Melnyk

In Ukrainian the mill is the mlyn, and Melnyk is the man who works it, the word for the building carrying the agent ending -yk. Other languages went the other way: Spanish kept both Molinero, the miller, and Molina, the mill, and the shortened form naming the trade rather than the tradesman became the commoner surname of the two. East Slavic speech kept the man rather than the machine, and Melnyk is the eastern member of the great milling family that runs through the German Müller, the Dutch Mulder and the English Miller.

What it never took was a suffix. Ukrainian and Belarusian family names usually carry one doing grammatical work, -ko, -uk and -ych, which turn the word for a scribe into Pysarenko; Russian adds -ov and -ev for belonging to. Melnyk sits in the smaller class that is the plain noun and nothing further, alongside Lebed, a swan, and Zhuk, a beetle.

Being a noun and not an adjective, the name does not bend for a woman: the wife of Leo Tolstoy was Sophia Tolstaya, but a Melnyk daughter is Melnyk exactly as her father is. Suffixes carried rank as well as grammar, and the patronymic in -ovich was a favour in the tsar's gift, granted in 1610 by Vasili IV to the Stroganovs for developing the salt industry in Siberia. The miller needed no grant from anybody. Every settlement with grain and with water or wind had a mill, so the byname was coined over and over in villages that never heard of one another. Melnyks are not one family and never have been.

A manor was divided into demesne worked for the lord's household, dependent holdings whose tenants owed him labour or a share of what they produced, and free land paying a fixed money rent. Beside those ran a second column of income, and the mill headed it: the lord charged for the use of his mill, his bakery and his wine press, as he charged for the right to hunt or to let pigs feed in his woodland. The pond, the wheel, the gearing and the stones were capital, and the capital belonged to the manor house.

That is what separates this name from Europe's other great trade surnames. A trade whose tools fit in the hand travelled with the tradesman; the mill did not. It was the lord's, and the man who ran it worked in a building he did not own. Holdings on a manor did become hereditary in practice, with a payment made to the lord at each succession, so a family could keep its place for generations without ever owning it. The system faded piecemeal, and it faded last in the east: the final feudal dues in France went at the Revolution, while the Rittergut estates of the Junkers stood in parts of eastern Germany until the Second World War.

There were two machines under the one word. The older had a horizontal wheel on a vertical shaft: the current struck the paddles and turned the runner stone balanced on the rynd directly above, the bedstone beneath never moving. With no gearing, the speed of the water was the speed of the stone. The other had a vertical wheel on a horizontal shaft and a train of gears to turn the motion through a right angle, pit wheel to wallower to great spur wheel to the stone nut. Such buildings stood thickly: Domesday counted 5,624 watermills in England in 1086, and by 1300 the number had reached between 10,000 and 15,000.

The skilled part was called tentering, setting the gap between the stones according to the flow of water, the grain being ground and the grade of flour wanted, and working the sluice to compensate for the seasons. Flour was only the beginning of what the building could do: the same power was set to sawing timber, fulling woollen cloth, crushing oil seed and making paper and gunpowder, and blast furnaces and forges were almost invariably water powered until the steam engine came. In a settlement where the rest of the work was done by hand, the mill was the one machine, and the miller the man who kept it running.

The windmill with sails on a horizontal shaft is a development of the 12th century, first built in the triangle of northern France, eastern England and Flanders, and the earliest certain northern reference is from 1185 at the vanished Yorkshire village of Weedley. The first European type was the post mill, its whole body balanced on an upright post so the miller could swing the building round to face the wind. By the end of the 13th century the masonry tower mill had arrived, where only the cap turns.

Windmills spread across Europe in the 14th century, and at their peak in 1850 there were an estimated 200,000 of them against some 500,000 water wheels. They went up in three situations: where there was too little water, where the rivers freeze in winter, and on flat land where the current ran too slowly to turn a wheel. The older multiple-sailed mills, carrying five, six or eight sails instead of four, are found in Spain, Portugal, Greece, Romania, Bulgaria and Russia. Cold shows in the machine itself: in colder climates the sailcloth was replaced by wooden slats, easier to handle in freezing conditions.

More bearers of the name are recorded in sport than in any other field. Faina Melnyk (1945-2016) was a Ukrainian discus thrower. Tetyana Melnyk, born in 1995, runs as a sprinter and hurdler, and Marharyta Melnyk, born in 2010, competes in rhythmic gymnastics. Ukrainian football alone accounts for Vadym Melnyk and Viktor Melnyk, both born in 1980, Bohdan Melnyk born in 1997 and Oleksandr Melnyk born in 2000.

The spread across the wider Slavic sporting world is broad. Boris Melnik (1945-2016) was a sports shooter and Vitaliy Melnik a luger; Olga Melnik, born in 1974, is a Russian biathlete and Evgenia Melnik, born in 1988, a Belarusian figure skater. North America carries it too, with Gerry Melnyk (1934-2001) and Larry Melnyk, born in 1960, playing Canadian ice hockey and Steve Melnyk, born in 1947, making his career as an American golfer.

The name sits deep in music and film. Lubomyr Melnyk, born in 1948, is a composer and pianist of Ukrainian origin; Ion Melnik (1935-2018) was a Russian composer and Peter Rodgers Melnick, born in 1958, is an American one. Aleksandr Melnik (1958-2021) directed films in Russia, Daniel Melnick (1932-2009) produced them in the United States, and Natasha Melnick, born in 1984, works as an American actress.

In letters and the sciences it runs just as wide: Mykhailo Melnyk (1944-1979), the Ukrainian historian and poet; Yaroslav Melnyk, born in 1959, a Ukrainian and Lithuanian novelist, philosopher and critic; the American poet David Melnick (1938-2022); George Melnyk, a Canadian historian and writer; Joseph L. Melnick (1914-2001), an American epidemiologist; and Roderick Melnik, a Canadian and Australian mathematician.

Ukrainian settlement carried the miller's name across the Atlantic and past it. Eugene Melnyk (1959-2022) built a business career in Canada and owned the Ottawa Senators. Bruce E. Melnick, born in 1949, flew as an American pilot and astronaut, and Mykola Melnyk (1953-2013) as a Soviet and Ukrainian pilot. Valentyna Melnyk, born in 1978, is a marketing academic in New Zealand, and Lola Melnick, born in 1982 and of Ukrainian background, became a television personality in Chile. Melnik and Melnick are the same name in other transliterations of the one Slavic word.

None of this is a single family tree, and that is the point of the name rather than a gap in it. What the bearers of Melnyk hold in common is not an ancestor but a trade: the one building in the village that turned, and the household trusted to keep it turning.