”We carry out research relying on the work of generations.” A conversation with Zoltán Hajdú on the occasion of his 70^th birthday

Zoltán Hajdú was born on May 4^th, 1952 in Végardó. He completed his secondary school studies at the Rákóczi Secondary Grammar School in Sárospatak, and after his military service, he graduated from the Lajos Kossuth University of Debrecen in Geography and History. In 1976–1977, he was an assistant lecturer at the Technical University of Heavy Industry in Miskolc. He defended his doctoral dissertation at the Institute of Geography at the Lajos Kossuth University in 1977, and in 1977–1978, he became a scholarship researcher of the Central Office of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Pécs. Since 1978 he has been a research fellow at the Transdanubian Scientific Institute (and its successors) of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He defended his CSc dissertation in 1986 and became a Doctor of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 2002. His habilitation procedure was successfully completed in 2013 and he became a professor in 2017. The present semi-structured interview was conducted in March 2022 at the Institute of Regional Studies. The aim of the article is to help readers get acquainted with the most important stages of Zoltán Hajdú’s life, his relationship with geography, as well as the factors underlying the previous two and affecting his career.

Keywords: human geography, political geography, administrative geography, history of science