Sad News For Howard University Alumni
Abdul Karim Bangura
Scholar Nick Stavrou is Mourned by Community
Nikolaos Athanasios Stavrou, Ph.D. was professor Emeritus at Howard University in Washington, D.C. The respected scholar and champion of Hellenism, passed away at dawn on Thursday, December 29.
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Nikolaos
Athanasios Stavrou, Ph.D., respected scholar and champion of
Hellenism, passed away at dawn on Thursday, December 29. He was
professor Emeritus at Howard University in Washington, D.C
Professor Stavrou loved life and filled it with creative work. Few knew of the chronic heart problem about which he never talked or complained, so those who knew him were shocked to learn of his death at Suburban Hospital in Maryland at the age of 76.
He was a Balkan expert with Balkan roots, his credibility resting in both his scholarly rigor and his birth in the village of Griazdani, in the part of Epirus that was granted to Albania by the Great Powers. During WWII the Greeks were targeted for extermination by Albanian Nazis known as Balli Kombtar, or Ballists. The Stavrou family barely survived. While most Albanians converted to Islam during centuries-long Ottoman rule, the ethnic Greeks maintained their devotion to Orthodox Christianity, which enraged the Nazis and their sympathizers. In 1952 Stavrou’s family escaped from Albania to Greece and later moved to the United States.