The Pallis/Vlasto Archive

Explanatory Notes

This Archive is relevant not only to Marietta Pallis but also to her immediate and more distant forebears, and to her siblings and other more recent descendants, many of whom in the Ralli, Vlasto and Pallis families were distinguished scholars and/or artists in their own right

The Ralli and Vlasto families were part of a clan of ‘merchant princes’ originating from the Greek island of Chios in the eastern Aegean, which was infamously laid waste in 1822 by the Ottoman Turks in the wake of the Greek War of Independence.  Following the massacres in 1822, family members who were not executed or sold into slavery migrated to mercantile centres across Europe and the Mediterranean, and the firm of Ralli Brothers established itself in the UK as bankers and East India merchants.  Marietta’s father, Alexandros Pallis, married into the Ralli family and was promptly sent off to Bombay to oversee the firm’s business interests there. He later returned with his family to Liverpool, where he became Senior Partner.

For more information about families of the Chian Diaspora, please visit www.christopherlong.co.uk.

Most items in the Archive are either written by, or are about, or are in some other way related to a specific person; some books/items in the collection may simply have belonged to the person in question.  The relevance of items in the archive to any particular family or person is indicated in Column F by a code letter:

a     Alexandros (Alex.) A. Pallis (1851-1935) – Language Scholar

a2   Julia P. (Ralli) Pallis (1857-1940)

b    Peter Theodore Vlasto (1879-1941) – Language Scholar

b2  Aziza K. (Pallis) Vlasto (1885-1985)

c    Marietta Pallis (1882-1963) – Ecologist and Artist

d   Alexander (Alec) A. Pallis (1883-1975) – Scholar and Greek public servant

e   Adrea(s) Pallis (1888-1977) – Artist and Silversmith

f   Marco Pallis (1894-1989) – Mountaineer, Buddhist Scholar and Musician

g  Dominie (Vlasto) Nicholls (Lady Nicholls) (1911-2005) – Diplomat and writer

h  Alexis Peter Vlasto (1915-2000) – Codebreaker and Language Scholar

j   Jill (Hilda Joan) (Medway) Vlasto (1916-1968) – Musician and teacher

k  Peter Dominic Vlasto (1956-  ) – Musicologist

l   Alexandra (Alix) Vlasto (1954-  )

o   Members of associated families of the Chian Diaspora, e.g. Rodochanaki, Paspati, Petrocochino, Calvocoressi, Argenti, Zarifi, etc.

p   Pallis family – General

r    Ralli family – General

v   Vlasto family – General