Konstantinos D. Paparrigopoulos

Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos was born in Constantinople in 1815 and passed away in Athens in 1891. In 1821, following the execution of his father along with other prominent Greeks, he fled with his mother to Odessa, where he studied at the Richelieu Lyceum as a scholar of the Russian Emperor Alexander I. In 1830, he came to Greece and continued his studies in Aegina and later at French and German universities. He taught history at the high school and the University of Athens. His unparalleled comprehensive work, the five-volume "History of the Greek Nation," was published from 1860 to 1872 and was completed with the "Epilogue of the History of the Greek Nation" in 1877. This was the first work to present the entire history of the Greek nation as a continuous and indivisible narrative, an unbroken chain of related periods and events. Paparrigopoulos was the first to highlight the significant importance of medieval Hellenism and paved the way for the restoration of Byzantium's reputation.