Sample from “Besszer” Calendar: Foreigners in Budapest

Born in Jánoshalma in the Hungarian reaches of the Habsburg Empire, Adolf Ágai (his physician father, originally from Galicia, Magyarized the family name from Rosenzweig in 1848) studied under the Hungarian poet János Arany in Nagykőrös before attending medical school in Vienna. After graduating in 1862, Ágai returned to Budapest as a journalist, introducing witty feuilletons that came to encapsulate the increasingly urban, bohemian life of middle-class Budapest. Ágai founded the satirical weekly Borsszem Jankó in 1868 and Kis lap, the first Hungarian children’s paper, in 1871. He published in dozens of German and Hungarian-language papers, often using a pseudonym.