Angelopoulos

Angelopoulos breaks in two. The stem is the given name Angelos, from angelos, a messenger, and in Christian use the angel; it ran from the humble to the imperial, the Angeloi having been a dynasty of Byzantine emperors. The ending is -opoulos, which means 'descendant of' and nothing else. Put together, the surname says only this: the family of a man called Angelos. No trade, no village, no nickname, just a father's name and the machinery that made it heritable.

That machinery had a home. The -opoulos ending originated in the Peloponnese, and though it long ago spread across the whole of Greece it remains the Peloponnesian signature. It was productive rather than fixed, attaching to an ethnonym as readily as to a personal name: Frangopoulos for the son of a Frank, Voulgaropoulos for the son of a Bulgarian. That is a record of who was living alongside whom in the Morea, written into the surnames instead of into a chronicle.

The ending inflects for whoever carries it. A daughter or wife of an Angelopoulos is an Angelopoulou, the genitive, reading as belonging to a man of that name; Greek is one of the few European systems where the surname still changes shape according to who holds it.

Greek surname endings are regional in a way few other European systems are, and -opoulos is one province of that map. The diminutive -akis belongs to Crete, -akos and -eas to the two sides of the Mani peninsula, -atos to Kefalonia by way of Venice, the genitive -ou above all to Cyprus, and -oglou to families out of Asia Minor, while -idis arrived in bulk in Macedonia and Athens with the Pontic refugees after the 1923 population exchange. Against all of these, -opoulos is the ending that stopped being local.

Hereditary family names appeared first among the Byzantine elite. Well into the 9th century they were rare; by the 11th and 12th centuries the great families used them routinely, drawn from placenames, nicknames or occupations. Below that level nothing hardened for centuries. Ottoman administration preferred patronymics and did not require surnames at all, so many of the names Greeks were using into the 19th century were still simply the father's name or a nickname, alive and changing rather than inherited.

What ended that was the 19th century, when patronymic surnames became common, and codification in the new Greek state, which fixed them in the formal Katharevousa spellings they still carry. The Greek identity card still records the father's name and surname beside the holder's own: the patronymic habit preserved inside a modern bureaucracy.

Theodoros Angelopoulos, known as Theo, was born in Athens on 27 April 1935; his father Spyros came from the town of Ampeliona in Messenia, in the Peloponnese where the suffix started. During the Greek Civil War his father was taken hostage and did not come back until the boy was nine. Angelopoulos said afterwards that his father's absence, and searching for him among the dead bodies during the Dekemvriana in Athens, shaped everything he later filmed. He read law at the University of Athens, went to Paris after his military service and dropped out of the Sorbonne to study film, then came home to work as a journalist and critic.

He began making films after the 1967 coup that installed the Regime of the Colonels: a first short in 1968, then political features about modern Greece in Days of '36 (1972), The Travelling Players (1975) and The Hunters (1977). The Travelling Players runs about four hours and consists of only eighty shots, each a choreographed scene with a great many actors in it. The style, slow and episodic, with long takes and barely perceptible changes of distance, made him one of the most respected film-makers in the world; Martin Scorsese called him a masterful film-maker, and Kurosawa, Bergman and Antonioni were among the directors who admired his work.

Emigration, the flight from home and the return to it, is the theme he came back to more than any other. In 1998 Eternity and a Day took the Palme d'Or at the 51st Cannes Film Festival. He was still directing at 76, at work on The Other Sea in Athens, when he died in January 2012; Greece buried him at public expense in the First Cemetery of Athens.

Lykourgos Angelopoulos was born at Pyrgos in the Peloponnese on 21 September 1941. He studied Byzantine music at the School of National Music under Simon Karas, and became protopsaltes, first cantor, at the Church of Saint Irene in Athens. In 1994 the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I named him Archon Protopsaltis of the Holy Archdiocese of Constantinople.

His life's work was to put the older notation back into living use. Following Karas, he wrote out his own chant editions by hand in an extended neumatic notation that restored signs taken from Late Byzantine practice, setting out the reasoning at Delphi in 1986. He founded and directed the Greek Byzantine Choir, taught at the School of Byzantine Chant of the Conservatory of Athens, and recorded on Mount Athos at Karyes in 1982. In France he sang with Ensemble Organum, setting Byzantine chant beside Old Roman and Ambrosian plainchant to hear what the two traditions had in common.

Manolis Angelopoulos, born on 8 April 1939, spent his childhood travelling Greece with his Hellenized Romani family's caravan, selling everything from carpets to watermelons. The trucks carried a microphone, and he began hawking the goods by singing them over the loudspeakers. His father died when he was thirteen; he went to work in clubs to keep the family, and cut his first record in 1957.

Through the 1960s he became one of the most celebrated singers in the country, on love songs and on songs about Greek refugees and far-off places, folding Romani and Arabic colouring into Greek popular music. Ta Mavra Matia Sou, his best known song, is built on a melody by the Egyptian composer Mohammed Abdel Wahab.

Theodore P. Angelopoulos, born in Athens in 1943, took a business degree at the University of Zurich. His family had been pioneers of the Greek steel industry and had moved into dry cargo shipping in the early 1950s, and he built the two together into an international group: Metrostar Management, founded in Athens in 1996, became one of the world's leading operators of oil tankers, and in 2002 he took over the Dutch shipbuilder Oceanco.

His wife took the name into Greek public life. Gianna Angelopoulos-Daskalaki, born Ioanna Daskalaki in Heraklion in 1955 and a law graduate of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, was elected to the Athens Municipal Council in 1986 and to the Greek Parliament in 1989. She led the bid that brought the 2004 Summer Olympics to Athens, the first woman to preside over a summer Olympic bidding committee, then was left off the organising committee that followed. When the International Olympic Committee began to doubt Greece would be ready she was called back, in May 2000, to run it; Samaranch and Rogge both credited her personally with the result, and at the closing ceremony Rogge called them unforgettable, dream Games.

In 2019 Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis asked her to lead Greece 2021, marking the bicentenary of the Greek War of Independence. The name is now attached to endowments abroad, among them the Angelopoulos Chair for Public Health and International Development at Harvard and the Gianna Angelopoulos Programme at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge.

The Peloponnesian ending has long since left the Peloponnese. Vassilis Angelopoulos, born in 1965, is principal investigator of the THEMIS mission at the University of California's Space Sciences Laboratory in Berkeley, and Jaime Angelopoulos, born in 1982, is a Canadian sculptor.

At home the name sits as firmly in the Church as in the arts. Athanasios Angelopoulos, born at Katerini in northern Greece on 6 November 1939, studied theology at Athens and Belgrade, taught at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki from 1973 and held its chair of ecclesiastical history from 1984. He founded the Institute for National and Religious Studies there, took the Academy of Athens award in 1980, and in 2007 was appointed a special adviser to the Holy Synod.