Antoniou

Antoniou is the genitive of Antonios, the Greek shape of the Roman Antonius, and it means simply 'of Antonios'. The given name behind it reached the Greeks above all through Anthony the Great, the third-century Egyptian hermit whom the Orthodox Church reckons the founder of Christian monasticism and the father of all monks. That made him an apt patron for a people whose monasteries, from Athos to Meteora, are pillars of the faith rather than an ornament at its edge.

A boy called Antonios was named for a monk, and in a language that makes a family name by putting the father's name in the genitive and leaving it there, his sons became Antoniou. The northern ending gives the same family as Antoniadis, and the bare genitive is counted a Cypriot ending too.

Greek given names cluster hard by locality, and what they cluster around is a shrine: the patron of the town, a famous church, or the monastery up the road. Spyridon belongs to Corfu, Gerasimos to Kefalonia, Dionysios to Zakynthos, Andreas and Androulla to Patras and to Cyprus, Markos and Markella to Chios; Savvas and Charalambis mark descent from Asia Minor. A village baptismal register reads back the dedication of its own church.

Antonios sits outside that pattern, and the reason is the man himself. He was the patron of no single island or harbour but the founder of the monastic life, and the name travelled with the institution rather than with a local cult.

Theodore Antoniou was born in Athens on 10 February 1935 and trained there first, studying violin, voice and composition at the National Conservatory of Athens and at the Hellenic Conservatory. He went to Germany for conducting, to the Hochschule für Musik and to the International Music Centre in Darmstadt. His teachers included Günter Bialas and the Greek composer Yiannis Papaioannou.

His early music hesitated between a plain atonality and a Bartókian folklorism before he took up serial technique and refined it into the manner that marks the rest of his output; in the 1970s the influence of Jani Christou, Bernd Alois Zimmermann and Krzysztof Penderecki became audible in his scores. The catalogue ran from opera and choral writing to chamber and solo instrumental music, and included more than a hundred and fifty scores for theatre and film. Over two hundred of his works were published, by Bärenreiter, G. Schirmer and Philippos Nakas.

He conducted as widely as he composed, for the Boston Symphony Orchestra Chamber Players, the radio orchestras of Berlin and Paris, the Bavarian Radio Orchestra and the National Opera of Greece. On 11 July 1996 his Kommos B, written in memory of Morton Gould, had its world premiere at the Naumburg Orchestral Concerts in the bandshell in Central Park. He was a member of the Academy of Athens, and in 2004 the Alfred Toepfer Stiftung awarded him its Herder Prize. He died in Athens on 26 December 2018.

Antoniou spent most of his working life teaching in the United States. He held posts at Stanford University, the University of Utah and the Philadelphia Musical Academy, and from 1978 he was professor of composition at Boston University. In 1974 he was engaged as assistant director of contemporary activities at the Tanglewood Music Center in Lenox, Massachusetts, and held that post until the summer of 1985.

Wherever he landed he founded an ensemble to play the music nobody else would programme: ALEA II at Stanford, the Philadelphia New Music Group, the Hellenic Group of Contemporary Music, and ALEA III, resident at Boston University, which he led through repeated European tours. He directed the ALEA III International Composition Competition. Athens never lost him: he was president of the National Greek Composers' Association, and from 1989 director of the Experimental Stage of the National Opera of Greece.

Angeliki Antoniou was born on 12 July 1956, studied architecture in Greece, then went to Berlin to study film direction at the German Film and Television Academy. She has worked as director, screenwriter and producer in both countries since, keeping homes in Athens and Berlin, and taught direction at the film school of the university in Thessaloniki in 2006. Her work has been shown and prized at Locarno, the Berlinale, Montreal, Moscow and Thessaloniki.

Persephone came in 1987, Gefangene des Meeres in 1989, and in 1992 Donusa took her to Locarno, nominated for the Golden Leopard and winner of the youth jury's award for best film. Verspielte Nächte, in 1997, swept the Greek Film Awards: best film, best director, best screenplay for Antoniou and Kriton Kalaitzidis, and best actress for Jasmin Tabatabai.

Her best-known film is Eduart of 2006, built on true events. It played more than forty festivals and collected eighteen awards in Greece, France, the United States and the United Kingdom, among them nine Greek State Film Awards at Thessaloniki and the FIPRESCI prize for best Greek film. The European Film Academy selected it for the 2007 European Film Awards, and Greece submitted it for best foreign film in 2008. Two more films arrived in 2020: Green Sea, which took the audience award at Kitzbühel, and the documentary The Unknown Athenians.

Kostas Antoniou was born in Athens on 19 April 1962 and came through Panathinaikos in the late 1970s as a midfielder valued for his attacking play. He won four championships with the club, in 1984, 1986, 1990 and 1991, and cups alongside them, and between 1984 and 1993 he made thirty-five appearances for Greece and scored three goals.

In 1988 he agreed to move to Olympiacos for twenty-four million drachma. The Panathinaikos president went to law, won an appeal that forced the transfer back, and Antoniou, who had said he would not return 'not even dead', sat out six months in the stands before he was allowed to play again. He moved to Athinaikos in the winter of 1994 and finished there. In May 2008 he came back to Panathinaikos as director of football, resigning in June 2010 after the club's president Nicolas Pateras stepped down.

Haris Antoniou was born on 9 March 1989 and grew up in Cyprus, a singer who came to music through the saxophone. He took lessons as a boy, at fifteen placed third in the Pancyprian saxophone competition, and worked through his teens as a singer and saxophonist, building a following on the island before he auditioned for television.

On 11 February 2011 he won the third season of the Greek X Factor, singing Joe Cocker's 'You Are So Beautiful', and took a two-year contract with Sony Music Greece. He was the third Cypriot in a row to win the Greek competition, after Loukas Giorkas and Stavros Michalakakos. His first digital single, 'Ston Kosmo Mou Ego', carried lyrics by Nikos Moraitis.

Ria Antoniou was born on 14 July 1988, half Peloponnesian, and won Miss Peloponnese in 2007, the year she was also second runner-up at Miss Model of the World. In 2008 she took the Star Hellas title of Miss Earth Greece, and that November represented Greece at Miss Earth in Angeles City in the Philippines.

Her working life since has been largely Italian. In 2012 she competed in the eighth series of Ballando con le Stelle on Rai 1 with Raimondo Todaro and finished third, then co-hosted the first season of Ballando con te with Milly Carlucci and Paolo Belli. She has appeared on Italia 1 since September 2013 in the football talk show Tiki Taka, and on film in Giulio Base's La coppia dei campioni and Carlo Vanzina's Non si ruba a casa dei ladri.