John Szepesfalvy

* Levoca, 15 May 1882 – † Budapest, 6 January 1959 / botanist, ; moss researcher ; ; He completed his elementary and high school studies in his hometown. In 1902, he enrolled in the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Budapest, majoring in natural history and geography. In 1906, he passed the teaching examination, and in 1908, he obtained a doctorate in humanities in botany as a major subject, and geology and plant geography as minor subjects. In 1909, he also passed the teaching examination. He committed himself to botany, and bryology in particular, very early on. In 1905, as a fourth-year student, he was admitted to the Botanical Garden of the Hungarian National Museum. From then on, he worked in this institution without interruption until 1943. Upon joining, Nándor Filarszky (Késmárk), the director of the archive at the time, entrusted him with building up the moss collection. At this time, the separation of the individual collections and the development of the non-flowering collections began. Szepesfalvy set to work with great dedication. He intended to write the moss flora of Hungary, and in addition to compiling literary data, he began to collect extensively in different parts of the country. He collected mainly in his own homeland, the Szepesség. He was still a university student when he won the university's competition prize with his work entitled Mosses of the Levant. His doctoral dissertation was also on a similar topic (it was published in the Botanical Bulletin in 1908 under the title Data on the moss flora of Northern Hungary). He participated in the establishment of the new Museum of Natural History, and in 1913 he made a longer study trip to Austria, Germany, the Scandinavian countries, Russia and Poland to gain experience. However, his planned trips in the following years were thwarted by the outbreak of World War I, and he even enlisted as a soldier and was only discharged in 1918. For his heroism on the front, he was awarded the title of Knight in 1924. From the 1920s onwards, he took part in fewer collecting trips and primarily studied the moss flora of the Budapest area. His works dealing with the fossil mosses of the Great Plain are of great importance. ; The identification of the mosses in the Pleistocene peat deposits discovered in 1927 confirmed that the Great Plain had a subalpine vegetation at that time. He was one of the founding members and honorary president of the Hungarian Botanical Society (1940). Later he became the editor of the society's journal, Borbásia. In 1942 he was appointed museum director at the Botanical Garden. He retired in 1943, but this did not mean any change in his life. Except for a few months during the siege of Budapest, he returned to his workplace for the rest of his life. After the war, he was responsible for tidying up and developing the disorganized moss collection. He also worked on larger, comprehensive works. Gardening was an interesting area of his scientific activity. He conducted plant breeding and plant acclimatization experiments in the garden of his house in Mátyásföld. Unfortunately, part of his plant material was destroyed during the Second World War. The part of the basement of his house, which was also suitable for work and wintering, was officially taken possession of in November 1950, so the remaining experimental material was also destroyed. ; ; His main works: ; Data on the Flora of Albania. Bryophyta. (In: Scientific results of the Balkan research of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, volume 3), 1926, ; Data on the distribution of peat mosses in Hungary, 1937, ; The moss flora of the area around Budapest and the Pilis Mountains 1-3. Annales Musei Nationalis Hungarici, 1940–1942.