Obituary Kornélia Buday
On 21 July 2008 Dr. Kornélia Buday (b. 1971) died following a haemorrhage in the brain. Only a couple of weeks before, on 5 July, she had given birth to her son Buday Soma Vendel. Kornélia Buday’s death put an abrupt end to the life of a promising theologian and scholar of religion who promoted Feminist Theology in her own country and did much to improve links between East and West.
In 2003 Kornélia Buday, Ela Adamiak and Rebeka Anic jointly published the Journal “Theologische Frauenforschung in Mittel-Ost-Europa / Theological Women’s Studies in Central/Eastern Europe / Recherche théologique des femmes en Europe orientale et centrale.” In the same year she completed her doctorate in Vienna, entitled “‘The Earth Has Given Birth to The Sky’ – Female Spirituality in the Hungarian Folk Religion“ (pub. 2004), for which she was awarded the “Marga Bührig Prize” in Switzerland in 2005. After this she was a guest lecturer in Budapest, Szeged and Bangalore. From 2006 to 2007 she worked at the Shamanism Archive of the Institute for Ethnology at the Károli Gáspár University, Budapest. From September 2007 onwards she had a full-time post as a university lecturer (ass. professor) in the Faculty of Humanities at the same university. In the winter semester 2007/2008 she held the Aigner Rollett Guest Professorship for Women’s and Gender Studies at the Karl-Franzens University Graz. She was an energetic and committed teacher at the Institute für Religious Studies in her current research area of gender and anthropology, shamanism and alternative healing methods and images of god and women in the religiously plural folk culture of Hungary. Kornélia Buday was working on her Habilitation [lecturer’s thesis] entitled “Genderspezifische Zugänge zu alternativen Heilverfahren am Beispiel schamanastischer Heilungswege” (“Gender-specific access to alternative healing methods –shamanic healing as an example”).
Rita Perintfalvi sent the following message from Hungary: “Kornélia Buday discovered the feminist way of thinking in Innsbruck when she started her doctorate there. During her time in Austria she brought together a group of Hungarian women theologians, thus starting the first Hungarian ESWTR group, which she led at that time. At the international ESWTR conference in Salzburg the young theologian offered to organise the first international ESWTR conference in Eastern Europe. In 2003 in the Netherlands the small Hungarian Section then decided to organise the next conference in Budapest. I first met Nelli in the year 2004, and at that time I joined the preparatory group. It was an incredible amount of work, and for two years we had meetings practically every weekend. Gender issues were something completely new in Hungarian theology. We did not receive any support from the Hungarian churches or society, just a lot of rejection and criticism. We were trailblazers with a difficult prophetic destiny.
I saw Nelli’s great enthusiasm and her commitment, which always remained unbroken despite the many organisational and financial difficulties. In my eyes she was a genuine heroine. It was thanks to her staying power and her energy that the first international ESWTR conference was able to take place in Budapest in 2005 with around 110 participants. Many of them will remember it. At this conference Nelli really wrote history, and not only the history of Hungarian feminist theology, but of the whole European Feminist Movement, which received a special Eastern European and Hungarian aspect through our conference .”
We are mourning Kornélia Buday. Many of us knew her, and experienced her and her commitment. May she rest in peace. We are mourning with her daughter Soma Vendel, who lost her mother so soon after her birth. We are mourning with all those who were close to Kornélia.
