Obituaries (from SPBS Newsletter 2007)

Gregorio de Andrés

At the recent London International Congress of Byzantine Studies I learned with great regret of the death of Gregorio de Andrés, author of the monumental catalogue of the Escorial Greek manuscripts, published back in the sixties; they served as a model of their kind, all the more remarkable as Fr Gregorio (as he then was) was a relative amateur in the field; he later left the Augustinian Order and did further work cataloguing Greek manuscripts in Madrid (see J.-M. Olivier, Répertoire des Bibliothèques et des Catalogues de MSS grecs de Marcel Richard, 3rd ed., Turnhout 1995, pp.513-516).

Dr. J.A. Munitiz

Professor J.M. Hussey, 1907-2006
Formidable Byzantine Scholar

Joan Mervyn Hussey, historian, Byzantine scholar and teacher: born Trowbridge, Wiltshire 5 June 1907; Assistant Lecturer in History, Manchester University 1937-43; Lecturer in History, Bedford College, London 1943-47, Reader 1947-50; Professor of History, Royal Holloway College, London 1950-74 (Emeritus); President, British National Committee for Byzantine Studies 1961-71; died Virginia Water, Surrey 20 February 2006.

Joan Hussey made an important contribution to Byzantine studies in Britain and internationally; she was a formidable scholar with penetrating judgement, wide knowledge and deep understanding of her subject.

For many years she was engaged in editing and contributing to the new Byzantine volumes in The Cambridge Medieval History. Planned immediately after the Second World War with the help of N.H. Baynes, the two parts of volume 4, The Byzantine Empire, did not appear until 1966-67, which delay demonstrates the enormous task in dealing with such a wide subject and co-ordinating with such a diverse group of scholars.

At the same time, as President of the British Committee for Byzantine Studies, Hussey was involved in the organisation of the 13th International Byzantine Congress held in Oxford in 1966.

Later, from 1970 to 1984, she applied herself to the history of the Byzantine Church, stimulated into activity by Henry Chadwick. Her The Orthodox Church in the Byzantine Empire, in the Oxford History of the Christian Church series, appeared in 1986.
Born in Trowbridge, Wiltshire, in 1907, Joan Hussey was first taught privately at home, then at Trowbridge High School for Girls and the Lycée Victor Duruy in Paris. She read History at St Hugh's College, Oxford. As a postgraduate she was first supervised by W.D. Ross in Oxford and later in London by N.H. Baynes, completing her PhD in 1935.

As an International Travelling Fellow of the Federation of University Women in 1934-35, and then as Pfeiffer Research Fellow at Girton College, Cambridge, she had the opportunity to study abroad. She spent sometime with the Byzantinist Franz Dölger in Munich and began investigating the manuscripts of the 11th-century scholar John Mauropous in the Hofbibliothek in Vienna, in the Vatican Library and in the monastery of St Stephen on Meteora. It was at this time that she also did a good deal of work on the great Byzantine mystic Symeon the New Theologian which she later handed over to Father Basil (later Archbishop) Krivocheine.

In 1937 she was appointed Assistant Lecturer at Manchester University, then from 1943 Lecturer and, subsequently, Reader at Bedford College, London, and from 1950 Professor of History in London University at Royal Holloway College, where she remained Head of the History Department until she retired in 1974.

Academic obligations during this period left little time for research. Her PhD thesis had already been expanded and published in 1937 as Church and Learning in the Byzantine Empire, 867-1185. In addition, various articles reflected her research on Mauropous and Symeon the New Theologian, and her long-standing interest in Byzantine monasticism.

At London University Hussey introduced undergraduate special and optional subjects mainly on Byzantine topics, and went on to produce for her students a brief survey of Byzantine life and history, The Byzantine World (1957), which still remains a model of its kind.

With her English-speaking students in mind she went on to translate George Ostrogorsky's 1952 Geschichte des byzantinischen Staates, as History of the Byzantine State (1956), to provide them with an up-to-date general history of Byzantium. To those who are familiar with translating from one language into another, the exceptional merits of this work are self-evident.

Meanwhile in 1964 she had discovered the apparently neglected and certainly deteriorating papers of the 19th- century Byzantine historian and Philhellene George Finlay in the British School at Athens. For the next 10 years she spent every September in Athens trying to sort these out. The result was The Finlay Papers: a catalogue (1973) and the subsequent edition of two volumes with selected items, The Journals and Letters of George Finlay (1995).

Parallel with her academic activities and links with European universities, she had a keen concern for educational developments both in universities and schools. (University material, she knew, was largely formed in the schools.) For many years she was one of the Chief Examiners for the Cambridge Local Examination Board, and as a teacher of London University she had contacts with the developing university colleges abroad. This meant involvement in setting up appropriate history syllabuses at various levels in Africa and in Malaya - giving her the opportunity to visit universities and schools in Nigeria, East Africa (particularly Uganda), the Sudan and Malaysia.

