Speros Vryonis, Jr.

Biography

The following tribute is from former students John Langdon and Professor Stephen Reinert of Rutgers University:

Speros Vryonis, Jr., prominent member of UCLA’s History Department from 1960-1982, and Director of the Gustave von Grunebaum Center for Near Eastern Studies from 1972-75 and 1979-82, quietly passed away on March 11, 2019 in northern California.

Professor Vryonis was a titan in the field of Byzantine Studies, whose publications on the transitions from Byzantine to Turkish rule in both Asia Minor and the Balkans were groundbreaking.  His masterpiece — The Decline of Medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor  and the Process of Islamization from the Eleventh to the Fifteenth Century (1971) — remains the premier study in the field, and ignited at publication an animated scholarly debate among specialists in Byzantine and kindred fields.  For this achievement, he was awarded the Haskins Medal by the Medieval Academy of America.  His elegant survey Byzantium and Europe (1968) arguably remains one of the best introductions to the field.  Vryonis’s scholarship extended deep into modernity,  his last major monograph, published in 2005, being The Mechanism of Catastrophe: The Turkish Pogrom of September 6–7, 1955, and the Destruction of the Greek Community of Istanbul. 

In addition to his appointment at UCLA,  Professor Vryonis held the Chair of Medieval & Modern History at the University of Athens (1976-84).  Following his departure from UCLA in 1997, he inaugurated NYU’s Onassis Center for Hellenic Studies (1988-93) and subsequently the Speros Basil Vryonis Center for the Study of Hellenism in Sacrameneto, California (1995-2000).  He produced a cadre of Byzantinists at UCLA and NYU, who taught/are teaching at Rutgers University, UCLA, the University of Pennsylvania, and Cardiff University.  His academic awards, elections, and appointments were numerous, including eight years as Visiting Scholar at Harvard’s Dumbarton Oaks Center for Byzantine Studies (1984-92).  In 1993, his students and colleagues paid tribute to Professor Vryonis with a two-volume Festschrift replete with important contributions to the wide array of fields in which he had published so extensively, and was such a renowned master.