WASHINGTON, DC – James L. Marketos passed away on May 13 after battling cancer for many years. He was 68 years old.

His wife, Denise Marketos, shared the sad news via email: “It is with a heavy heart that I share the passing of my dearest husband, Jim Marketos. He passed away peacefully on May 13 after living courageously with cancer for many years.”

Marketos’ funeral will be held on May 24 at Saint Sophia Greek Orthodox Cathedral located at 36th Street and Massachusetts Avenue NW in Washington, DC. The viewing will be at the church beginning at 10 AM and the funeral service will follow at 11 AM.

“I would like to thank everyone for the love and support they have given our family during this very painful time,” Mrs. Marketos said.

The son of Judge Leon J. Marketos and Mrs. Elizabeth (Cosolias) Marketos of Utica, NY, James L. Marketos, Esq. was a partner with the Washington, DC, law firm of Berliner, Corcoran & Rowe, LLP. A member of the New York and District of Columbia bars, he specialized in corporate litigation, representing private clients in state and federal courts throughout the United States. He received his Bachelor’s degree from Princeton University and his Juris Doctor degree from New York University where he was Co-Editor-in-Chief of The Annual Survey of American Law and was awarded the law school’s Vanderbilt Medal. From 1997 to 2008, he served as chairman of the American Hellenic Institute (AHI) and continued on as a Board Member of the organization.

His father retired as the chief judge of the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of New York before he passed away in 1996. His mother passed in 2004.

Marketos related some of his family’s history in an article titled A Glimpse of Peristasi which appeared in the November/December 2007 issue of Odyssey magazine. His maternal great-grandparents Dimitrios and Elisavet Cosolias, lived “in Peristasi, an ethnically Greek seaside village of eastern Thrace, then a province of the Ottoman Empire (now part of Turkey) bordering the northern shore of the Sea of Marmara,” he wrote.

His maternal great-grandmother Elisavet Cosolias was “among the 1.3 million Greek Orthodox evacuees from Turkish territory” in 1923, Marketos continued. She was “by then a widow in her 70s whose six children had already relocated to Greece and America.”

She immigrated to Utica, NY, to live with Marketos’ grandfather and his family, and later moved to her daughter’s home in Ann Arbor, MI, where she died in 1937. Marketos’ article also describes a 1969 visit to Peristasi with his parents so that his mother could “see the places she knew from descriptions heard as a young girl, perhaps even to gaze at the Cosolias house.”

Continuing his efforts on the issues of concern to the community, in 2018, Marketos wrote a letter to the editor published in the Washington Post in response to an editorial titled “A Better Way to Use U.S. Leverage” saying that, “if we’re considering ways to increase U.S. leverage over Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, why not publicly demand that he remove all Turkish forces from Cyprus?”

He introduced Professor Ismini Lamb during a 2019 AHI event on the Smyrna Catastrophe. In 2020, Marketos was also one of the speakers for the AHI event commemorating the 98th anniversary of the Catastrophe.

May his memory be eternal.