Theophrastos Georgiadis


Theophrastos Georgiadis was a Greek author and teacher. His work about the once prosperous urban center of Moscopole, today a small mountain village in southern Albania, is considered of great value since it concerns the period before the town's destruction in 1916.

Life

Georgiadis was born in Moscopole, then part of the Ottoman Empire, in a region known as Northern Epirus by Greeks. He was a teacher and director in the local Greek school until 1916. When Moscopole was ravaged by irregular bands during World War I, and most of its cultural buildings were destroyed, he was compelled to leave.

Work

In his volume Moschopolis, first published posthumously in 1975 in Athens, Georgiadis makes brief descriptions of the 22 churches and chapels of Moscopole, from which only 5 survive today. He includes information such as donors’ inscriptions of each church, the church registers as well as descriptions of the architectural style and the decoration of each building. For instance, about the Church of the Archangels Michael and Gabriel he mentions that it had two chapels dedicated to Saint Spiridon and Saint Nahum, which are in ruins now. In the Church of the Holy Virgin, notes that a scene of the Apocalypse was depicted in the porch which is now almost completely destroyed. Georgiadis gave also details about several churches that are completely destroyed, such as Saint Euthimios.