Cyril Mango

Cyril Alexander Mango (14 April 1928 – 8 February 2021) was a British scholar of the history, art, and architecture of the Byzantine Empire. He is celebrated as one of the leading Byzantinists of the 20th century. Mango was Koraes Professor of Modern Greek and Byzantine History, Language and Literature at King's College London, the University of Oxford Bywater and Sotheby Professor Emeritus of Byzantine and Modern Greek Language and Literature and emeritus professorial fellow of Exeter College, Oxford. Mango was born on 14 April 1928 in Istanbul, Turkey, the youngest of three sons of Alexander A. Mango, a descendant of a Genoese family who came to Istanbul via Chios, and Adelaide, known as Ada, (née Damonov) Mango, a refugee from Baku. One of his brothers, Andrew Mango, who lived and worked in London becoming head of the South East European Service of the BBC World Service, was also a respected scholar and author on Turkey. His other brother, Anthony, moved to America and became a senior figure in the United Nations. They were raised in a multi-lingual household where the common language was French but the children also spoke Russian, Greek, English and Turkish. Cyril Mango was also fluent in Spanish and Italian. After being schooled at the English High School for boys in Istanbul, where his father, who became a British citizen after studying law in England, was a barrister and legal counsel to the British ambassador, he graduated from the University of St. Andrews with an M.A. in classical philology in 1949. He went on to study at the University of Paris, leaving the Sorbonne with a doctorate in history in 1953. Harvard University, Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, D.C.