Pavlos Karolidis

Pavlos Karolidis or Karolides (Greek: Παύλος Καρολίδης, 1849 – 26 July 1930) was one of the most eminent Greek historians of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Life

Karolidis was born in 1849 in the village of Androniki (Turkish: Endürlük, now a suburb of Kayseri) in Cappadocia. His father Konstantinos Karolidis or Karloglou was a wealthy landowner and wheat merchant. Like most Cappadocian Greeks (see Karamanlides), Karolidis' mother tongue was Turkish, but he was educated at Greek schools, including two of the premier Greek-language institutions of the Ottoman Empire, the Great School of the Nation in Constantinople and the Evangelical School of Smyrna. In 1867 he enrolled in the School of Philosophy of the University of Athens, and in 1870 he went to Germany on a scholarship. He studied at the universities of Munich, Strasbourg and Tübingen and was awarded his doctorate in 1872.

On his return from Germany, he initially taught in the Greek high schools of Pera and Chalcedon. In 1876 he went to Smyrna to teach at the Evangelical School. There he remained until 1886, when he moved permanently to Athens in the independent Greek kingdom. After teaching in a high school for a few months, he was elected assistant professor of General History at the University of Athens. In 1893, he succeeded the dean of modern Greek historians, Constantine Paparrigopoulos, at the chair of Greek History. Initially, Karolidis pursued the idea of occupying a new seat for Oriental Studies, where he was more qualified, but his rivalry with Spyridon Lambros negated this prospect.