Kosmas Balanos was a Greek mathematician, author and school director
Background
He continued the work of his father Balanos Vasilopoulos, and was among Greece"s leading scholars of his time. He was born in Ioannina, a center of the 17th–18th-century modern Greek Enlightenment movement. Balanos was the first son of the scholar Balanos Vasilopoulos and became a priest like his father had done before him.
Around 1760 he succeeded his father as director of the Gouma School in Ioannina.
Career
He taught at various Greek-language schools of the Ottoman Empire, initially in Thessaly, and then in Thessaloniki. During the 1790s, the Gouma school faced serious financial difficulties, but Balanos managed to find new sponsors among the prosperous Ioannite diaspora and especially the Zosimades brothers. Balanos, as a conservative scholar, used archaic Greek in his work and rejected the use of the Demotic, the vernacular form of the Greek language.
