Samu Roth

* Ménhárd, December 18, 1851 – † Levoča, November 17, 1889 / teacher, mountaineer, Tatra explorer; ; His father was a butcher. He completed his elementary school education in his native village, then graduated from the nearby Késmárk Evangelical Lyceum in 1871. He obtained a natural history teacher's degree and a doctorate in humanities from the University of Budapest in 1874. From October 1874 he was a teacher at the Levoča Higher Secondary School, and from 1887 he was its director. He taught natural sciences in a modern spirit, wrote nearly 20 textbooks. He often went on Tatra hikes with his students. He conducted geological, glaciological, speleological and limnological research in the Tatra Mountains. He has great merit in founding the Carpathian Museum in Poprad. He published many articles in the Journal of Natural Sciences, the Journal of Geology, and the yearbooks of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (on tourism in the Tatra Mountains, marmots, the alpine ibex, the dwarf pine, the steppe stilts, the glaciers of the High Tatras, the mountain goats, his journey in the northern part of the Presov–Tokaj Mountains, etc.). He examined a total of 17 caves in the Tatra Mountains, but he also visited several caves in the Gömör–Szepesi Mountains. In one cave, he found the remains of the roasted bones of a cave bear and pieces of charcoal, which he assumed indicated the presence of ice-age (“diluvial”) people here. ; However, this claim was doubted by experts, and a three-member investigation committee even concluded that ; that the cave in question could not have been the dwelling place of prehistoric people. He was an active member, and between 1884 and 1889 he was the executive chairman of the MKE. His friends and admirers wanted to name a Tatra mountain peak after him, but this plan failed.