Nikolaou

For a people who took their living off the water, one name recommended itself above all others: Nikolaos of Myra, the wonder-worker whom sailors claimed as their patron. Until the late 18th century almost every Christian Greek child was named for a saint of the Orthodox calendar, and the saints were not picked at random: given names cluster by locality, following the patron of the parish or the monastery on the hill. Nikolaos belonged wherever there were boats.

The name is pre-Christian Greek the church carried forward, nike and laos, victory of the people, and it went into the font in every harbour town in the Greek world. The same saint travelled west by another road and arrived, much later, as Santa Claus. In Greek and Cypriot houses he stayed what he had always been: the man you named a son after when the son's father worked a deck.

Most Greek surnames are built. The Peloponnesian -opoulos adds descendant of, the Cretan -akis a diminutive, the Pontic -idis son of, each leaving a visible piece of carpentry on the end of the father's name. Nikolaou adds nothing. It is Nikolaos put into the genitive case and left there, so the surname is not a word but half a phrase: child of Nikolaos, with the child unspoken.

That bare genitive is the ending of Cyprus above all, standing beside Georgiou, Konstantinou and Afxentiou while the mainland bolted suffixes onto its patronymics. Because it is a case and not a suffix it is masculine and feminine at once: a daughter of the house is Nikolaou exactly as her brother is. Byzantium had made true feminine forms, a Palaiologina to a Palaiologos; the modern state flattened them to the genitive Palaiologou, a wife simply Mrs Yannatou to her husband's Yannatos.

Greece codified its surnames in Katharevousa, the formal register, so the fossil survives in official spelling long after Katharevousa itself was abandoned: a scrap of grammar that stopped being grammar and became a family.

So many households ended up Nikolaou at once because Greek families did not spread their given names about. The first son took the paternal grandfather's name, the second the maternal grandfather's, the daughters the two grandmothers, and the same few names came round every second generation. Where Nikolaos was in the rotation, half the men of a village answered to it, and cousins were told apart not by their official names, which matched, but by the worn-down forms of speech: Nikolaos becomes Nikos.

Under Ottoman administration none of it needed fixing in writing, and a man's second name changed with his father. Only in the 19th century, as patronymics hardened into inherited surnames, did that stop. Whatever a family's second name was in the generation the registers caught it, that name was theirs for good, which is why the Nikolaou of one island and the Nicolaou of one Nicosia quarter are usually no relation at all.

Adamantios Olympios Nikolaou, born about 1790 at Ryakia in Pieria and known to everyone as Captain Diamantis, shows what the name was doing. He was the eldest son of the armatolos and klepht remembered as Nikolas Kateriniotis Olympios, and so he was, quite literally, Nikolaou: of Nikolas. The patronymic still described a living father when he began working the mountains of Vermio, Olympus and Pieria before 1821.

When the Revolution came he held that ground and was then sent beyond it. The interim government and the Supreme Court, citing his bravery and military skill, made him commander of Evia and Eastern Greece, and he confronted the Ottoman forces in Evia successfully. The war moved his household as well as his command: the resident records of Skopelos place him on the island with his family on 2 April 1829.

That July he sat at the Fourth National Assembly at Argos as representative of the Thessalomakedones fighters and gave their proxy to Kapodistrias. By decision of King Otto he was made a senator on 16 June 1844, and he died on 19 January 1856, a mountain captain who finished in the upper chamber of the state he had fought to make.

Nikos Nikolaou (1909 to 1986) entered the Athens School of Fine Arts in 1929 under Konstantinos Parthenis and Umbertos Argyros, showed work first in the students' exhibition of 1932, and by 1935 had joined the Free Artists and was hanging at the Parnassos. That same year a young painter, Constantine Andreou, was accused of cheating because his work was too lifelike; Nikolaou spoke up for him, and the two were friends for life.

He went to Italy in 1937 with Yiannis Moralis and won a scholarship to Paris in 1939. His most consequential act came in 1949, when he, Nikos Hadjikyriakos-Ghikas, Yannis Tsarouchis, Moralis, Nikos Engonopoulos and Panayiotis Tetsis formed the Armos group, which opened at the Zappeion in Athens in 1950, a roll-call of postwar Greek painting.

In 1960 he moved to Aegina and the house became the place other painters came to sit; he talked Andreou into buying on the island too.

Lakis Nikolaou was born on Ios in the Cyclades in 1949, grew up in Peristeri and started in a team he and the neighbourhood boys made up themselves; Atromitos saw him playing in it and signed him in 1967. On 31 July 1971 AEK Athens bought him for 600,000 drachmas and two players, promising a signing premium of 300,000 that was never paid. He was a medical student throughout, and the clash of faculty workshops with training nearly ended the career early.

AEK kept him. Under Frantisek Fadrhonc he moved from the forward line to centre-back and stayed, forming with Petros Ravousis one of the notable defensive pairings of the era. That side reached the UEFA Cup semi-finals in 1977 and won the Alpha Ethniki in 1977-78 and 1978-79 with the Greek Cup in 1977-78. He was athlete of the year in 1974 and 1979, captained the club after Mimis Papaioannou, and won 15 caps from his debut on 8 September 1973, playing at Euro 1980. He retired in 1980 to be club doctor, was called back into boots when results collapsed, and played his last match on 30 May 1982.

The second career was longer. He qualified in orthopaedics, trained at Duke from 1983 to 1986 and was honoured by the American Orthopedic Association for work on cruciate ligament transplants. He was doctor to the Greek national teams from 1982 to 1994, head of AEK's medical department from 1987, and in October 1997, with the club in financial trouble, he took its presidency for about a year.

Cyprus, where the -ou genitive is most at home, has the name across public life: George Nicolaou on the bench as a judge, Ionas Nicolaou in politics, Panicos Nicolaou in banking, Konstantia Nikolaou shooting for the island, and the Cypriot-American chemist K. C. Nicolaou. Nikolas Nicolaou, born in Nicosia in 1979, spent his playing career as a defender at Olympiakos Nicosia and captained it; voted one of the best defenders in the Cypriot second division in 2013-14, he became assistant manager in 2014 and returned in May 2024 as manager, charged with getting the club back up.

In Greece the name went the other way, out into the Italian leagues. Dimitrios Nikolaou, born in 1998, debuted for Olympiacos on 29 January 2017 in a 2-1 win at Veria and scored a month later in the Greek Cup against Aris; that October he put through his own net and then headed a goal of his own against Barcelona in the Champions League. Empoli took him on loan in January 2019 and bought him, he won the Serie B title in 2020-21, and Spezia, Palermo and Bari followed before a Super Cup with OFI.

Charis, Giorgos and two men both called Marios Nicolaou played football in Cyprus, Jannis Nikolaou plays as a German-born Greek, and the American director Ted Nicolaou carries the spelling with a c that diaspora registrars preferred. Nothing has been added to any of them: they are all still, in grammar as plain as it comes, of Nikolaos.