In Memoriam: Vilmos Voigt

Vilmos Voigt died at the age of eighty-five on June 8, 2025.

He was graduated from the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE) in 1963, where he served during a long time as head of the Folklore Department, and Director of the Institute of Ethnography. He was a lecturer from 1970 and a university professor from 1995. Upon his retirement in 2010, he was appointed Professor Emeritus.

He is a renowned European researcher in Hungarian folkloristics, semiotics, aesthetics, and ethnography. For decades, he defined the framework and content of folkloristics teaching. He received his doctorate in ethnography in 1995.

He specialized in comparative philology and the theory of folk poetry. He is the author and contributor to several national and foreign lexicons.

He was, among other things, president of the Hungarian Semiotics Society, member of the Hungarian Ethnographic Society, and member of International Association for Semiotic Studies, , and representative of Hungary in the IASS-AIS Executive Committee.

Vilmos Voigt received numerous awards in Hungary and abroad. He was honored as a Dr. Sc. of the Hungarian Academy of Science and was also a Fellow of the American Folklore Society. In 2010 he was awarded the Knight’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Hungary.

In a review of his book “Európai folklór. [European Folklore.] (2020), one of his colleagues, Judit Gulyás, wrote:

“With his extensive knowledge of foreign languages, his bibliophilia, inexhaustible curiosity towards multilingual international literature and source works, interdisciplinary knowledge, interest in methodology and theory, unique, encyclopedic knowledge, and his creative ideas and provocative questions, Vilmos Voigt is an exceptional scholar of Hungarian folklore studies. In the foreword to this book, dated on his eightieth birthday, he wrote: European folklore is not to be found in individual folklore accounts and fieldwork journals, but in the ‘great’ paradigms. In my lectures, papers, and books, I have made a determined and consistent effort to show what can be interpreted as a folklorist in European culture.”