Evangelos Kofos

Who is Evangelos Kofos?

Evangelos Kofos, was born in Edessa, Macedonia, Greece in 1934 and graduated from Anatolia College of Thessaloniki in 1952. His grandfather, Evangelos Ant. Kofou, had been an elected elder of the Greek Community Council in the then Ottoman-held Edessa, responsible for the Greek schools of the region. A generation later, his father, Andonis Ev. Kofou, had been organized in the Resistance in Edessa during the German occupation, until his arrest and imprisonment in 1943 in a notorious prison camp in Thessaloniki. As a result the family moved to the mother’s native town, Thessaloniki.

Evangelos Kofos has been a Special Adviser on Balkan affairs at the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy, Athens, Greece.

In 1995 he was appointed Visiting Fellow on Greek Studies at Brasenose College, Oxford. Prior to this he had served for over thirty years at the Greek Ministry of Foreign Affairs as Special Consultant on Balkan Affairs and retired with the rank of ambassador-counselor.

He holds a Ph.D. in History from Birkbeck College, University of London, a M.A. in International Relations from Georgetown University, Washington D.C., and a B.Sc in Journalism from Ohio University, Athens, Ohio. Kofos is a member of several academic societies and served for many years as Special Counsellor on Balkan affairs in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Athens. He is also the author of a number of books and essays on Greek and Balkan issues. Two of his books, Greece and the Eastern Crisis, 1875-1878, and The History of the Macedonian Question in the 19th and 20th centuries \[in Greek, 1993, unpublished\], have received Academy of Athens awards. His earlier book, Nationalism and Communism in Macedonia, has been considered a pioneering work on a controversial Balkan issue.