János Czecz

János Ferenc Czetz

János Ferenc Czecz , also Johann Ferdinand Czetz and Juan Fernando Czetz (born June 8, 1822 in Ghidfalău / Gidófalva , Transylvania ; † September 6, 1904 in Buenos Aires ) was an Austrian and Argentine military technician , officer and Hungarian freedom fighter .

Life

Czecz was the son of an imperial hussar officer. He attended the Theresian Military Academy in Wiener Neustadt. He joined an Austrian infantry regiment in 1842 as a lieutenant, joined the Austrian General Staff in 1846 , the Hungarian War Ministry in June 1848 and then as a military advisor to the National Defense Committee , where he became acquainted with the leaders of the Hungarian uprising .

Lajos Kossuth appointed him chief of the general staff in Transylvania and in place of Baldacci gave him command of the remnants of the army there. Soon Czecz had reorganized the army and justified the trust that General Józef Bem placed in him .

Czecz was promoted to general and commanding officer in Transylvania in May 1849; but because of an injury to his foot he could not personally take part in the operations against the advancing Russians. After the lost battle of Világos he went to Hungary, where he stayed hidden with friends through the winter until he was able to flee to England via Hamburg in the spring of 1850 . Here Czecz published his "Memoirs about Bems campaign in Transylvania in the years 1848 and 1849" (Hamburg 1850).

From England he moved to Spain, where he met Prudencio Rosas , an Argentine military leader. He returned to England again, where he visited the brother of Prudencio Rosas, the former Argentine dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas , who lived there in exile in Southampton. From England he traveled back to Spain, where he married Basilia Ortiz de Rosas , the daughter of Prudencio Rosas, in Seville . After the death of their father-in-law, the couple traveled to Argentina in 1860.

There he first worked as a surveyor and then joined the Argentine military in this capacity and thanks to the support of Lucio Victorio Mansilla , a cousin of his wife. Here he created the first modern map series that plotted the borders of Argentina to Brazil and Paraguay. At the beginning of the Triple Alliance War against Paraguay he was promoted to colonel, but was bedridden and prevented by a month-long illness. In 1866 he was busy planning a railway line between Santa Fe and Esperanza (Santa Fe) . When a conflict broke out in the south of the province of Córdoba, he was given the task of building fortifications in the area of ​​what is now General Villegas . In 1870 he was one of the organizers who founded the Argentine Military Academy. From 1875 he was head of the topographical development of the Entre Rios province. In addition, worked as a teacher at the Colegio del Uruguay in this province. In his last years he dealt again with the planning of railway lines in the south of the province of Buenos Aires. He died in the Argentine capital in 1904.

literature

• Constantin von Wurzbach : Czetz, Johann . In: Biographisches Lexikon des Kaiserthums Oesterreich . 3rd part. Typogr.-literar.-artist publishing house. Establishment (L. C. Zamarski, C. Dittmarsch & Comp.), Vienna 1858, p. 109 ( digitized version ).
• Czetz Johann. In: Austrian Biographical Lexicon 1815–1950 (ÖBL). Volume 1, Publishing House of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna 1957, p. 163 f. (Direct links on p. 163 , p. 164 ).

Web links

• János Czetz , in: A Pallas Nagy Lexikona (Hungarian)