Grynaeus Tamás köszöntése

In the greeting words on the occasion of a scholarly conference, celebrating 70th birthday of Dr. Grynaeus, I tried to characterize him from a personal angle. We know each other from a considerable time, and I can refer to various early contacts between us, reflecting the characteristic features of his person and activity. Together with her mother, he gave (already as a student) many important and great folklore fieldwork collections to the Etimológiai Adattár (Ethnological Archive) of the Budapest Museum of Hungarian Ethnography. Even as a university student, I could witness the warm words on the then already promising much but suffering from the then circumstances much too, Tamás Grynaeus, by the late Professor Sándor Bálint, who was, without any doubt, the most venerable Hungarian specialist of folk religion. When inviting Dr. Grynaeus to deliver lectures on Hungrian ethnomedicine at our University Institute of Folklore (Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest), I was able to listen some of those, and, of course, I made notes from the lectures. Just to show the width and depth of his lectures. I quote here only his words on the historical and comparative background of a folk healing custom: to hang on trees the clothes, belonging to the cured patients. (It was just a lucky coincidence that the jubilee choose the same topic for the conference, thus the reader could compare his actual views with his university teaching once.) The wide horizons of his studies, both in folk medicine and folk religion, can be well exemplified by his forthcoming monograph, St. Anthony's Fire, a wonderful comparative analysis on the disease and its curing, both medically and mentally. It is showing too, that not only a diligent and accurate scholar, a polymath is he, but also a very successful medical doctor. As for the personality of Dr. Grynaeus, a Christian humanity and Christian humility can be mentioned first. In his short reports about curious events occurring during his medical practice, we find very telling cases for that. Troughout the history of Hungarian folklore research, we find clever priests and learned medical doctors, who have worked on the field of ethnomedicine. But it was a rare combination, when the same person can be greeted as really an expert in three different, important field of studies: ethnography, medicine and religion. Tamás Gryneaus belongs to that exclusive club of the best scholars in all the three domains. But he is not a skeleton-hunter, he is a vivid person, whose whole life is directed by the same principle: the close contact between soul and body, between earthy and divine health. Wishing him further a harmonious life, I refer to the famous commentary by dr. Martin Luther (Tischreden 493b-494a) of the words of Psalm 31: In manibus tuis tempóra mea, omnis vita mea, omnes dies, horae et momenta vitae meae