"Looking back", Hussey once wrote in a letter, "apart from the valued links abroad, I should like to pay tribute to two of my Oxford tutors, E.M. Jamison and E.S.S. Proctor, who instilled into me as an undergraduate the principles of scholarship, to the University of Manchester which revealed the true meaning of an academic community, to my own students in the University of London whose discussions so often elucidated East Roman history, and most of all to Norman Baynes who demonstrated the perfect balance between historical detail and the wider implications of the subject, and whose friendship illuminated so many other aspects of everyday life."

Tribute was paid to her in turn in an 80th-birthday Festschrift published in 1988 under the appropriate title Kathegetria ("Teacher"). A forceful and unassuming character, Joan Hussey was an inspiring kathegetria. She represented the old tradition of scholarship and integrity.

Julian Chrysostomides

Geoffrey Constantine Lintott, 1926-2006

Geoffrey Lintott was born in Brighton where he studied painting at the College Art from 1948-1951 after serving in the Intelligence Corps. In 1951 he won a scholarship to study Byzantine iconography at the British School at Athens and in 1975 he studied print-making for a year and developed his own method of printing linocuts without a press. His Byzantine studies bore fruit much later when he accepted a commission to paint six icons for a newly-built church, and subsequently, he received numerous requests for his painstaking and radiant icons. In 2003, he was received into the Orthodox Church taking the name Constantine.

A.H.S. Megaw, 1910-2006
Public servant who defined Byzantine archaeology

Peter Megaw, architect, scholar, administrator, diplomat, was a key figure in the development of the now flourishing subject of Byzantine archaeology. He was born on 14 July 1910 in Portobello House on the Grand Canal in Dublin, then a fashionable nursing-home. (Philip Grierson, the Byzantine numismatist, was also born there in November 1910). Peter was christened Arthur Hubert Stanley, and was brought up on Antrim Road, part of a distinguished Belfast family – ‘There’s a whole tribe of Megaws’, said an impatient senior archaeologist. His father was Honorary Secretary of the Linen Hall Library, and his three brothers, Eric, who was to become a pioneering radio engineer, Basil, another archaeologist, and Dennis, a designer and typographer, were responsible for first calling him ‘Peter’. Like them he was educated at Campbell College, and like Basil he went on to Peterhouse, Cambridge, where he read architecture.

Peter then set up house in a (literally) unfurnished flat in London with a fellow architecture graduate, James Mason, but those were hard times for architects. So Mason tried acting, and Megaw archaeology. Both were successful: Mason broke into films while Peter took his architecture to the British School of Archaeology at Athens, funded by the Cambridge Walston Studentship in 1931, the Craven and Byzantine Research and Publication Funds (1932-33), then as Macmillan Student (1933-35), Senior Student and Librarian (1934-35). He embarked on various classic architectural studies of middle Byzantine churches, at Osios Loukas, in Athens and the Mani, as well as excavating with Humfrey Payne at Perachora. He acted as Assistant Director and briefly Acting Director, 1935-36, before he was appointed to the newly created Department of Antiquities of Cyprus in 1936.

In Athens, he also met, and married in 1937, Elektra Eleni Mangoletsi, an Albanian from Koritsa, born in Thessalonike on the feast of St. Demetrios, brought up in Manchester and educated at the Slade; elegant, exotic, a great beauty and an accomplished artist, she was thoroughly down-to-earth with a wicked sense of humour and a delight in teasing young men (who made Melba toast for her) and amusing children (who invited her and Peter to their birthday parties). If complementarity is the source of perfection in a marriage, she was the perfect wife for Peter at every stage of his career. Without her, it may be hazarded, his career would have been very different. She brought imagination, character, a strong aesthetic sense, an interest in ethnography and an enormous amount of fun to their life together.

Cyprus
Peter’s life work was the Department of Antiquities. Appointed in 1936, he remained in this post until 1960. Described in Bitter Lemons as ‘a quite exceptional archaeological officer’, he was a highly competent colonial officer in charge of a fledgling department which he nurtured into the effective and respected agency it has became. He left digging to his Cypriot colleagues and foreign expeditions, directing his own energy towards organizing the service with meticulous attention to detail, editing reports, keeping an eye on developments in Farmagusta, setting up a medieval museum at Paphos, saving the apse at Kiti, rescuing tomb slabs. His excellent eye he put to use in the conservation of standing buildings, assembling teams of permanently employed stonemasons and carpenters, buying land to preserve the site as well. His restoration of churches and monasteries, castles and fortifications all over the island earned him friends in almost every village. He saw the importance of survey and rescue archaeology early and set up the Archaeology Survey of Cyprus. He stayed in Cyprus during the war, though Elektra left for South Africa and later Egypt to put her artistic skills towards the war effort. After the earthquake of 1953 he designed the houses provided for those whose homes had been flattened. He brought into the filed the bright young Cypriots who were to continue his work after independence, and ensured their university education. He received the CBE in 1951 in recognition of his achievement as a public servant, but he was to offer yet more signal service: during the delicate independence negotiations, he was trusted as a true friend of Cyprus. He may be seen in photographs of the signing of the Treaty of Guarantee on Independence Day, 16 August 1960, standing in black tie and decorations behind the signatories, keeping a close eye on their progress.

