Vlachos

Vlachos is not a father's name and not a trade in the ordinary sense. It is a people. The Vlachs were the Aromanians, the Latin-speaking herders of the Pindus, and to call a man Vlachos was to say which world he came out of: the high pasture, not the plain.

Then the word widened, as useful words do. A Vlachos need not have been Aromanian at all: it came to mean a shepherd, a highlander, a man of the mountain folds, and lowlanders used it of anyone who lived that way. Ethnonyms are among the most productive of all the nicknames that hardened into surnames, and this is the plainest example Greek has.

Transhumance is the practice the surname records: livestock droved in herds between several fixed pastures, high steppe in summer, the alluvial grasslands of the lowland valleys in winter, as against a farm where the animals stay all year on one piece of ground. It is not wandering. The pastures are known, the road between them is known, and the calendar is set by grass and snow.

What travelled was the flock and the few men who managed it. Most of the community stayed in permanent houses and came out when needed; the herders slept in camps and seasonal huts at the grazing sites. In the Balkans the Aromanians did this alongside the Greek Sarakatsani, the Albanians, the Megleno-Romanians and the Turkish Yoruk, some summering as far north as the Balkan Mountains and wintering on the warm plains near the Aegean.

A shepherd's duty was narrow and unforgiving: keep the flock intact, keep predators off it, and have it at the market ground in time for shearing. He milked his ewes and made cheese from the milk. He worked in company, several men either minding one large flock or merging their animals and dividing the watching, in cabins they often shared with the sheep.

He was also, unlike the farmer beside him, usually a wage earner paid to watch someone else's animals, and the men who took the work were commonly younger sons with no land coming to them. That is the social fact under a common surname: a trade obliged to recruit from outside itself, generation after generation, wherever sheep were kept high up. And it was always high up, because in the valleys grain paid better than grazing, which is why pre-modern shepherding concentrated in a few rugged countries, Greece among them.

The system depended on crossing a great deal of ground. While the region lay under the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires, the borders between Greece, Albania, Bulgaria and the lands that became Yugoslavia were relatively unobstructed: a flock could summer in one and winter in another without asking anyone.

The national states ended that. As they emerged from the former Ottoman Empire, new lines were drawn straight through the pastoral year, dividing one group's summer habitat from its winter habitat, and war, which came often, closed the rest. The Morlachs or Karavlachs of the Dinaric Alps, the western branch of the same Eastern Romance shepherd population, lost their movement the same way. The living that had produced the surname was legislated out from under the people carrying it.

Georgios A. Vlachos (1886–1951) was born in Athens and studied law; his father was the writer and politician Angelos Vlachos. In 1915, a young reporter on the paper Chronos during the Noemvriana, he argued in print that Greek army units should not surrender their arms to the French admiral. He was among the sharpest critics of Venizelos through the National Schism, and in the summer of 1917 was put into internal exile for it.

In 1919 he founded Kathimerini. In the summer of 1922, days before the collapse at the front in the Greco-Turkish war, he published two articles, "Oikade" (To Home) and "Pomeranians", calling for peace and for the army to be pulled back for the coming winter; after the Venizelist revolution of that year, the one that led to the Execution of the Six, he barely escaped trial for them. When Italy attacked in October 1940 he wrote his famous piece "The dagger", and later an open letter to Adolf Hitler. Under the occupation he refused to cooperate with the Nazi authorities and handed Kathimerini to its own personnel.

Helen Vlachos (1911–1995) grew up in her father's newsroom, reported for Kathimerini and covered the Berlin Olympics in 1936; during the war, the paper closed, she nursed. Afterwards she returned as a columnist under a heading that was simply "E", for Eleni, widely read for attacking the government from it. When her father died in 1951 she took ownership, added the afternoon Mesimvrini, founded the illustrated magazine Eikones, the first of its kind in Greece, and launched the Ekdosis Galaxia paperbacks.

The colonels' coup began at two in the morning on 21 April 1967. Vlachos reached the Kathimerini offices in the small hours to put out what proved to be the only edition of her paper published under the dictatorship, gathering photographs and records because she judged the evidence would matter later. The next day she closed her newspapers and Eikones rather than accept the junta's censorship. It was among the first open acts of resistance to the regime, and it landed hard: the colonels had assumed a right-wing proprietor would carry them, and instead she told them they could no more tell her how to run her newspapers than she could tell them how to run their tanks.

She kept up the attack in print. To the Italian paper La Stampa she called Brigadier Stylianos Pattakos a mediocre man who acted like a clown, and said she feared Georgios Papadopoulos less than going to the dentist. Summoned to the Athens Military Court, she was interrogated for four hours; told a trial date would follow, she said it was going to be a lot of fun. In October 1967 the clown remark put her under house arrest.

In December she got out. With a forged passport and her hair dyed black with shoe polish to match it, she climbed at 55 from her window onto a neighbouring roof and went roof to roof across a cold Athens night down to street level, then hid while her husband, Konstantinos Loundras, paced their flat in her high heels to convince the police she was still inside. Two days later she was on her way to London on a flight arranged by her friend Leslie Finer, and Britain gave her asylum.

From exile she campaigned alongside Melina Mercouri and Amalia Fleming, published House Arrest in 1970 and edited the Hellenic Review for Greeks in Britain. There a leaked document on the junta's propaganda operation in London reached her, implicating Gordon Bagier, a British MP taking money to lobby for the colonels; the storm that followed damaged the regime and led eventually to the Register of Members' Interests at Westminster. She went home in 1974 when the junta fell, restarted her papers, and sat as a state deputy for New Democracy in the first freely elected parliament of the Metapolitefsi. In 2000 the International Press Institute named her a World Press Freedom Hero.

Dionisios G. Vlachos grew up on Cephalonia, took his diploma in chemical engineering at the National Technical University of Athens in 1987 and his doctorate at the University of Minnesota in 1992. He holds the Allan and Myra Ferguson Endowed Chair at the University of Delaware and directs the Catalysis Center for Energy Innovation, the Department of Energy centre he formed in 2009. His group has produced a tungsten carbide replacement for platinum in fuel-cell electrodes and a catalytic route from sugar to isoprene, the rubber in car tyres.

Michalis Vlachos, born in 1967, began at Apollon Smyrnis and was called up for Greece in 1989. He won a Greek Cup and Super Cup with Olympiacos in 1992, then the Alpha Ethniki with AEK Athens in 1993–94, and scored in the first group stage the Champions League ever held, a 1-3 defeat by Casino Salzburg. He captained AEK, crossed to Portsmouth in 1998 for more than fifty league appearances, and finished at Apollon, where he had started, in 2003.