Final Farewell to András Bíró

Today marks the final farewell to András Bíró (1925–2024). His personal papers are now available for research at the Blinken OSA Archivum.

"Born in Bulgaria to a Serbian father and a Hungarian mother, he almost had three mother tongues; he was an anti-fascist in Hungary, then first a devout and later a disillusioned communist, a rejected party-membership applicant, and, despite everything, a liberal and egalitarian leftist. He lived in Paris, in the Rome of Fellini and Mastroianni in the 1960s, in Kenya and Mexico, until, in the second half of the 1980s, he returned home(?)," wrote István Rév in his obituary. In 1990, Bíró established the Autonomia Foundation, striving to strengthen civil society and support marginalized groups. "For their resolute defence of Hungary's Roma minority and effective efforts to aid their self-development," the Autonomia Foundation and András Bíró were awarded the Right Livelihood Award, also known as the "Alternative Nobel Prize," in 1995.

His papers provide an insight into important chapters of his personal and professional life. The collection includes state security documents on Bíró from 1956 to 1988, his collected interviews between 1995 and 2016, correspondence relating to the journals he founded for the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, documents relating to the Interim Anti-Ghetto Committee in Miskolc, and an account of his formative experiences in Mexico in the 1970s.