Istanbul and Athens
After a short period as Acting Field Director of the Byzantine Institite in Istanbul (1961), he became Director of the British School in Athens in 1962. He was a distinguished and much loved director, acting effortlessly as honorary cultural attaché at the embassy, creating the conditions for good research, developing new generations of Byzantine archaeologists. Students of that era recall the family atmosphere that Peter and Elektra created in the School, and among the outlying Byzantinist households: the excursions to remote archaeological sites, the glorious Christmas parties, unshockable assistance with personal problems, enthusiastic support for impending marriages, charades in the Upper House, scrabble in the Finlay. They gave shrewd advice to students, and treated them like adults. Under Peter’s guidance, the School weathered the beginnings of the colonels’ regime, built the Visiting Fellow’s flat and the Byzantine room in the Library, opened up seven new excavations (one in Libya, one in Cyprus, two Byzantine) – and recorded its Byzantine levels.

Washington
After retirement from the School, his second retirement, Peter went back to Dumbarton Oaks as Visiting Scholar during the academic year 1968-69 (he had been there previously in the fall of 1958 and the spring of 1962). This connection was of great value as the patronage of Dumbarton Oaks was brought to bear on the cleaning of churches and the financing of excavations. The sixties and early seventies were a golden age of collaboration between Dumbarton Oaks and Cyprus, the time of the cleaning of Neophytos and Asinou, Monagri, Lagoudera and Chrysostomos, of the excavation of Saranda Kolones and Kourion. And in all this Peter played an important part, helping for example to appoint to the staff of Dumbarton Oaks a field-architect who would work in Turkey and Macedonia as well as Cyprus.

Retirement
Peter and Elektra divided their lives between winter in their flat in Athens, round the corner from the School, and summer in London in Perrins Walk: in both they were hospitable, bringing together their archaeological ‘family’, introducing students from ‘home’ to a new generation of Greek scholars. And in spring and autumn he excavated, and she worked on her paintings, in Cyprus. A place on those excavations at Saranda Kolones and Kourion was greatly coverted, and the team included Greek and Turkish Cypriots, Greeks, other Europeans and Americans. At weekends the whole expedition relocated to the remotest corners of the island and entrancing deserted beaches to find rare orchids for Elektra to paint as part of her major project on the wild flowers of Cyprus. (Both Peter and Elektra, at different times, were responsible for designing an issue of Cypriot stamps, and Elektra’s were of flowers). At the end of excavations Peter was know to sing Theodorakis. Eventually a permanent base in Cyprus was found, at Exovrisi in Paphos, to assist the continuing work. After the invasion of 1974 Peter led the first archaeological expedition into the newly divided Cyprus, with a heavy heart. But the work continued, even after the death of Elektra in June 1993.

Last Years
Peter became an Ordentliches Mitglied of the Deutsches Archaeologisches Institut and Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, receiving the Frend Medal in 1995. He was an early Honorary Life Member of the Society for the Promotion of Byzantine Studies, and in Cyprus was both an honorary citizen of Paphos and honoured by his erstwhile colleagues in recognition of his contribution to Cypriot archaeology (every single person invited to the party came). His 90th birthday in 2000 was celebrated in the Institute of Classical Studies, and also in the School in Athens, and his Festschrift, Mosaic, was published in 2001. In November of 2002 he returned to Belfast for the last time for the opening of a small library in the Institute of Byzantine Studies to house his books and celebrate his work. He was still working at Saranda Kolones in his 90s, but increasingly travel became difficult and his health declined. He died in London on 28 June 2006.

Legacy
Peter Megaw made a major contribution to our understanding of Byzantine monuments in Istanbul, Greece and Cyprus. His monograph on Kanakaria was published in 1977 and proved to be of forensic as well as academic importance when the mosaics were stolen; preliminary fieldwork reports, pottery studies and articles on Cypriot churches appeared in Dumbarton Oaks Papers, or the Annual of the British School at Athens. His magnum opus on the episcopal precinct at Kourion is in press at Dumbarton Oaks. His nice understatement, amazing visual memory and accuracy were prized by art historians and archaeologists alike. But this underestimates the breadth and originality of his achievement, in both Crusader and Byzantine Studies. He saw Cyprus in the context of the Levant and of southern Anatolia. He excavated, conserved, studied mosaics and wall-painting and became the doyen of middle and late Byzantine glaze wares, studying fabric and technique rather than iconography. He discovered a crusader castle (previously thought to be a temple of Aphrodite), grasped the (controversial) importance of the stained glass from Pantokrator and Chora, and with young colleagues invented kite photography and pioneered the scientific analysis of middle Byzantine pottery. He saw the way ahead, remarkable in such a modest, discreet and academically cautious man. His lifetime’s devotion to the material culture of the Greek world led him into paths never contemplated by the ‘British School architects’ of an earlier age. What he shared with them – besides his training – was a passion for the standing buildings of Byzantium which he combined with inspired scholarship, academic rigour and the diplomatic skills necessary to create a subject, Byzantine archaeology.

