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Speros Vryonis, Jr.
Speros Vryonis, Jr., is one of the most eminent Byzantinists of his generation. After a distinguished career at UCLA, he became the founding director of the Alexander S. Onassis Center for Hellenic Studies at New York University, from which he retired as emeritus Alexander S. Onassis professor of Hellenic civilization. Prof. Vryonis’s extensive work on the history and culture of the Greeks from Homer to the present, and on their relations with the Slavic, Islamic, and New Worlds, includes the seminal The Decline of Medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor and the Process of Islamization from the Eleventh through the Fifteenth Century; Byzantium and Europe; Studies on Byzantium, Seljuks and Ottomans; Byzantium: Its Internal History and Relations with the Islamic World; and Studies in Byzantine Institutions and Society. He has also edited, among other volumes, Aspects of the Balkans: Continuity and Change (with Henrik Birnbaum); Essays on the Slavic World and the Eleventh Century; Islam and Cultural Change in the Middle Ages; Individualism and Conformity in Classical Islam (with Amin Banani); and Islam’s Understanding of Itself (with Richard G. Hovannisian).
Prof. Vryonis is a Guggenheim Fellow and Fulbright Scholar, as well as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Medieval Academy of America, and the American Philosophical Society.
The Mechanism of Catastrophe: The Turkish Pogrom of September 6-7, 1955 and the Destruction of the Greek Community in Istanbul)
This lecture will focus on the Turkish pogrom of September 6-7, 1955, which caused massive material and moral damage to the Greek minority and etablis of the greater Istanbul region. In the half century that has elapsed since the attack, a considerable body of important materials that deal with it has emerged. A careful analysis of these sources enables one now to place the event within its historical context, and particularly within a political, economic, and social framework. This event constitutes an important chapter, not only for the fate of minorities in modern Turkey, but for the evolution and formation of the modern Turkish state and society.
In the last two decades Professor Vryonis has systematically studied and analyzed over 27,000 pages of Turkish, Greek, Armenian, English, and French archival and secondary sources in an attempt to reconstruct and provide a very thorough and well-documented account of the events of September 6-7, 1955. The result of this long and systematic study is a book that was published in 2005, titled, The Mechanism of Catastrophe: The Turkish Pogrom of September 6-7, 1955, and the Destruction of the Greek Community of Istanbul.
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