Gregorios Stathis, Emeritus Professor, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens

Professor Grigorios Stathis was born in the village of Platania–Gerakari, Ioannina, on 8 November 1939. After secondary education at the renowned Zosimaia School—a model high school—his university education (Athens–Rome–Copenhagen–Oxford) is threefold: Theology, Byzantine Philology, and Music and Musicology. He is emeritus professor of Byzantine Musicology and the Art of Chant at the Department of Music Studies of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (since September 2008) and Honorary Director of the Foundation of Byzantine Musicology of the Church of Greece (since June 2022).

A renowned researcher and musicologist with international recognition, and an exceptionally prolific author, he has a large, varied, and significant body of work numbering more than eight hundred titles, with a central axis the monumental seven-volume catalogue The Manuscripts of Byzantine Music – Mount Athos, which was awarded by the Academy of Athens on 30 December 1976.

As a university teacher he is also a spiritual “Father of Doctors,” of an entire generation of fifty young researchers—scientists, most of whom are also university teachers, and with his many-sided offering he is the essential founder of the science of Byzantine Musicology in Greece and a renewer of the Art of Chant, with international radiance.

Alongside his scientific and teaching work, inseparable from his life, is his compositional and artistic work. Grigorios Stathis is a composer with a large body of work and an interpreter of the pre-1814 notation. Above all he is a poet, with thirty collections and large multi-verse works (published: The Unredeemed – the Epic of Cyprus, a five-act drama in 3,612 fifteen-syllable verses (1965); The Love Word (three collections, 2001); The Athonite Enneads and Ballads of the Prisoner (2001), etc.).

With his decisive contribution and his digital engraving of the signs of chant (Stathis Series), their worldwide codification was achieved (4 July 1997) by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), as derivatives of the Greek alphabet (mid-10th century).

He established (2000) the institution of holding every three years an International Conference on “Theory and Practice of the Art of Chant.” Nine conferences (I–IX) have been held to date, with publication of the Proceedings of the first I–IV.

Ἰδιαίτερη φροντίδα ἐπέδειξε γιὰ τὴν ὀρθὴ ψαλμώδηση στὴ λατρεία καὶ ἀπὸ γυναῖκες ψάλτριες, καὶ δίδαξε τὴν Ψαλτικὴ Τέχνη καὶ σύστησε τοὺς Χοροὺς Ψαλτριῶν στὰ γυναικεῖα Μοναστήρια: Ὁ Εὐαγγελισμὸς τῆς Θεοτόκου στὴν Ὁρμύλια Χαλκιδικῆς, Παντοκράτορος – Ταὼς Πεντέλης, Παμμεγίστων Ταξιαρχῶν στὸ Πήλιον Ὄρος, καὶ Παναγίας Νέου Τιχβὶν στὸ Αἰκατερίνμπουργκ τῆς Ρωσίας.

He has been honored with commendations and awards from the Church of Greece (1971), an award of the Academy of Athens (1976), and has been presented with crosses, icons, and medals by Patriarchates, Metropolises, Monasteries, and various organizations and associations.

He was proclaimed Honorary Doctor (Doctor Honoris Causa) by the “Gheorghe Dima” Music Academy in Cluj-Napoca, Romania (31 July 2012), and by the “George Enescu” University of Arts in Iași, Romania (29 September 2017), and recently (2 December 2024) by the Department of Social Theology and Christian Culture of the Theological School of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.