The interest in traditional popular culture appeared in the eighteenth century in Szeged and was maintained mainly by the scholarly teachers of the Piarist grammar school, and the Franciscan monks. Accordingly, most of the contributors were priests. The most important representatives of pre-ethnographic, pre-folkloristic interest are András Dugonics (1740-1818), Benedek Csaplár (1821-1906), Lajos Kálmány (1852-1919), the Bunevac Ivan Antunovich (1815-1888), Sándor Pintér (1841-1915), and the Jewish Immanuel Löw (1854-1944). They conducted research on the fields of dialectology, history, folk poetry and religiosity. They discovered and presented the traditional life of Szeged and its surroundings.