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Eleni (Hélène) Glykatzi-Ahrweiler, the Greek-French Byzantinologist whose work and public voice helped restore Byzantium to the center of European history—not as a dimmed epilogue than a durable, governing civilization—died on Monday. She was 99.  

Ms. Ahrweiler argued that the Byzantine Empire was best understood not through caricature but through its institutions: administration, law, diplomacy, geography and the long, pragmatic struggle to hold together a state at the hinge of continents. In a 1985 interview, she described her subject with a line that became a kind of intellectual calling card: a state multiethnic and multicultural, yet unified (“Byzance était un État multiethnique, multiculturel et pourtant unitaire” – Le Monde, May 6, 1985).

That insistence—unity without purity, continuity without myth—made her both an internationally cited scholar and, in France and Greece, a recognizable public intellectual: sharp, concise, impatient with easy nationalism, and willing to treat history as a tool for understanding contemporary power.

She was also a barrier-breaker in French academic life. Trained in Athens and then Paris, she rose through research at the CNRS and teaching at the Sorbonne, eventually becoming president of Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (1976–1981) and later rector of the Academy of Paris (1982–1989), a rare public role for a medievalist—and, repeatedly noted at the time, a striking one for a woman at the summit of the French university system.  

Her scholarship ranged widely, but her signature was a Byzantium that felt structurally real: a state that survived through governance, through adaptation, and through the management of diversity. Her books and collected studies helped shape how the empire’s political logic is taught and debated.  

On May 8, 2025, she was among the principal speakers at a tribute event for Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew at the Basil & Elise Goulandris Foundation in Athens, an occasion that brought together political, academic and cultural figures to reflect on his life and work. On her remarks she emphasized the importance of the Ecumenical Patriarchate for Hellenism and recalling Patriarch Bartholomew’s standing in European public life, including his remarkable encounter with President Jacques Chirac in Paris.  

In a statement on her passing, Archbishop Elpidophoros of America, said: “Eleni Glykatzi-Ahrweiler gave the world a truer Byzantium—an inheritance of faith, learning, and resilient governance. We honor her memory with gratitude and prayer.”

Biography

Ms. Ahrweiler was born in Athens on Aug. 29, 1926, and came of age during the upheavals of war and occupation. Biographical accounts describe her joining the Resistance in Athens while still very young, at the start of World War II, then studied history and archaeology at the University of Athens before moving to Paris in 1953 to pursue Byzantine studies.  

In Paris she built a career that combined scholarship with institution-building. She worked at the CNRS before joining the University of Paris faculty and helping shape the post-1968 university landscape, including the creation and leadership of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, where she later spoke of navigating student agitation and political factionalism while expanding the university’s physical and academic footprint.  

In 1982, President François Mitterrand appointed her rector of the Academy of Paris and chancellor of the universities of Paris—the first woman to hold that post.

To the wider public, she became one of the rare specialists who could make Byzantium feel contemporary without flattening it—linking the empire’s long contest between East and West to modern questions of European identity, borders and cultural continuity. In the language she used, Byzantium was not a museum: it was a case study in how states survive when surrounded, when outnumbered, and when forced to negotiate rather than conquer.

Among her best-known works are Byzantium and the Sea (Byzance et la mer), Studies on the Administrative and Social Structures of Byzantium (Études sur les structures administratives et sociales de Byzance), The Political Ideology of the Byzantine Empire (L’Idéologie politique de l’empire byzantin), Byzantium: Countries and Territories (Byzance : les pays et les territoires), and later books that widened her reach, including The Making of Europe (The Making of Europe), Europeans (Les Européens), and Why Byzantium? (Pourquoi Byzance). She received numerous French and international honors and decorations, including Commandeur de la Légion d’honneur, the Grand-croix de l’ordre national du Mérite, Commandeur des Palmes académiques, Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres, Austria’s Order of Merit (silver grand officer), and the Olympic Order.

She married Jacques Ahrweiler and had a daughter, Marie-Hélène

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