Remembering Vangelis Kechriotis in the Merkez Han

Mehmet Kentel, RCAC Library Head Librarian and former RCAC Fellow, remembers Vangelis Kechriotis, the late ‘professor, colleague and friend of so many of us’…

It may not be a shiny-happy idea to have a commemorative piece as one of the first posts of this blog. But life happens, and one needs to record it. Here’s a very simple, short record of a very sophisticated scholar of the Ottoman Empire, with a wide range of academic interests, who passed away on August 27, 2015.

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Vangelis Kechriotis was a Greek historian, who held an undergraduate degree from the University of Athens, a master’s degree from the University of Essex, and a doctoral degree from the Leiden University. He has been a faculty member of Boğaziçi University since 2005. His dissertation was on the Greeks of Izmir at the end of the Ottoman Empire. He worked extensively on intra-communal relations, communal organizations, and political agencies of Greeks, and port cities in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His articles were published in numerous leading journals in the field, and in edited volumes. He also co-edited two volumes: Economy and Society on Both Shores of the Aegean (with Lorans Tanatar Baruh, in 2010) and Modernism: Representations of National Culture (with Ahmet Ersoy and Maciej Górny, in 2010). His most recent project was on the political and economic networks of Cappadocian Greeks. Last year he was an RCAC Senior fellow with this project.

In his last years he was also actively involved with the History Foundation in Turkey, where he served as the Vice President. He was an active participant of discussions of history and historiography in Turkey as well as in Greece, writing articles intended for larger audiences in Turkish and Greek newspapers. His scholarship and popular writing was a radical critique of the dominant nationalist paradigms of history writing in both countries. Even during his days in the hospital he was one of the leading experts in Turkey who commented on Greek politics and especially the rise (and fall?) of Syriza.

He was the husband of Ceyda, father of Rana, a professor, colleague, and friend of so many of us. He is being dearly missed in many corners of the world, and definitely so in the Merkez Han…

May he rest in peace.