Greek-American historian Speros Vryonis died, aged 90.
The Memphis-born academic, writer and professor was the son of Greek immigrants from Cephalonia. He received his BA from Southwestern College, Memphis, Tennessee and went on to earn a postgraduate degree and PhD from Harvard University for a thesis on “The internal history of Byzantium during the time of troubles, 1057-81”.
He taught and directed at numerous institutions and was appointed director of the Alexander S Onassis Centre for Hellenic Studies at New York University in the late 1980s. He was also the director of the Speros Basil Vryonis Center for the Study of Hellenism at Rancho Cordova, California.
He had an extensive bibliography. Books include “The Decline of Medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor and the Process of Islamization from the Eleventh through the Fifteenth Century” (1971), “The Mechanism of Catastrophe: The Turkish Pogrom of September 6-7, 1955, and the Destruction of the Greek Community of Istanbul” (2005), and “Byzantium and Europe” (1968).