Macedonian Life February 1979 No 105

Constantine

Comanoudis

an outstanding

Greek of the

diaspora

Among the distinguished Greeks of the diaspora coming from North­ern Greece Constantine Com­anoudis holds a prominent place. Born in 1874 into a well-to-do Thracian family of Adrianople which had emigrated to Begrade in 1829 fleeing the Turkish misrule and op­pression, Constantine Comanoudis attended secondary school in Bel­grade and then went to study law in .the Belgrade University.

Always eager to learn, he left Belgrade for Paris where he did graduate work earning his Ph. D. in Law in 1901. In 1902 he returned to Belgrade and took up a post in the Serbian Ministry of Economics. At the same time he sought a univer­sity career and managed to be elected associate professor at the Belgrade University. Two years later he was appointed to the chair of administrative law at the same university and in 1920 he became a full professor.

Side by side with his academic career, Constantine Comanoudis sought a political one and in 1920, the year he was appointed full professor at Belgrade University, he ran for office and was elected a deputy in the Serbian National Assembley. From January 1921 to December 1922 Constantine Com­anoudis served as Serbian Economics Minister. He served in this post with rare distinction and some of his accomplishments were outstanding as, for example, the com­position of the first budget of the United Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, the making of a loan of 500 million dinars in Serbia in 1921 and another loan of $ 100 million from the U.S.A. in 1922.

He ran for political office twice again in 1923 and 1925 as a candidate of the Democ­ratic Party and was both times victorious. When his third term in the Ministry ofEconomics was up. he sought and won the office of Mayor of Belgrade which he held for many a term. Thanks to his tireless activity and uncommon esthetic appreciation, he beautified the city of Belgrade leaving behind him the fame of Belgrade' s best and most active mayor.

Next to teaching and politics writing en­gaged the attention of this many-sided per­sonality. In 1901 he published in French a meticulus treatise entitled Les Traites d' Alli-ence au XIX siecle. Eight years later he wrote in Serbo-croatian his voluminous work called Administrative Law which sawanother printing in 1920. Scores of other treatises and articles have been published by Serbia' s most prominent periodicals.

Constantine Comanoudis died in 1962 at the age of 88. He was married to a Serbian lady called Militsa who died in 1950. Comanoudis's legal, political and literary contributions to Serbia have been hailed by the Yugoslav social historians themselves as is evidenced by an article published in the second volume of the pre-war Encyclopedia of the Serbs. Croats and Slovenes p. 498.

K. Hatzipavlou Ι. Papadrianos