Veres Gábor szerk.: Agria 45. (Az Egri Múzeum Évkönyve - Annales Musei Agriensis, 2009)
Szecskó Károly: Dancza János (1899-1985)
he served as a soldier in the Hungarian Red Army. In 1921 he moved to Budapest where he took on work and joined the left-wing working class movement. In 1924 he returned to the town of his birth, where he took part in the reorganization of trade union life. In 1927 he joined the Természetbarátok Turista Egyesülete (Friends of Nature Walking Club), of which he was president of until 1949. At the end of the 1920s he started excavating prehistoric sites on an amateur basis, and together with his unemployed colleagues engaged in the research of the caves in the Bükk Hills. In the spring of 1932, together with his work team, he became the first person to excavate Neandertal-type prehistoric finds in Hungary at the Subalyuk Cave in Borsod County. This brought him recognition within the archaeological community both at home and abroad. In the period up to 1939 he excavated several other Bükk caves. His articles relating to his prehistoric research appeared in a number of professional publications (Búvár, Természetbarát, Földtani Közlöny). Following the Szálasi putsch of October 16 t h 1944 Dancza went into hiding in the caves in Aggtelek, from whence he returned to Eger on 26 t h December. On the 27 t h December he was named commander of the local militia by the National Committee, and then chief constable of the county-municipal police force. In the middle of January 1945 on his own initiative he set up an internment camp within the grounds of the castle, where the militia, and their commander committed a number of atrocities. This led to his dismissal. In 1949 he was named director of the Aggtelek Caves, which was where he worked until November 1953. Having being relieved of his post he returned to Eger, where he worked in the trade department of the County Council, before becoming director of the hardware factory. He lost his job there at the beginning of December 1956. After that he joined the special police, where he worked until June 1957. It was then that he was appointed head of the department of complaints of the Ministry of the Interior's Heves County police headquarters, attaining the rank of major. It was from here that he went into retirement in the summer of 1960. Dancza became a part-time museologist at the István Dobó Castle Museum in Eger, and it was there that he organized the local history, the history of the workers' movement and the contemporary history collections, making the castle museum the first of the provincial museums to do so. During the course of his employment ten of his source-based studies were published in the museum yearbook. Indeed, a number of his valuable manuscripts also survive. During the second half of the 1960s he still had the energy to continue his researches into prehistoric themes. This wrote a number of papers proving that it was an illusion to believe that prehistoric men from the ice age would have been able to dig mammoth traps. Although he had been an active participant in the working class movement, after 1945 the local communists were wary of Dancza due to the allegations that surrounded him. Thus, by the time he died on October 12 t h 1985 at the age of 86 János Danza had already been all but forgotten. 352
