Speros Vryonis

Speros Vryonis Jr. (Greek: Σπυρίδων "Σπύρος" Βρυώνης, born July 18, 1928 in Memphis, Tennessee) is an American historian of Greek descent and a specialist in Byzantine, Balkan, and Greek history.^[1] He is the author of a number of works on Byzantine and Greek-Turkish relations, including his seminal The Decline of Medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor (1971) and The Mechanism of Catastrophe (2005).

Vryonis attained his Bachelor of Arts in ancient history and the classics from Southwestern College (now Rhodes College) in Memphis, Tennessee in 1950. He received his Masters of Arts from Harvard University two years later and his Ph.D. from the same school in 1956.^[2] Vryonis carried out his post-doctoral research at Dumbarton Oaks before joining the history faculty at the University of California, Los Angeles in the mid-1960s, where he served as the director of the G. E. von Grunebaum Center for Near Eastern Studies. In 1987 he was tapped to head the Alexander S. Onassis for Hellenic Studies at New York University. Vryonis is also the former director of the Speros Basil Vryonis Center for the Study of Hellenism and is currently the AHIF Senior Fellow for Hellenism and for Greek and Turkish Studies.^[2]

A two-volume festschrift was published in his honor in 1993.^[3]

He currently resides in northern California.

Selected works

• "Isidore Glabas and the Turkish Devshirme," Speculum 31 (July 1956), pp. 433-443
• Byzantium and Europe New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968.
• "The Byzantine Legacy and Ottoman Forms," Dumbarton Oaks Papers 23/24 (1969/1970), pp. 251-308.
• The Decline of Medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor and the Process of Islamization from the Eleventh through the Fifteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971.
• The Mechanism of Catastrophe: The Turkish Pogrom of September 6–7, 1955, and the Destruction of the Greek Community of Istanbul. New York: Greekworks.com, 2005.

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