Georgiou

Georgios is the ordinary Greek word georgos with a saint's weight put on it, and georgos means earth-worker: farmer, the man in the field. The saint who carries it is nothing of the kind. George of the Orthodox calendar is a soldier and a dragon-slayer, one of the most venerated figures of the Eastern church. The legend is a warrior's; the word underneath it is a job description, and the humblest one a village had.

The word went into the font because of the saint, not the job. Boys were called Georgios for the man on the horse, in households that were, as it happened, farming.

Georgiou is that name put into the genitive and left there, 'of Georgios', and the bare genitive is above all the ending of Cyprus. The same name went north with different carpentry on it: Georgiadis is built with -idis, 'son of', the ending the Pontic Greeks carried west with them.

In the order European society drew for itself, the earth-worker was the bottom course: serfs and freemen worked for all, the knight fought for all, the churchman prayed for all, and the man who worked for all was the worst fed of the three. Byzantium had the same institution under its own word, the paroikoi standing where the serfs of the west stood. About half the adults on a manor held no land at all, and a survey of 104 thirteenth-century English manors found 45 percent of the land-holding tenants with under three acres, when a family needed ten to live off the ground.

The year itself ran on two or three great unfenced fields cut into hundreds of narrow strips. One lay fallow to recover its fertility, barley or oats went into the second in spring and wheat or rye into the third in autumn, and the next year the planting moved round. A family might work seventy strips totalling some twenty acres, scattered on purpose so that everyone drew a ration of the good ground and the poor, and few owned a plough team, six to eight oxen being beyond one household.

The animals took the fields back at fixed points, grazing the fallow and the stubble once the grain was off, by a right held in common under rules against overgrazing the villagers enforced themselves. Harvest was the one stretch when the work was not divided by sex and the whole household went out, and it carried the year's cruelty: a tenant's crop ripened in the same week as his lord's, and his lord's was cut first.

Savva Georgiou, whose name is also written Georgios Savva, was born on 22 October 1933 into a working-class Greek Cypriot family with Jewish descent through one of his grandfathers. He joined the APOEL youth side in 1949 and the senior squad the year after. In the 1951 Cypriot Cup final against EPA Larnaca he scored twice and APOEL won 7-0, a scoreline no Cypriot Cup final has matched since; the championship followed in 1952.

Then he did what no Cypriot had done and turned professional abroad, spending a year in England with Bristol City and turning out for a representative team of London. For 1955-56 he went to Maccabi Haifa, making him the first foreign footballer brought in from abroad to play professionally in Israel, where until then the only foreigners on the pitch had been British soldiers stationed under the Mandate. Settling in the port city was hard, but he scored, and Israeli football keeps his name.

Cyprus brought him back in 1956 and he became the most important player APOEL had. In 1959, in a combined side drawn from APOEL and Omonia, he beat the Greece national team more or less by himself. He died on 9 August 1992.

Stavros Georgiou, born on 14 September 1972, had his best years at APOEL between 2002 and 2007: championships in 2002, 2004 and 2007, the cup in 2006, the super cup in 2004. He made his Cyprus debut on 11 October 2003 in a 2-2 home draw with Slovenia in qualifying for Euro 2004 and scored his only international goal in it. He went into coaching in 2012 as assistant at PAEEK, took the head job there the next year, then had APOEL's under-19s in the 2014-15 UEFA Youth League before managing Ethnikos Assias.

The name runs down the team sheets around him: Panikos Georgiou, born 1954, a Cypriot club manager, and the footballers Nicolas Georgiou, born 1976, and Fotis and Vangelis Georgiou, both born 1988. Off the pitch there is Marios Georgiou, born 1997, a Cypriot gymnast; Michael Georgiou, born 1988, an English snooker player; Eleni Georgiou, born 1985, a Greek Olympic synchronised swimmer; and Lakis Georgiou, born 1938, who shot for Greece at the Olympics.

Petro Georgiou was born on Corfu on 30 November 1947 and educated at Melbourne University. He taught first, as a senior tutor in politics at La Trobe from 1970 to 1973, then went into the machinery of Australian conservative politics for twenty years: senior adviser to Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser from 1975 to 1979, director of the Australian Institute of Multicultural Affairs from 1980 to 1985, then the Victorian Liberal Policy Unit and, from 1989, the state directorship of the party.

At the 1993 federal election he fought the Liberal leader John Hewson to have food exempted from the 15 percent goods and services tax Hewson was proposing. The Liberals lost that election anyway, and had Georgiou's suggestion not been taken the defeat would have been heavier. Andrew Peacock's resignation then opened the Victorian seat of Kooyong, and Georgiou won the 1994 by-election with 64 percent of the two-party vote against the Greens, becoming only the fourth member the seat had had in 72 years.

In 2005 Georgiou was one of a small number of Liberal parliamentarians who said publicly that they disagreed with their own government's policy of mandatory detention for asylum seekers. He began speaking against it in June and started drafting a private member's bill to soften it. On 17 June, Prime Minister John Howard announced a change: families held with children would be allowed into the community, and long-term detainees would have their cases reviewed regularly. Georgiou was given much of the credit.

On 11 August 2006 he crossed the floor, with Russell Broadbent and Judi Moylan, to vote against the Migration Amendment (Designated Unauthorised Arrivals) Bill, which would have sent all asylum seekers offshore for processing. His party had already tested him that year: in March the former political adviser Josh Frydenberg challenged for his preselection, and at the convention at Trinity Grammar School Georgiou held the seat with 62 of the 85 delegates to Frydenberg's 22.

He had turned down a parliamentary secretary's post from Howard in 1998, and was the first member for that blue-ribbon seat in more than a century to spend a whole career on the backbench; every predecessor since 1910 had served long spells on a front bench. He announced in November 2008 that he would retire at the 2010 election and used his valedictory speech to criticise both major parties over immigration. In 2013 he was made an Officer of the Order of Australia, and he died on 4 April 2025, aged 77.

The oldest Georgiou the record holds to a trade is Chourmouzios Georgiou, born about 1770 and dead by about 1840, a Greek composer and music teacher. The best known is Steven Georgiou, born in 1948, the British musician the world met as Cat Stevens and who is now Yusuf Islam. Kevin Georgiou, born in 1985, is the British rapper K-Koke; Byron Georgiou, born in the 1950s, is an American lawyer and activist; Elisa Georgiou, born in 1994, is a Cypriot model.

Australia holds more than one. Alongside Petro there is Peter Georgiou, born in 1974, another Australian politician, and the Australian rules footballers John Georgiou, born in 1975, and Alex Georgiou, born in 1990. The registers that fixed these families wrote down a name meaning a man with his hands in the soil, and went on writing it.