A FÖLDTUDOMÁNYI ISMERETTERJESZTÉS MESTEREI A MAGYAR FÖLDRAJZI TÁRSASÁG SORAIBAN

Absztrakt

Several eminent Hungarian geographers also excelled in popularizing science. The Hungarian Geographical Society, founded in 1872, has been encouraging such activities from the beginning. By the volume and quality of popular geographical works, Jenő Cholnoky is the uncontested leading figure in this field, an equivalent of today’s Sir David Attenborough. His guidelines on how to write a popular scientific book are still followed by many. The book series Library of the Hungarian Geographical Society, edited by him, was a high-quality selection of travel reports by the best of geographers. Cholnoky’s lectures in the Society were also extremely enjoyable according to the reports of eyewitnesses – but, unfortunately, no moving pictures have survived of them. Before World War II Central and South-Asia were the primary destinations of Hungarian travellers. In the 1960s the greatest Hungarian globetrotter, Dénes Balázs, revived the traditions of travel book writing and published 26 travelogues from all parts of the world. Geologists, such as Árpád Juhász, also significantly contributed to the (not very rich) popular geographical literature of the recent decades. The legendary general secretary of the Society, Antal Nemerkényi, restarted the popular magazine A Földgömb (The Globe) to create a forum for geographers (and nongeographers) who feel committed to spreading knowledge on the Earth. The magazine is now edited in the spirit of ’borderless geography’, i.e. reports from all disciplines are published if somehow bound to geographical place. Experimentation with new forms of the dissemination of knowledge is inevitably needed.