Ignác Kúnos

Who was Ignác Kúnos?

Ignác Kúnos was a Hungarian linguist, turkologist, folklorist, a correspondent member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. At his time he was one of the most recognised scholars of the Turkish folk literature and Turkish dialectology. Grandfather of George Kunos American-Hungarian neuroendocrinologist, pharmacologist.

He attended the Reformed College in Debrecen, then studied linguistics at the Budapest University between 1879 and 1882. With the financial support of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and the Budapest Jewish community he spent five years in Constantinople studying Turkish language and culture. In 1890 he was appointed at the Budapest University as professor of the Turkish philology. Between 1899-1919 he was the director of the newly organized Oriental College of Commerce in Budapest. From 1919 until 1922 he held the same post at the Oriental Institute integrated into the Budapest University of Economics, and then from 1922 he taught Turkish linguistic at the university. In the summer of 1925 and 1926, invited by the Turkish government, he was professor at the Ankara and Istanbul Universities, besides this in 1925 he organized the Department of Folkloristics at the Istanbul University. He died during the soviet siege of Budapest.