In Memoriam

Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 27 (2019): 340-344

On March 11, 2019, Speros Vryonis, Jr., a towering figure in Byzantine history, Hellenic studies in general, 
and related Islamica, passed away in Sacra-
mento, California. In anticipation of many 
tributes to him and commentaries on his 
astonishing scholarly legacy, I will limit 
my remarks here to a sketch of his life and 
some personal recollections. 

V r y o n i s  w a s  b o r n  i n  M e m p h i s , 
Tennessee, on July 18, 1928. It was then a 
semi-rustic urban center on the Mississippi 
in the segregated South. He always spoke 
with a slight Southern accent. His parents 
w e r e  i m m i g r a n t s  f r o m  t h e  i s l a n d  o f 
Cephalonia (various spellings) off the west 
coast of Greece. His father established a 
large bakery and meat processing plant 

in Memphis, and as a boy Vryonis worked 
in both. He had fond memories of his 
childhood. He and his father frequently 
went fishing in the lakes and streams 
around the city.

He grew up bilingual in Greek and 
English. From early in his life, his parents 
impressed upon him the delights of Greek 
culture and civilization from Homer to the 
present. He would sit enraptured, listening 
to relatives and members of the Greek 
community in Memphis discuss the glories 
and tragedies of Hellenism. He learned 
of the Greco-Turkish war of 1919–21 and 
began to wonder how Anatolia had become 
Turkish.

In 1937, a few months before his tenth 
birthday and having just participated in a 

RemembeRing SpeRoS VRyoniS, JR.  
(1928–2019)



Remembering Speros Vryonis, Jr.

Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 27 (2019): 341

State of Tennessee piano competition in 
Nashville, his parents took him from school 
to visit relatives in Cephalonia. They sailed 
on the Queen Mary to Southampton and 
then crossed Europe to Venice, where he 
had his first introduction to Byzantine 
art. From there they continued to Athens, 
where his parents took him to visit the 
Acropolis and Parthenon, a site that left 
an indelible impression on him. This visit 
was instrumental in determining his 
future professional and emotional life. 
Later, when he was a student for a year at 
the American School of Classical Studies 
in Athens, he visited the site at least five 
to ten times a month. Later still, when 
he taught at the University of Athens, he 
continued to visit it repeatedly. It was his 
intellectual and spiritual lodestone. 

Vryonis spent three delightful months 
in Cephalonia, thoroughly immersed in 
the life and language of the island and 
exploring every square meter of it. A year 
after he returned to America, his parents 
separated. At the age of ten, he was sent 
to Castle Heights Military Academy, a 
private school in Lebanon, Tennessee, 
which closed in 1986. There he excelled in 
athletics, especially basketball and boxing, 
but he was cut off from Greek life and 
culture. At the age of sixteen he returned 
to Memphis and attended Southern Law 
University for a year (he once thought 
of becoming a patent attorney) before 
enrolling at nearby Southwestern College, 
now Rhodes College. He had high praise 
for his teachers there and graduated in 
1950 with an honors thesis entitled “The 
History of Cephallenia from 3000 BC to 313 
AD.” After graduation he spent a year on 
a Fulbright Scholarship at the American 
School of Classical Studies in Athens and 
completed a project entitled “A Historical 

and Archaeological Survey of Cephallenia” 
(1951), which is held in the library of that 
institution.

Afterward Vryonis entered Harvard, 
earning an MA in 1952 and a PhD in 1956 
with a dissertation entitled “The Internal 
History of Byzantium during the Time of 
Troubles, 1057–81.” In 1960, after doing 
postdoctoral work at Dumbarton Oaks and 
teaching at Harvard, he became professor 
of Byzantine history at UCLA, where 
he remained for twenty-eight years. In 
1972, following the death of Gustave E. 
von Grunebaum, who had founded the 
Center for Near Eastern Studies at UCLA, 
he replaced von Grunebaum as director, 
serving twice until 1982. Between 1976 and 
1984 he also held the chair of Medieval 
and Modern History at the University of 
Athens. In 1985 he founded the Speros Basil 
Vryonis Center for the Study of Hellenism, 
which housed much of his library, in Los 
Angeles and served as its director until 
1988. In that year he left UCLA to become 
Alexander S. Onassis Professor of Hellenic 
Culture and Civilization at NYU and the 
director of the Onassis Center for Hellenic 
Studies (1988–1993). In 1995 he left NYU 
and returned to the Vryonis Center, 
which had meanwhile been relocated to 
Rancho Cordova south of Sacramento. 
Between 1996 and 2000 he again directed 
the Center until he retired to his home 
in El Dorado Hills, California, east of 
Sacramento. Upon his retirement the 
Vryonis Center was closed, and in 2002 its 
library was transferred to California State 
University Sacramento, where it became 
the Tsakopoulos Hellenic Collection.

