Béla Balogh

Béla Balogh was born on 16 February 1936 in Tarna Mare (Hungarian: Nagytarna), a village in Satu Mare County, Romania, close to the present Hungarian border. He began primary school in his home village and continued it in Halmeu (Halmi), where his family moved in 1945.

He completed secondary school at the Hungarian teacher training school in Satu Mare (Szatmárnémeti) in 1953 and went on to study history at the Bolyai University in Cluj, graduating as a history teacher in 1957. According to former colleagues, he escaped reprisals for the frank opinions he voiced during the 1956 Hungarian revolution only by chance.

After university Balogh became an archivist rather than a teacher. From 1957 to 1969 he headed the Lugoj branch of the Romanian State Archives. When the 1968 administrative reform abolished that office he moved to Baia Mare (Nagybánya), where he became a senior archivist at the Maramureș County State Archives. In 1974 he co-authored the guide to the Maramureș county archives.

In 1975 he completed an intensive course in Latin and palaeography in Cluj, which turned his interest towards the early modern period. Since publishing opportunities were narrow before 1989, he concentrated on economic history and on the history of education and culture, above all in Baia Mare and the former county of Szatmár. His early articles appeared in the Timișoara paper Szabad Szó, and from the 1970s in Bányavidéki Fáklya (later Bányavidéki Új Szó) and Szatmári Hírlap. His longer studies were published in Korunk, Művelődés, Erdélyi Múzeum, Revista Arhivelor, Levéltári Szemle and the yearbooks of the Baia Mare and Satu Mare museums.

His main works include a history of the schools of Baia Mare, A máramarosszigeti református líceum diáksága 1682 to 1851 (2000), Bányászat és pénzverés a Gutin alatt (2001, with Kálmán Oszóczki), the edited source collection Nagybányai boszorkányperek (2003) on the Baia Mare witch trials, A máramarosszigeti református líceum története (2013), a source book on the 1848 to 1849 revolution in Baia Mare and a monograph of Halmeu. He also wrote, with Kálmán Oszóczki, a study of the Baia Mare goldsmiths' guild of the 15th to 17th centuries (1979), and lectured widely, including at the 2002 commemoration of the printer Miklós Misztótfalusi Kis.

Balogh lived and worked in Baia Mare from 1969. Colleagues described him as a modest man and a day labourer of his community, who never turned away researchers who came to him for help and who served the public through his writing and lectures. Few details of his private and family life were published.

Béla Balogh died in Baia Mare on 27 October 2026, aged 90. His death was announced the same day by the Baia Mare historian Lajos Dávid in a tribute published by MaraMedia, which noted that he had celebrated his 90th birthday in February. The cause of death was not made public, and no funeral details had been published at the time of writing.

Balogh's work made the archives of Baia Mare available to a wide readership. Lajos Dávid wrote that thanks to him much more is known about the turning points of the town's past and about the Reformed college of Sighetu Marmației, that the witch trial records might otherwise have stayed on the archive shelves, and that the town's mining and minting history would be far poorer without him.

He received the Kőváry László Prize of EMKE in 2014 and the Pauler Gyula Prize, Hungary's highest state award for archivists, in 2022.