Makris

Makris is the Greek adjective makrys, long or tall, standing on its own as a family name. There is no father inside it and no saint behind it: it is a remark about a body, made by people who knew the man, and it fixed him as firmly as any patronymic fixed a son to a father. The feminine is Makri, so a wife or daughter is a Makri, and the household ends up described in the plural: the tall man's people.

The adjective sits on the map as readily as on people. Makris was an old name for Ikaria in the eastern Aegean, and there is a Makri island off western Greece, a Makri in Evros and a Nea Makri in Attica. A word this plain gets used for anything long, which makes it a poor guide to descent and a good one to how Greek naming worked before the state took an interest.

Surnames taken from nicknames are the broadest class there is, and onomastics calls them cognominal. They divide into names from appearance, of which Makris is a textbook case, and names from temperament, the branch that produced Daft and Gutman. Greek family names have run to placename, nickname and occupation since the Byzantine period, and this is the branch nobody applied to himself.

A patronymic is issued by the family and a baptismal name by the Church, but a byname is conferred from outside, by neighbours, and it can be a joke: Short has been read as an ironic tag for a tall man, and almost nobody surnamed King descended from one, the first bearer having only behaved like a king or been as broad as a bishop.

So Makris is the one kind of Greek surname whose literal claim cannot be checked. The Nikolaou really did have a Nikolaos behind them and the Papadopoulos a priest. The first Makris was tall, or was mockingly called tall, or stood beside a taller brother; the village's joke did not outlive the village. The word did.

Under the Ottomans a family name was not required, so a nickname of this kind was not reliably hereditary. The tag was working equipment: it told two men of one baptismal name apart in a village, and it could be dropped. Then the new Greek kingdom codified surnames, and whatever a household was called when the clerk wrote it down became its property for good.

For patronymic families that froze something true a generation earlier; for nickname families it froze something never true of more than one man. Unrelated tall men were noticed independently in Aetolia, in Thrace, in the islands and in Cyprus, so two Makris families are not two branches of one house. They are two observations written down in the same few decades.

The bearer who made the name matter was born at Gavalou in Aetolia-Acarnania in 1772. Dimitrios Makris came from fighting stock: his father Evangelos had fought in the Greek revolt of 1770, and after his father's death Dimitrios held a captaincy in the district of Zygos. He began as a klepht under Captain Georgios Sfaltos, took over the band when Sfaltos was killed, and was appointed armatolos at Zygos. The commission bought him nothing: he never collaborated with Ali Pasha of Janina, and he built his fortune plundering the Turks at Vrachori.

He was initiated into the Filiki Eteria only just before the rising was launched in Western Greece on 5 May 1821, and sat for Zygos that year in the Assembly of Western Continental Greece, one of the most powerful chieftains in west central Greece. He fought through the Third Siege of Missolonghi and married inside it, to Eupraxia, daughter of the city notable Samos Razi-Kotsikas; he fought at Agrinio and Aitoliko, joined Georgios Karaiskakis to repulse a body of Albanians, and was made a general of the rebel army in 1823.

When the kingdom came he wanted nothing from it, refused political and military honours, went home to Gavalou and died there in 1841. His weapons are kept in the City Hall of Missolonghi: the silver rifle known as the Liaros, and the sword he carried in the Exodus, handed down in his family from the fighters of 1732. A house named for nothing but height had an heirloom older than its surname.

Nikolaos Makris was born at Missolonghi in 1829, the son of the war captain, and took the family trade into the machinery of the new state rather than the mountains. He entered the Hellenic Army, was sent to France to be trained, and worked through command and staff posts until he was commanding the Athens police and heading the Hellenic Gendarmerie.

In the Greco-Turkish War of 1897 he commanded the 1st Infantry Division, leaving the army afterwards as a major general. He was returned to parliament several times for Aetolia-Acarnania, the ground his father had held with armed men, and died in 1911. Between them the two cover the distance from klepht to member of parliament in two lives.

Orestis Makris, born on 30 September 1898, came out of the Athens Conservatoire as a tenor and first appeared with the troupe of Rosalia Nika in 1925, then with the Papaioannou troupe. He moved from singing into comedy and made his name in folk parts, above all the stock stage drunkard.

Greek cinema then cast him against that entirely, as the over-strict father, in some forty films. Decorated with the Order of the Phoenix, he is reckoned one of the most significant of modern Greek actors. He died in Athens on 29 January 1975 and lies in a family grave in the First Cemetery.

Memos Makris was born in Patras on 1 April 1913 and brought to Athens in 1919. He studied at the Athens School of Fine Arts, joined the National Resistance during the German Occupation, and went on to Paris after the liberation. Politics then rebuilt his career elsewhere: France deported him in 1950 over his allegiance to the Left, and Hungary granted him asylum, where he became a significant figure in its cultural life. Greece stripped him of his nationality in 1964, he regained it in 1975 after the restoration of democracy, and the National Art Gallery gave him his first Greek retrospective in 1979.

The work is public and nearly all of it memorial: the monument to the victims of the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria, the monument to the Hungarian volunteers of the Spanish Civil War in Budapest, the Liberation monument at Pécs, and more sculpture in squares and on buildings across Hungary. In Cyprus he made the statue of Archbishop Makarios in the Presidential Palace, and in Greece the sculpted head of a youngster at the entrance of the National Technical University, commemorating the Polytechnic uprising of 1973. He died in 1993.

Andreas Makris, born at Kilkis in northern Greece on 7 March 1930, carried the name into American concert halls. He sat in the first violin section of the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington for 28 years, after posts with the Dallas and Saint Louis symphonies, and served many years as its composer in residence under Howard Mitchell, Mstislav Rostropovich and Leonard Slatkin. Of his hundred or so works the Aegean Festival Overture of 1967 travelled furthest: transcribed for concert band by Major Albert Bader of the USAF Band, it became a fixture with American bands. He died in 2005 at his home in Silver Spring.

George Makris, born on 29 August 1920, played guard at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, coached the Bolling Air Force Base team, and became the eighteenth head football coach at Temple University in Philadelphia, holding the job from 1960 to 1969 and finishing 45-44-4. Cynthia Makris, born 1956, is an American soprano, and Constantine Makris a Greek-American cinematographer and television director.

At home the name held its footing through Dimitrios Makris, 1910 to 1982, who served as Interior Minister, the photographer Vassilis Makris and the singer Dionysis Makris, with football carrying it on through Thomas Makris, Georgios Makris and the Cypriot Antonis Makris. Nothing shows any of them descended from the others; each is descended from somebody's tall neighbour.