Professor Imre Boba
A memorial gathering was held Saturday, March 30, 1996 in honor of
University of Washington History and Jackson School Professor Imre Boba at
the University’s Faculty Club. Professor Boba passed away January 11,
1996 at age 76. Professor Boba’s family, friends, and former colleagues
paid tribute to his personal and academic life.
Imre Boba was born in Gyor, Hungary, October 23, 1919, of a Polish father
and a Hungarian mother. At age ten, upon his father’s death, he was sent
to live with relatives in Poland, where he finished the high school in
1939. After the fall of Poland, he returned to Hungary (then neutral),
where he graduated in 1941 from the Hungarian-sponsored lyceum for Polish
youth on Lake Balaton, and in 1946 from the University of Budapest. Being
ineligible for military service because of a childhood disability, he
served throughout World War II with the Polish Resistance Movement in
Hungary, spiriting Polish officers to the West and assisting the Hungarian
authorities in the care of Polish refugees, finally joining the Polish
Second Army Corps in Italy for transfer to England. He received the
Silver Cross of Merit with Swords from the Polish Government in Exile in
London for his work in the Resistance.
From 1952-59, Professor Boba served with Radio Free Europe in Munich,
first as Researcher and Cross- reporter for the Polish Desk, and later as
Assistant to the Political Adviser. But his original desire to devote his
life to scholarship led him to bring his family to Seattle, where he
entered the graduate program in history at the University of Washington.
In 1962 he received his Ph.D. and was appointed Assistant Professor of
History at the UW, beginning a tenure of 28 years, usually in conjunction
with the Jackson School of International Studies. In Spring 1990 he was
guest professor at the University of Tubingen, Germany.
From boyhood, Professor Boba was interested in the origins of the Polish
and Hungarian peoples, and his dual nationality gave him a unique
perspective. It was in the study of early medieval sources pertaining to
the movement of peoples in Eastern Europe that he discovered a discrepancy
in translation which led him to the thesis that the city of Morava, the
seat of St. Methodius’ activities, was located south of the Danube river
in present-day Serbia.
Because the Czechs and Slovaks have long based their national prestige
on the so-called “Great Moravian Empire” on the river Morava north of the
Danube, Professor Boba’s suggestion has been the object of controversy.
It was a source of satisfaction to him that now, after some 25 years,
scholars are accepting his theory as valid. The presentation of his
thesis, Moravia’s History Reconsidered (1971) has now appeared in German
and Croatian translations and will soon be published in Hungarian.
Professor Boba often questioned accepted assumptions in medieval history,
such as the Invitation of the Rus’, the location of Morava, the Donation
of Constantine, and, most recently, the early church history of Hungary,
relying on primary sources as the basis for his work. In the introduction
to Nomads, Northmen, and Slavs (1967), he wrote “[my] method of dealing
with these sources is founded on the belief that the chroniclers and
medieval historians knew and understood the events described by them much
better than we. It is far more likely that the obscurity of certain
passages in their narratives is due, not to the ignorance of a medieval
scribe, but to our own inability to comprehend.
