Balázs Orbán  Balázs Orbán, Baron of Lengyelfalva (Lengyelfalva, 3 February 1829 – Budapest, 19 April 1890) was an author, ethnographic collector, parliamentarian, correspondent member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (1887). He was born at Lengyelfalva, near Székelyudvarhely, Principality of Transylvania (today Polonița, Romania), into an old Székely family from Udvarhelyszék. His father, János Orbán, Baron of Lengyelfalva (1779-1871) was a parliamentarian, who during the French wars was an army officer; his mother was Eugénia Knechtel (1810-1883). According to Balázs Orbán’s memoir, he was a descendant of a family half Upper Hungarian, half Italian (or Greek) from Istanbul. The Baron title was given by Maria Theresa to the great-grandfather of Balázs Orbán, Elek Orbán von Lengyelfalva on the 13th of November 1744. He completed his schooling in Székelyudvarhely, first to a catholic then to a reformed grammar school as he could learn ancient Greek, Math, and History there, but he had left his homeland already in the summer of 1846. He and his family traveled to Constantinople to receive the heritage of his grandmother, Mária Foresti, who was descended from Venice and probably poisoned by Muslims. After long lawsuits he only received a small part of the fabulous fortune, so he learned the craft of watchmaking. Taking the opportunity, he traveled around the Near East. He had got to Egypt, where he climbed the pyramids, in the Holy Land visited the biblical places, met a lot of Hungarian and Romanian “Bedouin” from Transylvania, who escaped the military conscription, traveled around Asia Minor, studied the ancient Greek cultural remains, wrote admiringly about the revolution of the Greek people. He later published his Eastern adventures in six volumes, entitled Traveling in the East. As a result of what he has seen here, he had adopted strongly anti-clerical views, which he has voiced in several of his works. He learned about the Hungarian Revolution of 1848 from a Western newspaper in Athens. He left the Ottoman capital with a military unit of volunteers but learned of the fall of the War of Independence in Vidin.