Ithaca College

Calling hours for former longtime speech communications professor Constantine “Gus” Perialas will be held on Friday, May 13, from 4 to 7 p.m., with a Trisagion Service at 6:45 p.m., at St. Catherine’s Greek Orthodox Church, 120 West Seneca Street in Ithaca. Funeral services will be held at the church on Saturday, May 14, at 10:30 a.m.

Perialas passed away this past Monday. A native Ithacan, he began teaching in the Department of Theatre Arts and Speech Communication in 1967. Through much of the 1970s he served as vice president for student and campus affairs. He returned to teaching in 1977 and served as chair of the Department of Speech Communication from 1982 to 1994, retiring in 1996. The Perialas Prize—a campus-wide oratorical contest—was established by the department in 1997 to celebrate and promote the principles of classical rhetoric.

In 1984 Perialas had been ordained as a priest in the Greek Orthodox Church, taking at that time the name Epiphanios. He served as a pastor in a number of parishes, and in 2003 he was elected as the first bishop of the newly created Metropolis of Spain and Portugal.

His full obituary can be found in Friday’s Ithaca Journal.