Szatmári Gizella: Signs of Remembrance - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2005)
Hungarian People is an ethnographic history based on extensive factual knowledge and "loving care for his people combined with much courage". His Livei of Great Hungáriám is a series of monographic studies written for a mature readership. Besides all that, he edited newspapers, too — between 1884 and 1893 The Country and the World and then, until 1910, The Nation'd School, a teachers' magazine. What is perhaps his best-known and most popular work to this day, the five-volume The World of Hungarian Fairy Tale and Legend, appeared between 1894 and 1896. The book that Benedek himself regarded as his one most important work was his autobiographical memoir My Sweet Motherland! published in 1920. At least as significant as that was the launching of the children’s paper Pal, which he started back in Kisbacon where he had settled down permanently after the war and the Peace Treaty of Trianon. At a time when formal education in Hungarian was no longer available in Transylvania, the newspaper and its correspondence column helped to uphold, nourish and pass on the nation’s historical and cultural traditions. Its readers included the future poet Jenő Dsida and the future writer Rózsa Ignácz, both secondary-school pupils at the time. Unselfishly, Benedek spared no money or energy to organise the Hungarian literary life of Transylvania, but he lacked the support and sympathy needed to succeed. "He was a hero, true and courageous, the only martyr born of this soil in our sight, the brother of such men of yore as an Apáczai or a Kelemen Mikes, one of the few who never die,” eulogized his former protégé Áron Tamási at Benedek’s funeral in 1929. His plaque featuring a relief portrait was made by Károly Kirchmayer and unveiled, on the fiftieth anniversary of Benedek's death, at the writer’s former home at the corner of Reáltanoda utca and Kecskeméti utca, District V. The Pioneer of Hungary's Geology The three-quarter likeness crafted as a self-standing sculpture in memory of János Böckh was placed in a niche in such a way that the work appears to be "stuck" in the corner-axis of the Geological Institute of Hungary (14 Stefánia utca, District XIV). The passer-by can of course make the connection between the stately figure of the gentleman dressed in traditional Hungarian costume and the impressive building rising above it in the background, Ödön Lechner's beautiful design in 60
