It was back in the summer of 1992 in Ulaanbaatar when I met George Kara for the very first time, just a couple of days after my eighteenth birthday. He was attending the 6th International Congress of Mongolists and I was on my way to China with a bunch of friends spending most of that summer on various trains throughout Asia. The first gesture of his that I saw was him handing over his own daily allowance to students arriving from Hungary on their first visit to Mongolia, while he murmured a few short and very quiet sentences to the students’ professor.
When I recollect my memories about him, I always bump into these motifs: the ad-hoc nature of the places we met, the signs of his generosity and his quiet but always witty speech. In the 1990’s it was not uncommon, for instance, that our university would be closed during the winter seasons to save some money on the heating bill. Professor Kara held his classes and exams in the most diverse locations from university dorms to heated corridors of public buildings. Later as a PhD student of his, when he was already spending most of his time in the United States, once I spent a long afternoon and an early evening with him discussing different aspects of my dissertation at a downtown Budapest post office, much to the amusement of the local staff probably. Yet another time we ended up in a nearby restaurant, and he ordered lunch for both of us without a morsel of pretended paternalism in the most natural way, knowing of course that the prices of that restaurant were exorbitant for students. By that time it was already very difficult to reach him in person, although he maintained his position in Budapest as well, just to help out the department fulfilling the bureaucratic requirements to be able to run by his official presence. Taking advantage of the opportunity, he offered his income to be shared among teachers working at the department on a voluntary basis.
I don’t know if his humility and zesty speech have anything to do with his family background, the education of his open-minded baker grandfather, often mentioned in class, or if it was a way of contrast to the less ornate style of Professor Ligeti’s, usual in the then newly renamed Eötvös Loránd University. Next to attending Ligeti’s classes he learned his first Asian languages from professors like the turkologist Gyula Németh and the sinologist Barnabás Csongor (who celebrated his 94th birthday in 2017—萬歲!). His abundant talent in languages was obvious from the very beginning. According to legend in the department, after a few weeks spent in Mongolia on their first visit in 1957 Kara amused his companions, Katalin Kőhalmi and András Róna-Tas with a parody of the Mongolian accent spoken by the local Chinese community. A true polyglot he didn’t only scrutinize Mongolic, Turkic, Tibetan, Manchu, Evenki, and Chinese languages, but unlike many of his predecessors (and quite a few successors for that matter), he was able to reach a good command of their spoken varieties. Following orders from Ligeti, he stayed at the university after having graduated and receiving his university doctorate in 1961 and candidature (roughly equal to PhD) in 1967. He started to nurture a newer generation of scholars, and after Ligeti’s death in 1987 he was already the head of department. He also took the chair of the Department of Chinese and East Asian Studies for a while. Ever since its establishment in 1970 he had been the director of the Research Group for Altaic Studies at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences until it was closed in 2006. Among his disciples in Budapest are internationally renowned scholars like Ágnes Birtalan and Imre Hamar, now heads of the above departments. From 1988 he started to teach at the department of Central Eurasian Studies, Indiana University in Bloomington. For a long period he lived a “transhumant” life spending half of the year in Hungary and the other in the USA, finishing this tiresome practice only in the middle of the first decade of the new millennium. During this time he taught another group of young American scholars like Christopher P. Atwood, the co-editor of this volume, as well as Brian Baumann, Daniel Prior, and Andrew Shimunek, all contributing their papers below.
Professor Kara’s lifetime affiliation with Asian philology set a rare example for all members of academia earning him a reputation of the all-wise scholar, but beyond that lie even more important layers of his personal character and that is his philanthropy and humanism. These are the most prominent pillars of his personality for which he is known among his contemporaries: an extraordinary humanist with extraordinary knowledge. Tümen nasulatughai!
Ákos Bertalan Apatóczky
Budapest, April 2017