Papadakis

The root is shared and needs saying once: papas is the priest, and Papadakis is the priest's son, the same clerical word that stands behind Papadopoulos. Everything else is the ending. The suffix -akis is a diminutive, and it does to a name what it does to a noun: Michalakis is little Michalis, young Michalis, the son of Michalis. It is the suffix of Crete, carrying Mitsotakis, Theodorakis and Androulakis with it. A Greek hearing Papadakis hears not just a priest's household but one on the great southern island.

The ending is younger than most people assume. It was introduced into Cretan surnames in the 19th century, at the point when Greek family names were hardening into the fixed, inherited, state-registered things they are now. The feminine form then follows the island's grammar rather than the mainland's: a daughter of a Papadopoulos becomes Papadopoulou, an archaic genitive making her literally 'of' her father, while a daughter of a Papadakis is simply Papadaki, the diminutive itself turned feminine.

Crete's -akis is one entry in a suffix atlas covering the Greek world, and the Peloponnese sends -opoulos, 'descendant of'. So a Greek surname is a postcode as much as a pedigree, and Papadakis demonstrates the principle better than any of them: the same priestly root as Papadopoulos, the same meaning to the letter, a wholly different homeland encoded at the end.

Ottoman administration did not require a family name at all, so into the 19th century a Greek last name could still change in a generation. That is the setting in which -akis hardened on Crete. The suffix belonged to the island rather than to a religion: Cretan Turks bore -akis names as naturally as their Christian neighbours, and went on doing so until the Surname Law replaced them officially.

The best documented Papadakis is also the most literal one. Antonios Papadakis was born in 1810 at Psychro on the Lasithi plateau, in a Crete under Ottoman rule, and he was the son of Fragios Papadakis, priest of Psychro. The surname on the page and the man in the parish were one household.

In 1823, in the fighting that came with the effort to stifle the Greek War of Independence on Crete, his father was killed and Antonios and his two brothers were seized and sold as slaves. Antonios, thirteen, went to Constantinople. Emmanouil, fourteen, and the younger Andreas went to Alexandria, where both converted to Islam and both rose in Egyptian service: Emmanouil became a major general and then Minister of Military Affairs of Egypt as Ismail Selim Pasha, and Andreas became chief of constabulary in Alexandria.

Antonios spent six years in Constantinople before escaping in 1829 to Odessa, where Alexandru Sturdza found him work in a Greek printing shop and he enrolled at the College of Agriculture and Agronomics, graduating in 1833. He then learned land, livestock and trade from the inside on the Sturdza estates, and was made director of Roxandra Sturdza's holdings in Bessarabia, buying land and property of his own until he was a very wealthy man.

In 1848 he settled in Athens for good and took Greek citizenship. He sat on the board of the National Bank of Greece, worked through the Educational Society, funded orphanages and schools, and backed the Cretan war for independence from the Ottomans with money sent home to the island he had been carried off from.

He died on 27 December 1878 and left the University of Athens everything: houses, buildings, bonds, bank shares and accounts, invested to throw off income permanently. More than three thousand Antonios Papadakis Scholarships have been paid from it. The university put up a marble bust and a plaque in two of its historic buildings and cut his name below that of its founder, King Otto.

Antonis Papadakis, known as Kareklas, was born in 1893 at Pervolia near Rethymno, still Ottoman territory then, and picked up the Cretan lyra as a child. He is reckoned one of the most important lyra players of the early 20th century, and he worked before the instrument's modern partnership had settled: the laouto was not yet established as the lyra's accompaniment in Crete, the bouzouki was the usual choice, and Kareklas often played instead against the boulgari, then popular around Rethymno.

The island's string tradition kept producing men of the name. Kostas Papadakis, 1920 to 2003, was a Greek folk violinist; Konstantinos Papadakis, born 1972, took the concert route as a pianist. Not one family, but one musical culture.

Andreas Papadakis, 1938 to 2008, was born in Nicosia and came to London in 1956, taking a DIC at Imperial College and a doctorate at Brunel. In 1964 he bought a house in Holland Street, Kensington, discovered the dry cleaners on the ground floor could not legally be lived in, and opened a bookshop instead. Academy Editions followed in 1968, and by the sale of the company in 1990 he had published over a thousand titles on art and architecture. He bought the ailing Architectural Design in 1976, then published Charles Jencks's The Language of Post-Modern Architecture in 1977, in a sixth edition by the time he sold up. In 1997 he began again as Papadakis Publisher with his daughter Alexandra.

Constantine Papadakis, 1946 to 2009, took his civil engineering diploma at the National Technical University of Athens, came to the United States in 1969, and finished a doctorate at Michigan in 1973. He headed civil engineering at Colorado State, was dean of engineering at Cincinnati, and from 1995 until his death was president of Drexel University, where he doubled full-time undergraduate enrolment, tripled freshman applications and quintupled both the endowment and research funding.

Eleni Papadaki, 1903 to 1944, was born in Athens, read philology at the university and studied phonetics, music and piano at the Great Conservatory, then went on the stage in 1925 at twenty-two in Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author. The critic of Demokratia wrote that the stage had gained a great actress. She played Wilde's Salome the same season, and the ancient tragedies made her later career.

Nick Papadakis, born in Greece in 1943, remains the all-time points leader at Hartwick College, signed for the Atlanta Chiefs of the North American Soccer League in 1968 and finished with the Tampa Bay Rowdies in 1975; he won four caps for Canada, scoring twice. Petros Papadakis, born 1977, played American football and went into radio; Gabriella Papadakis, born 1995, competes for France as an ice dancer; Christina Papadaki, born 1973, played tennis for Greece.

Politics took the name to Brussels twice over, with Dimitris Papadakis of Cyprus and Konstantinos Papadakis of Greece both sitting in the European Parliament. And the loop closes where it opened: Iosif Papadakis, born 1960, is an astrophysicist at the University of Crete, working on the island whose diminutive gave them all the last three letters of their name.