The noted linguist, philologist and orientalist Alexander Csoma de Koros was born in 1784 at the Transylvanian village of Romania into a Protestant family belonging to the military caste of Szeklers, who had been serving as frontier guards against the Ottoman expansion. With the prospect of becoming a Pastor, the young Csoma entered the famous Bethlen College at Nagyenyed, where for the first time he became interested in the origins of the Magyars. It was also in this scholarly environment that his linguistic aptitude became apparent and by the time he graduated in 1815, in additional to Hungarian and Romanian, he had already mastered Greek, Latin, Hebrew, French and German and he achieved various scholarships to visit different countries and to learn linguistics. Csoma stayed in Kanum for three years, working on the dictionary and reading through Tibetan manuscripts. In 1831 he travelled to Kolkata where he was employed by the Asiatic Society of Bengal as a librarian, cataloguing Tibetan books and working on this dictionary. During this period, he published in the Society’s journal a number of articles on Tibetan Geography and philology, and in 1834 his famous work the first Tibetan-English Dictionary came out. He was widely regarded as the founder of Tibetology. In 1833, he was conferred the Honorary Membership of the Asiatic Society and in 1834 by the Royal Asiatic Society. After that he still continued his research in Tibetan, Sanskrit and other languages until 1942 when he decided to resume his quest and reach the land of Yugars by crossing Tibet. In a stroke of ill fate, soon after his departure he contracted malaria and died in Darjeeling before reaching Tibetan territory. He was buried in the English cemetery of the town and three years later, in 1845, the Asiatic Society of Bengal erected as stone on his grave. Over his grave was raised, on a low platform, a polygonal obelisk-type column.