings of the MNM burned down during the fighting in Budapest, and almost the entire African collection of Kálmán Kittenberger was lost there. Many of his writings were published without printing ink or only mutilated. The black-and-white motion picture he made on his last African trip is preserved by the National Film Archive. A bust in Nagymaros commemorates his memory, and the zoo in Veszprém took his name. ; ; His main works: ; Hunting and Gathering in East Africa (published in English in 1929, in French in 1933, and in German in 1962), 1927, ; The Changed Africa, 1930, ; In the Wilds of East Africa, 1955, ; From Kilimanjaro to Nagymaros, 1956, ; Hunting Adventures in Africa, 1957, ; My Last African Hunt, 1971.