May 28, 2009 - Lambros Papantoniou of Washington D.C. passed away peacefully this morning.
He was 63, weeks shy of his birthday on July 4th, the American holiday which filled this proud immigrant son of Greece with immense honor.
Mr. Papantoniou, known to official Washington for decades as "Mr. Lambros," was the Washington diplomatic correspondent for the Greek daily newspaper Eleftheros Typos, Radio Thessaloniki, and the U.S.
weekly newspaper Greek News.
He was born on July 4, 1945 in Mandra Xanthi, a village in Greece's Western Thrace region. His parents were refugees, who fled from Asia Minor in 1922 to settle in Greece.
He studied law at Aristotle University in Thessaloniki, and arrived in the United States in 1973. He studied international law and political science at the University of California, Berkeley, where he obtained his Master's Degree and Juris Doctorate.
In 1975, after the Turkish invasion of Cyprus, he began working as a journalist, specializing in U.S. foreign policy issues relating to Greece, Turkey, Cyprus and the Balkans. Over the course of a prodigious career, he was correspondent to many Greek and Greek-American Media, and participated at numerous foreign policy conferences and panels in the United States, Greece, Cyprus and Australia.
A member of St. Sophia Greek Orthodox Cathedral in Washington, D.C., he is survived by three sisters and one brother in Greece, one brother in Boston, and his beloved nephew Stavros Stavrakis, who resides in Philadelphia with his wife Vasiliki and their children Prometheus, Aristotle and Elektra Cynthia.
