Arrabona - Múzeumi közlemények 31-33. (Győr, 1994)

Timaffy László köszöntése

SALUTATION OF LÁSZLÓ TIMAFFY Dr. László Timaffy was honored at the occasion of his 75th birthday by a two-days scholarly conference organized by the János Xantus Museum in Győr and the Museum System of the County Győr-Sopron-Mosón. He is an outstanding researcher of the County, of the Kisalföld (Little Hungarian Plains), and the North-Western part of Hungary with the adjacent areas of Austria and Slovakia, who has been since 1960 the most faithful author of Arrabona. Dr. László Timaffy was born in the village Mosonszentandrás on April 16, 1916. The family lived after World War I in the town of Moson, but he got his imprinting experience in the home of his grandparents in the village Cikolasziget in thee region of Szigetköz. His grandfather arrived after the war from the Land of Szeklers (in Eastern Transylvania), settled down and organized the diaspora of the small island of the Danube into village community. In the 19th century the anti-inundation works were arranged rather late in the subregions of Kisalföld: both in Csallóköz and in Szigetköz. The young Timaffy could experience the world of small islands, river branches tide lands, forests and meadowlands. During his university studies the reviving of his experience of childhood helped him to do a deeper exploration of the memory of people. He graduated from one of the oldest and most famous classical secondary grammar schools of the Piarist order in Magyaróvár. He entered the Péter Pázmány University in Budapest where he got his teacher's diploma (from history and geography) and his doctorate (with a dissertation on the hydro-geography of Szigetköz). During his university studies he got acquainted with ethnography. He got into contact with István Györffy, the irradiating professor of ethnography in Budapest. His first ethnographical publications appeared in the early 1940s in the popular journal Földgömb (Globe). He presented the practice of gold-washers in a paper with excellent documentation: then he gave an outline of animal keeping and shepherding in the islands of the Danube. These smaller papers were later summarized in a larger publication in German. 16