Pappas

Papas is the priest, and Pappas is that word worn as a family name with nothing added to it. The most consequential man to carry it was born a priest's son in Dovista, a village in Ottoman Macedonia now named Emmanouel Pappas after him. On limited schooling he made himself a figure in commerce and banking, and not only at home: he kept trading posts in Constantinople, Vienna and Budapest. That is the shape of the Greek world before the Atlantic came into it, a merchant network strung along the Danube and the Bosphorus.

Pappas was a founding member of the Filiki Eteria, and when the rising came in 1821 he spent his fortune arming and paying guerrilla troops. In the spring he brought 4,000 Macedonian fighters across to Chalkidiki and landed at Agion Oros, where the leaders gathered in the Koutloumousiou monastery and the northern revolution was declared on 23 May. It spread to Polygyros, Arnaia, Ormylia, Sithonia and Kalamaria, and Pappas was named Leader and Defender of Macedonia.

He split his force, and the second column under Stamos Kapsas was outflanked at Vasilika, where Kapsas stood with 68 men and none came out. Pappas fell back into Pallene and entrenched himself in the ruins of ancient Potidaea, which on 30 October a corps of 14,000 under Mehmed Emin Pasha took and burned. In November he got away by sea towards Hydra and died on the passage. The First National Assembly at Epidaurus proclaimed him a hero of the Greek nation.

The name was unstable before it ever left. Greek writes it with one pi or two, Papas or Pappas, and it reaches Latin script already carrying both; women take the -a form, Pappa or Papa, by the ordinary rule that the wife or daughter of a man whose surname ends in -as is registered with an -a. Nothing settled the Latin spelling early either. The transliteration standard now applied to the Greek identity card, ELOT 743, reaches only three of its six name fields.

Then came the ocean, and a second change ran the other way. In the United States, Pappas is very often not the ancestral surname at all but the stump of a longer one, cut down from Papadopoulos or Papageorgiou at the point where a Greek family began dealing with American clerks and employers. The papa- root survived and everything after it went. That is why the American Pappases are so numerous and so unrelated to one another: the name is a common destination rather than a common descent.

Given names went the same way and by the same logic, sound rather than sense. Vasileios becomes Bilis and then Billy; Athanasia becomes Nancy; Dimitris, through the nickname Demis, becomes Jimmy, which has nothing to do with the Greek name behind English James. A household could keep the surname and lose the given names, or the reverse, and both happened in the same streets.

Charles Herach Papas was born in Troy, New York, on 29 March 1918 into a family in the import and export trade, and the trade took them far enough that he spent his early childhood in Tianjin. He read electrical engineering at MIT, spent the war in the Navy Department in Washington on degaussing and on microwave radar antennas, and took a Harvard doctorate in electrodynamics in 1948. At Los Alamos and Berkeley he assisted Luis Alvarez on a linear accelerator and worked with Enrico Fermi on the theory of radioflash, now called EMP.

He went to Caltech in 1952 and stayed 36 years, directing the Antenna Laboratory; his Theory of Electromagnetic Wave Propagation, published in 1965, was still being reprinted decades later, and the academies of Bologna and of Yerevan both elected him a foreign member.

Alexis Pappas made a stranger crossing for a shorter distance. Born in London on 16 October 1915 to Greek expatriates who had been living in Belgium and had taken refuge in England during the First World War, he was carried on to Norway a few years later. He studied under Ellen Gleditsch, took his doctorate in 1954 on fission yields, and from 1957 held a chair at the University of Oslo, in radioisotope studies and from 1962 in nuclear chemistry.

William Papas was born on 15 July 1927 at Ermelo in the Union of South Africa, the son of Kostas Papas, a Greek immigrant. At fifteen he ran away from home to join the South African Air Force and flew coastal missions as a tail gunner. Art school followed, in Johannesburg and then in Kent and London, and his first cartoon was printed in the Cape Times in 1951. Working as an artist-cum-reporter, he covered Nelson Mandela's treason trial in 1958.

In 1959 he brought his family to Britain, settled in Kent and joined the staff of the Guardian, taking over as its political cartoonist from David Low in 1963. He drew pictorial reports from Cyprus in 1965 and the Six-Day War in 1967 and was commended three years running for the Kate Greenaway Medal. Then he moved again: ten years in Greece, then Geneva, then in 1984 Oregon, where he kept his own gallery and drew the American cities into the volumes Papas' America and Papas' Portland.

Not every crossing was for work. Nikolaos Pappas, born at Kymi on 21 June 1930, entered the Hellenic Naval Academy in 1948 and rose through minesweepers, a survey ship and gunboats, commended for the rescue of the crew of the steamer Stratoniki when she sank in September 1967 in appalling weather. By 1972 he had command of the destroyer Velos.

The Navy's revolt against the ruling junta was set for 25 May 1973 and was pre-empted. Pappas took the Velos to Italy anyway, where he and 31 of his officers and NCOs asked for political asylum and he denounced the regime before the international press. The junta dismissed him and stripped him of his citizenship. Reinstated when it fell in 1974, he ended as Chief of the Hellenic Navy General Staff from 1982 to 1986 and Minister for Mercantile Marine in 1989 and 1990.

The most recognised bearer of all did not inherit it. Irene Papas was born Eirini Lelekou on 3 September 1929 at Chiliomodi outside Corinth, to a schoolteacher mother and a father who taught classical drama at the Sofikos school. The family moved to Athens when she was seven, and she came out of the National Theatre drama school in 1948 after rebelling against its stylised teaching. The surname came from her 1947 marriage to the director Alkis Papas, and she kept it for the rest of her working life.

Cannes noticed her in 1952 for Dead City, Lux Film signed her in Italy, and Hollywood followed. She won Best Actress at Berlin for Antigone in 1961, played Electra in 1962, and became internationally known through The Guns of Navarone, Zorba the Greek and Z. The Trojan Women brought her the National Board of Review's Best Actress award in 1971, though she said she had earned only $10,000 from Zorba.

When the colonels seized Greece in 1967 she called for a cultural boycott and went into exile in Italy and New York, and the American side of her career took root there: Iphigenia in Aulis at Circle in the Square in 1968, Medea on Broadway in 1973, The Bacchae in 1980. She went home when the junta fell, took the Golden Lion for her career at Venice in 2009, and died in 2022.

The American list is long and it is professional rather than landed: Sophocles Papas, the classical guitar teacher and music publisher who died in 1986; Athena Papas in dental science; the philosophers George Pappas and Gregory Fernando Pappas; Theodore Pappas, executive editor of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Sport took a particular share, from the baseball players Milt Pappas and Erik Pappas to the decathlete Tom Pappas and the runner Alexi Pappas.

Pappases have sat in the legislatures of Illinois, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey and Texas and in the United States House of Representatives, which is the plainest measure of how thoroughly the name settled. Nor did the crossing end at America. Arthur Pappas and Tas Pappas made their names in Australian rugby and skateboarding, Michael Papas made films in Cyprus, and Chris Pappas sits in the KwaZulu-Natal Legislature, in the country where William Papas learned to draw.