Papadopoulos

Papadopoulos is two pieces bolted together. Papas is the priest; -opoulos is 'descendant of', a suffix that began in the Peloponnese and travelled far past it. More than 150,000 people carry the result, in Greece, in Cyprus and across the Greek diaspora, and it stands first on the list of Greek surnames. The feminine form is Papadopoulou, the masculine genitive, so a family's women and men do not write the name identically.

Most Greek family names are built the same way, a stem plus a suffix that quietly places the first bearer: -akis for Crete, -akos for the Laconian Mani, -atos for Kefalonia, -idis for the Pontic Greeks, -ou for Cyprus. Papa- is the exception that says nothing about geography and everything about the household. It does not tell you where a man came from. It tells you what his father was.

Christianity argued about married clergy for a thousand years, and its two halves reached opposite answers. The Council of Elvira, held before Constantine legalised the faith, made it explicit law that clergy should not have relations with their wives; the Gregorian Reforms of the 11th century banned clerical marriage outright. Enforcement failed worst in rural Europe, so the Western church closed the argument by canon law, declaring in the 12th century that Holy Orders were a diriment impediment to marriage. A priest's marriage was no longer merely forbidden. It was void.

The Orthodox east settled the other way, and settled it as ordinary parish practice. Its parish clergy are the 'white clergy', secular priests and deacons as distinct from the monastics who wear black, and a parish was expected to be served by them rather than by monks, on the reasoning that a man living in the world needs the support of a wife to do it. So a Latin village had a priest and no priest's children. A Greek village had both, in every generation, and the children had to be called something.

The English words clerk and cleric are one word: Latin clericus, from Greek klerikos. It came to mean an office worker because in the medieval courts writing was entrusted to the clergy, most laymen being unable to read, and in that setting clerk meant scholar. That is the standing a papa- name records. English had to reach for workarounds: A Dictionary of English Surnames treats Abbot, Bishop and Cardinal as nicknames rather than descriptions of the men who bore them. Greek needed no workaround. It could name the priest's actual child, and did, until the description had stopped describing anybody and simply become the family's name.

Efstathios Papadopoulos, called Tassos, was born on 7 January 1934 to Nicolas and Aggeliki, a family from Assia. He went from the Pancyprian Gymnasium in Nicosia to read law at King's College London and was called to the bar through Gray's Inn, pointed that way by his father's circle of lawyers and judges. He returned to Cyprus on 20 March 1955, ten days before EOKA began its armed campaign against British rule, served as regional chief of operations in Nicosia, then moved to PEKA, the movement's political arm, and became its general secretary in 1958 at the age of 24.

At the London Conference of 1959 he was one of only two delegates outside AKEL to vote against signing the London and Zurich Agreements, then sat as one of four Greek Cypriot representatives on the commission that drafted the constitution of the new republic. At 25 he was made provisional Minister of Internal Affairs and then Minister of Labour, and he remains the youngest person ever to hold a Cypriot ministry; twelve years followed across Interior, Finance, Labour, Health and Agriculture. He entered the House of Representatives in 1970, presided over it in 1976, led the Democratic Party from 2000, and took the presidency of Cyprus on 28 February 2003 on a first-round majority of 51.51 per cent, serving until 2008.

Lefteris Papadopoulos was born in Athens on 14 November 1935 to Anatolian refugees, a father from a village near Bursa and a mother from a village near Novorossiysk, both expelled in 1924 in the population exchange between Greece and Turkey. He reached the third year of law at the University of Athens and left it for journalism, joining Ta Nea in 1959 and becoming one of its popular columnists.

From 1963 he wrote lyrics, and ended with roughly 1,200 songs and partnerships with most of the composers and singers of his generation: Mikis Theodorakis, Stavros Xarhakos, Stelios Kazantzidis, George Dalaras. His friendship with the composer Manos Loizos is counted the landmark of the career, and in 1969 'O Dromos', made with the composer Mimis Plessas, became the fastest selling Greek album. Among the singers he wrote for was Marinella, born Kyriaki Papadopoulou in 1938, so the commonest name in Greece could sit on both the lyric sheet and the label of one record.

The name reached Tuscany and lost its Greek ending. Giuseppe Papadopulo was born on 2 February 1948 at Casale Marittimo in the province of Pisa, to Italian parents, his paternal family of Greek descent and his surname an Italian wearing-down of Papadopoulos. He played as a defender for Livorno, then for Lazio, helping them win the Cup of the Alps in 1971, then for Brindisi, Arezzo, Salernitana and Bari.

He began coaching in 1984 at Cecina, a minor amateur club in Tuscany, and worked up through Sorrento, Licata and Perugia before taking Acireale to a surprise promotion to Serie B in 1993. Siena made him: between 2001 and 2004 he took the club from the Serie B relegation zone to the first Serie A promotion in its history, in 2002-03, and kept it up the season after. Siena's supporters called him il Papa, the Pope, which put the name back into the word it came out of. He later took Lecce up through the playoffs, and managed Lazio, Palermo, Bologna and Torino.

Gregory Michael Papadopoulos, born in 1958, took a BA in systems science at the University of California, San Diego in 1979, then an SM and a PhD at MIT in 1983 and 1988, writing his dissertation on a dataflow architecture microprocessor under Arvind and developing, with David E. Culler, the simplified dataflow approach they named Monsoon. He taught at MIT from 1988, helped start Ergo Computing and Exa Corporation, and was chief architect at Thinking Machines from 1992. He joined Sun Microsystems in September 1994 as chief scientist of the server division, became chief technical officer of the whole company in April 1998, and stayed until February 2010.

The rest of the roll runs wide. Dimitrios Papadopoulos (1889-1983) was a Greek general in the Second World War; Panos Papadopoulos, born 1958, is a Greek-Swedish designer; Stephanos Papadopoulos, born 1976, a Greek-American poet and translator. The spelling bends to whichever country it lands in, giving Michal Papadopulos in Czech football, Vitali Papadopulo in Russian football, and Panos Papadopulos (1920-2001), a German actor of Pontic Greek origin.