Peter and Elektra had no children. Peter hardly ever supervised doctorates, and he never held an academic job. But as an expatriate for much of his life he trained and inspired generations of Byzantinists, indeed far more students than he would have had as a professor. Above all, he enabled them to see Cyprus through his eyes, and those of his wife Elektra: the archaeological and art historical establishment of Greece and Cyprus, as well as the world-wide community of Byzantinists, owes a great deal to them both.

Margaret Mullett

Professor Anna Różycka-Bryzek, 1928-2005

Professor Anna Różycka -Bryzek graduated from the faculties of history of art and English philology at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow. She was an outstanding pupil of Vojeslav Molè (1886-1973) - Slovene art historian, who initiated systematic research on Byzantine and Postbyzantine art in Poland. In the beginning of her scientific activity, Professor Różycka-Bryzek concentrated on Italian painting of 14-15th centuries, and on Postbyzantine art, particularly in Slavic countries.

In 1961 Różycka -Bryzek received a PhD degree in humanities on the basis of the thesis entitled Bizantynsko-ruskie malowidla scienne w kaplicy Swietokrzyskiej na Wawelu [Byzantine-Russian wall-paintings in the Holy Trinity chapel of Wawel Castle] - see a bibliography of her works from 1956-2000 in: Ars graeca - Ars latina. Studia dedykowane Profesor Annie Różyckiej-Bryzek [Ars graeca - ars latina. Studies dedicated to Professor Anna Różycka-Bryzek], Krakow 2001, pp. 17-22. In the following year she published an important work on frescoes in the church Santa Maria di Castelseprio.

Until 1978 she worked in the National Museum in Krakow. During that time she edited a catalogue of the exhibition 1000 years of Art in Poland in the Petit Palais (Paris, 1969) and in the Royal Academy of Arts (London, 1970). In 1983 she completed her habilitation thesis, entitled Bizantynsko-ruskie malowidla w kaplicy zamku lubelskiego [Byzantine-Russian wall-paintings in the chapel of Lublin Castle]. This work constituted a part of the analysis of the Byzantine frescoes in Poland, created under the personal patronage of Ladislas Jagiello, the Grand Duke of Lithuania, and through the marriage with Jadwiga of Anjou the King of Poland, which Professor Różycka-Bryzek prepared in the course of a few decades. She was also the author of pioneering works on the origins and medieval history of the Our Lady in the Paulin monastery of Jasna Gora in Czestochowa and Orthodox monasteries in south eastern Poland. In addition to that Professor Różycka-Bryzek dedicated a few years to research on the corpus of icon painting from Little Poland.

In 1989 she held the Chair for Byzantine Art History in the Department of Art History at the Jagiellonian University. Since 1997 she was Correspondent Fellow of the Polish Academy of Sciences and Letters.

Jacek Maj

Obituaries from BBBS 2010:
Dr Benedikt Benedikz (1932-2009)
Konstantinos Ikonomopoulos (1980-2009)
Profess Ihor Sevcenko (1922-2009)

Obituaries from BBBS 2009:
John Barron (1934-2008)
Julian Chrysostomides (1927-2008)
Zaga Gavrilović (1926-2009)
Michael Hendy (1942-2008)
Angeliki Laiou (1941-2008)
Geoffrey Lewis (1920- 2008)
Evelyn Patlagean

Obituaries from BBBS 2008:
Kenneth Storer (1924-2007)

Obituaries from BBBS 2006:
Professor Dr. Natela Aladashvili (1923-2006)
Professor Philip Grierson (Dublin 1910-Cambridge 2006)
Jean Irigoin

Obituaries from BBBS 2005:
Sir Steven Runciman (1903-2000)

Obituaries from BBBS 2004:
George Every
Jakov Ljubarskij
Michael Maclagan
Peter Topping

Obituaries from BBBS 2003:
Lennart Rydén

Obituaries from BBBS 2002:
Professor Sir Dimitri Obolensky

Obituaries from BBBS 2001:
The Hon Sir Steven (James Cochran Stevenson) Runciman, C.H
Nikaolaos Oikonomides
Herbert Hunger