V r y o n i s ’ s  s c h o l a r s h i p  w a s  o f 
e x t r a o r d i n a r y  b r e a d t h  a n d  d e p t h .  A 
testament to this was the two-volume 
Festschrift in his honor, TΟ EΛΛΗΙΚΟΝ: 



Remembering Speros Vryonis, Jr.

Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 27 (2019): 342

S t u d i e s  i n  H o n o r  o f  S p e r o s  V r y o n i s , 
Jr. (New Rochelle, NY: Caratzas, 1993), 
p r e s e n t e d  t o  h i m  o n  h i s  s i x t y - f i f t h 
birthday. In reflection of his own work, 
the contributions ranged over Hellenic 
Antiquity, Byzantium, Byzantinoslavica, 
Armeniaca, Islamica, the Balkans, and 
modern Greece. The first volume contains 
a  t w e n t y - p a g e  b i b l i o g r a p h y  o f  h i s 
publications. But the Festschrift by no 
means marked the end of his scholarly 
career. Indeed, he continued to publish 
on many subjects for another twenty-five 
years. An updated bibliography would 
probably reach forty pages.

Vryonis is most renowned, of course, 
for his unprecedented work 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 
question of how Asia Minor had been 
transformed from a Christian Byzantine 
region into a Muslim Turkish one had long 
intrigued him. In 1959 he mentioned to 
Helmut Ritter in Istanbul that he wanted 
to write a history of this transformation, 
but Ritter discouraged him, saying it would 
be impossible. Vryonis took this response 
as a challenge. The result was a work that 
revolutionized the study of medieval Asia 
Minor. By a thorough analysis of both 
Greek and Muslim sources, he reached a 
series of conclusions about the causes 
and consequences of the transformation. 
His arguments have proven fundamental 
to our understanding of medieval Asia 
Minor. In the introduction to the second 
revised edition (New York: Greekworks.
com, 2011), he reviewed scholarship 
by others on the subject after the first 
appearance of his book and noted that 
its basic theses had not been challenged. 

Decline was translated into Greek and two 
attempts have been made to translate it 
into Turkish, but the task has proven too 
daunting. Decline won the Haskins Medal of 
the Medieval Academy of America for the 
most outstanding book in medieval studies 
in 1975. Vryonis would go on to receive 
many other prestigious awards and honors 
during his career, including fellowships 
(grants), honorary doctorates, election to 
learned societies, and decorations.

V r y o n i s  a d h e r e d  t o  t h e  h i g h e s t 
scholarly standards. He had no tolerance 
for academics who did poor work or, above 
all, did not have command of the languages 
required for their research. This attitude 
was epitomized by his critique of the first 
volume of Stanford Shaw’s History of 
the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey 
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 
1976). Shaw was a colleague at UCLA, but 
when his work was published Vryonis 
considered it an affront to scholarly 
excellence, academic freedom, and the 
integrity of UCLA’s evaluative process and 
standards. He did not feel free to discuss 
it until after giving up the directorship 
of UCLA’s Near East Center, which he had 
renamed in honor of von Grunebaum, for 
whom he had the highest respect. He then 
published an exhaustive and devastating 
dissection of Shaw’s book in Balkan Studies 
24 (1983): 163–286. He demonstrated in 
painful detail that, apart from its countless 
mistakes, it was not an original work 
based on research in primary sources, 
as was claimed, but largely plagiarized 
from or based on secondary publications. 
Before Vryonis’s critique, Shaw’s book had 
already been harshly reviewed by Rifaat 
Abou al-Haj (AHR 82 [1977]), V. L. Menage 
(BSOAS 41 [1978]), and Colin Imber (EHR 93 
[1978]). In Turkey, Aydoğan Demir (Tarih 



Remembering Speros Vryonis, Jr.

Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 27 (2019): 343

Incelemeleri Dergisi 1 [1983]) considered 
the book worthless. I once asked Vryonis 
what Halil Inalcık thought of his criticism 
of Shaw’s work. He replied that Inalcık had 
agreed with him but said, “We need him”—
meaning that Shaw would help promote 
Ottoman studies.

I first met Vryonis in 1985, when I 
passed through Philadelphia while he was 
attending a conference at the University 
of Pennsylvania. I introduced myself 
and gave him a box of pistachios from 
Gaziantep, which greatly pleased him. In 
1989 my wife and I moved from Ankara 
to Vacaville, California, which turned out 
to be only about forty-five minutes from 
the Vryonis Center in Rancho Cordova. 
I frequently visited the Center to use its 
remarkable library, and Vryonis and I 
soon became good friends. He was kind 
and helpful and always encouraged me 
in my work. Eventually we began to 
meet monthly for lunch. I always looked 
forward to these lunches because each 
time was like a tutorial on Byzantine or 
Turkish history, or on the state of the art 
of Middle Eastern studies in the United 
States. He was candid in his criticism of 
certain academics, including a few at UCLA 
in addition to Shaw. He felt they were 
frauds because they published little or 
mediocre work or had a poor command of 
the necessary languages. As director of the 
Center at UCLA and privy to the quality of 
the publications of its members, he was in 
a good position to judge. Vryonis could do 
research in more than a dozen languages. 
For him, competence in the necessary 
languages was the sine qua non of solid 
scholarship. This he found lacking even at 
Harvard in the early 1950s. He would recall 
that his professor of Byzantine history 
 

would ask him to translate Greek for 
him and that instruction there in Middle 
Eastern languages was terrible. This was 
before H. A. R. Gibb arrived in 1955 and 
established the Center for Middle Eastern 
Studies at Harvard.

In the course of his life, Vryonis had 
to face a number of physical challenges. 
He suffered from seizures as a boy. He 
overcame two bouts of cancer, and near 
the end of his life, several vertebrae in his 
neck fused so that he could not raise his 
head. But the worst thing to befall him 
was the loss of the oldest of his three sons, 
Basil, who suffered from schizophrenia 
and took his own life while in his twenties. 
Vryonis never got over his son’s death and 
named the Center in Rancho Cordova after 
him. Our older son suffers from a similar 
condition, and Vryonis always offered a 
sympathetic ear to our dilemmas.

Vryonis was not religious, nor were 
his parents in any strict or deep sense, 
although they were a family of fourteen 
generations of priests. The Greek Orthodox 
Church was simply a part of their cultural 
upbringing. Its festivals were markers of 
the seasons and bonds of community.

Vryonis had a wicked sense of humor. 
I once asked him to recommend a Greek 
restaurant in Sacramento for lunch. He 
replied that the Greek restaurants in 
Sacramento ranked among the minor 
Greek tragedies. He was the only person 
I know who had met M. F. Köprülü. This 
m e e t i n g  o c c u r r e d  w h e n  t h e  T u r k i s h 
scholar and politician came to Harvard 
in 1956. Vryonis found Köprülü arrogant 
and described him as someone who “could 
see around corners.” Certain graduate 
students, including Shaw, served as his 
“ghulāms”. Curiously, when Vryonis was 
 



— Gary Leiser  
Independent Scholar

(leiser.gary@gmail.com)

Remembering Speros Vryonis, Jr.

Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 27 (2019): 344

teaching at the University of Athens, he 
said certain people there accused him of 
being a Turkish spy. 

Like that of any scholar, his home was 
full of books. Numbering, he guessed, 
around nine thousand, they were stacked 
from floor to ceiling in every room. 
His garage contained forty file cabinets 
s t u f f e d  w i t h  p a p e r s .  T h e y  i n c l u d e d 
correspondence, files from his time at 

UCLA, research notes, and even a rare set 
of court records of the Menderes’s trial at 
Yassıada in Turkey (1960–61). He also left 
behind a completed manuscript on the 
Greek sources for the Battle of Manzikert. 
One hopes that it will see its way to press 
as the final contribution to his remarkable 
legacy. As a great scholar, Vryonis was 
indeed sui generis. But more than that, he 
was a good teacher and friend.

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