I was once told by the party bureau: you behave like a Ukrainian national bourgeois
Peter Gergeli is a Ukrainian Hungarian, translator, musician, composer, and one of the organizers of the Lviv Hungarian Cultural Society. He was born on November 29, 1951, in the city of Vynohradiv in Transcarpathia, which became part of Soviet Ukraine after the end of World War II. During his school years, he was fond of music and mathematics, and played in one of the first rock bands in Transcarpathia, VIA Eridan. In 1968, he entered Leningrad State University named after A. Zhdanov, Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics, but soon changed his major. In 1973-1978, he studied at the Lviv Conservatory, then advanced his skills in Yerevan and took an internship with Professor Albert Lehman of the Moscow Conservatory. During the events that accompanied the collapse of the Soviet Union, he participated in the activities of the Committee of Civil Accord together with Viacheslav Chornovil. He took part in the World Congress of Hungarians in Budapest in 1992. He worked as a lecturer at the Lviv Conservatory, a military translator at the Hetman Petro Sahaidachnyi Ground Forces Academy. He translates from Hungarian into Ukrainian and vice versa. Having contributed to the formation of the Hungarian community in Lviv in the first years of Ukrainian independence, he is still actively involved in its life.