Tag Archives: Hazai

Obituaries

Dear Reader,

obituaries are an important means to share the memories of a person who has passed away. The writer of the obituary shares his or her knowledge of the deceased and, very often, shares the perceptions and sentiments related to that person. An obituary is thus a pathway to contribute to collective memory by sharing these individual observations and sentiments.

In a scholarly environment, collective memory is the essence of all academic pursuit. Without the achievements (and occasional errors) of our predecessors, meaningful reasoning would be simply impossible. It is thus understandable that writing obituaries is one of the many tasks of a scholar who takes history as the most important source of progress. In this tradition, PIAC members dedicate obituaries to their fellow members who have passed away.

References to obituaries dedicated to the following scholars, but published outside the domain of altaist.org, were added recently.

Oliver Corff, September 13, 2022

Obituary: Prof. Dr. Dr. h. c. György Hazai (1932-2016)

We are grieving the passing of the great Turkologist and Ottomanist scholar György Hazai in Budapest on 7 January, 2016. György Hazai was both a full member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and an honorary member of the Turkish Academy of Sciences (TÜBA), also an honorary member of numerous scholarly institutions and organisations including the Turkish Language Association (TDK), the American Oriental Society, the Deutsche Morgenländischen Gesellschaft, and the Societas Uralo-Altaica. He received numerous academic and state honours and citations.

The range of his scholarly research included Turkology in general, Ottoman and Turkish linguistic history, transcription texts, Turkish dialects, historical documents, and Old-Turkish Studies.

His publications in the field of Turkish Bibliography and Documentation proved to be especially influential, in particular his on-going Bibliography of Turkish and Ottoman Studies, the Turkologischer Anzeiger/Turkology Annual (TA), which he initiated and published in collaboration with the unforgettable Turkologist Andreas Tietze.

By means of his work at several universities and in numerous scholarly organisations he contributed to the development of Turkology but also of Oriental Studies generally.

Unfailingly he worked to build bridges between scholarly traditions, people, and lands. As president of the 12th Annual Meeting of the Permanent International Altaistic Conference (PIAC) in Berlin in 1969, he succeeded in assembling an impressive mix of orientalists from both the East and the West, a remarkable achievement which cannot be overestimated, given the historical situation at that time.

György Hazai brought scholarly discourse to its foremost level, innovating with new problems and solutions. In these efforts he was always intensely interested in the exchange of ideas and cooperation within a widely-conceived and internationally-spread network of colleagues.