Greek-American Professor Nikolaos Stavrou Passes Away

Greek-American Nikolaos Athanasios Stavrou passed away on Thursday, December 29, at the age of 76.

After facing a chronic heart disease, the Professor Emeritus of Political Sciences in the Howard University and renowned Balkan scholar took his final breath in a Maryland hospital.

Mr. Stavrou was born in Griasdani, a village in Northern Hepirus, which was granted to Albania by the Great Powers. He wrote many books on basic national issues of Greece, Cyprus and the broader region, conducted several researches, but is better known for his articles in the US media on “the rights of the Greeks of Northern Hepirus, which had been completely violated by the Albanian authorities” as he would characteristically point out.

Mr. Stavrou had moved everyone with his yearlong efforts aimed at finding the bones of his brother Gregory in Albania, in order to bury them in his father’s tomb. Gregory Stavrou had been sentenced to death and executed by the Hoxha regime on September 3, in 1953. The Greek state honored him for his sacrifice in 1991. The surviving members of the Stavrou family escaped from Albania to Greece and later moved to the United States.

Professor Nikolaos Stavrou had founded and run the “Mediterranean Quarterly” magazine, which was considered to be one of the most credible magazines of political content published in Maryland.