It is our sad duty to report to you that Sophie Papageorgiou died on March 24, 2025. She was a librarian at the Gennadius Library for 36 years. Hired in 1969 upon the retirement of then Assistant Librarian Eurydice Demetracopoulou, Sophie’s career spanned the latter years of Frank Walton’s directorship and the arrival of our current Director, Maria Georgopoulou.

Sophie earned her undergraduate degree in Classics from the University of Thessaloniki and her degree in library science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champagne. After serving seven years as Assistant Librarian at the Gennadius, she was promoted to Acting Librarian in 1976 when Frank Walton retired. From 1976 through 1980, Kress Foundation-supported annual professors at the Gennadius were tasked with the directorial duties that lay beyond the scope of the Librarian – organizing lectures, exhibitions, fundraising and so on; and Sophie ran the Library. In 1980, Sophie was promoted to the position of Librarian, and in 1984 she was joined by Beata Panagopoulou as Director.

Over the years of Sophie’s librarianship, the Gennadius added well over a thousand titles per year and took in major archival collections (including the papers of Ion Dragoumis in 1977-78). In the mid 1980s demand for research time among readers was such that the library even instituted Tuesday and Thursday night opening hours until 8pm! But the pressure on storage space and simply the age of the original building also meant that Sophie had to face every librarian’s nightmare: closure for renovations. During her tenure, perhaps the most impressive of these projects was the creation of a sub-basement level below the main reading room. There were other crises, too. In 1985, the staff discovered that 363 volumes had been stolen over the year. The next year a reader was caught writing in books and stealing one of them; he was never linked to the previous mass theft.

Despite such challenges the collection continued to grow, often through donations, and the storage, classification, and retrieval systems of the library steadily evolved. In July 1990, Sophie was granted a leave to hold a Mortenson Fellowship at the University of Illinois, where she studied the “automated catalogue” system. On her return, she joined with the other librarians of Athens to incorporate the Gennadius holdings into the broader, electronic catalogue, now named Ambrosia.

She was a member of the American Honorary Society BΦM, the Society of Librarians of Greece, the Bibliophile Society and the Historical and Ethnological Society of Greece. Sophie had published extensively in Greek and English numerous scholarly articles, exhibition catalogs, and monographs based on the Gennadius collections, such as Travelers and artists in Corinth 12th - 19th centuries (Athens, 2009); and in Greek American Missionaries in Greece, 1820-1850 (Athens, 2001); Imvros, the History of a Greek Island (Athens, 1994); and a History of Samothrace, Fourth Century A.D. to 1912 (Athens, 1982).

Sophie retired in February 2006, having acquired thousands of books for the Gennadius, having overseen the management and preservation of its incredibly diverse and precious collections, and, most importantly, facilitated the research of countless researchers. As much as anything, that help, encouragement and support she provided – as memorialized in so many footnotes of thanks by so many scholars – is a legacy that will last forever.

We offer sincere condolences to her family.

Mark Lawall and Maria Georgopoulou