Dimitriou

Behind the surname stands a given name, and behind the given name a goddess of grain. Demetrios of Thessalonica was born in that city in 270, a young man of senatorial family who rose to be proconsul of the district and was run through with spears in about 306, in the persecutions under the emperor Galerius. The vast church of Hagios Demetrios in the city dates from the middle of the fifth century, when Thessalonica became the main military base of the region. Sieges by the Slavs followed, each deliverance was credited to him, and the civil magistrate of the early mosaics hardened into the military martyr of the icons.

What made his name ordinary rather than merely holy was the work he was given in the countryside. Through the medieval centuries Demetrios was patron of agriculture, of peasants and of shepherds, and the historian Hans Kloft argues he took that office from Demeter herself: when the Eleusinian Mysteries ended in the fourth century, the rural population moved her rites and her responsibilities onto the Christian saint. The harvest did not lose its guardian, it changed the name it prayed to, and every farming household with reason to keep him close had reason to put his name on a son.

From a given name that common, surnames followed. Dimitriou is Dimitrios in the genitive, the son entered in the register as the father's, and it is the southern and Cypriot form, while the Greeks of the Pontus and Asia Minor built theirs the northern way as Dimitriadis. Cypriots writing in English mostly settled on Demetriou, which is why so many documented bearers carry an e where a Greek passport carries an i.

Ioannis Dimitriou was born in 1826 at Pesperago on Lemnos and went young to Alexandria, where a great many Lemnians were already living. He went into cotton, working in the industrial workforce of a cotton company and trading as a cotton and industrial merchant, cooperated with the British and amassed a great fortune. He kept working interests on Lemnos too: the money was made in Egypt and the island was never let go.

Standing among the eminent Lemnians of Egypt carried duties. With the banker John Antoniadis and the worker Kyriakos Christodoulos he represented the Egyptian-Lemnian businessmen of the island, and the three sat on the councils that kept the schools of the Greek community running. He was among the first members of the Lemnian Brotherhood in Alexandria, and died in that city in the first decade of the twentieth century.

The cotton money went into antiquities. Dimitriou was an amateur archaeologist and a collector, chiefly of ancient Egypt and of ancient coinage, and in 1895 he was among those funding the Greek Museum in Alexandria. In 1890 he gave his collection of artifacts to the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, where it became the basis of that museum's Egyptian collection: not an addition to a department but the department itself.

Between 1892 and 1898 he gave a further 10,000 Ptolemaic coins to the Numismatic Museum of Athens, the Greek consul Markos Dragoumis acting as intermediary. For their keeping he had two rich oaken coin cabinets made, and the cabinets are preserved in the museum along with the coins.

Andreas Demetriou was born at Strongylo in the Famagusta district of Cyprus on 15 August 1950. He went through the Pancyprian Gymnasium, the oldest secondary school on the island, and then to Thessaloniki, the saint's own city, to read psychology at the Aristotle University. He taught there through every rank from 1975, took his doctorate in 1983 and held a chair in developmental psychology until 1996.

He was after one comprehensive theory rather than a set of findings: an account that would keep what had survived testing in Piaget, fit it to psychometric and cognitive theory, and cover intellectual development across the whole life span. His model sets the mind on three levels, the processing potentials underneath attention and representation, an outward-facing level divided into six domains of thought, and an inward-facing level that regulates the other two and generates executive control and planning. It runs through more than 180 books and articles, and five journals, Developmental Science and Intelligence among them, have each given a special issue over to arguing about it.

He moved to the University of Cyprus in 1996, was vice-rector and acting rector from 1999 to 2002, and from 2004 to 2008 founding president of the interim governing board of the Cyprus University of Technology. He served as the republic's Minister of Education and Culture from March 2008 to August 2011, then went back to the universities as president of the University of Nicosia Research Foundation, and in 2019 became a founding fellow of the Cyprus Academy of Sciences, Letters and Arts, whose president he became in 2020.

Andrew Demetriou, born on 14 April 1961, is the youngest son of Greek Cypriot immigrants to Australia, and football was already in the house: his older brother Jim played senior football for Essendon in the mid-1970s. Recruited from Pascoe Vale, he played on the wing for North Melbourne from 1981 to 1987, 103 games and 47 goals, and finished with three games for Hawthorn in 1988. Before that he had worked in the dental import trade.

The administrative career was the larger one. He was chief executive of the AFL Players Association from 1998, negotiating a new collective bargaining agreement between the league and its players, moved to the league itself as general manager of football operations in May 2000, and at the end of the 2003 season was elected by the board to succeed Wayne Jackson as chief executive of the Australian Football League.

He held it eleven years and used them to make the competition national, taking the league from 16 clubs to 18 with the Gold Coast Suns, who entered in 2011, and the Greater Western Sydney Giants. He restructured the tribunal system and sold the game twice over, in a record A$780 million television deal in 2005 and a record A$1.25 billion one for 2012 to 2016. He announced on 3 March 2014 that he would go at the end of that season, and handed to his deputy Gillon McLachlan in June.

Angeliki Kiourtsaki was born at Peristeri in Attica on 14 August 1954 into a household short of money, went out to work as a child and never finished school. An agent found her in 1968, when she was fourteen; her career proper began in 1970 at a venue called BETA VETA, and in 1972 she took the name she has sung under since, Angela Dimitriou. She has released 39 albums, 30 of them gold and 24 platinum.

Her signature song is 'Fotia Sta Savvatovrada', fire on Saturday nights, but she has an audience across the Arab world too. 'Margarites' went to the top of the charts in Lebanon, and she recorded 'Ana Bahebak Aktar' with the Egyptian singer Amr Diab, both produced by Vangelis Yannopoulos of Minos-EMI Greece through his connections at EMI Arabia.

The rest of the name sits in Cyprus and in the diaspora. Panayiotis Demetriou, born in 1939, was a Cypriot politician and a Member of the European Parliament; Harriet Demetriou was the first chairwoman of COMELEC, the Philippine election commission; Michael Demetriou is an American aerospace engineer.

In Britain it went into performance, in Natasia Demetriou, comedian and actress, Jamie Demetriou, actor and writer, and Cleo Demetriou on the stage. In sport it stayed with the ball, in the English footballer Mickey Demetriou and in two men named Jason Demetriou, a rugby league coach and a Cypriot footballer at Anorthosis Famagusta.