Origin of the Kiriakou name
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The Kiriakou name originates, in John Kiriakou's own account, in an uncorrected clerical error.

His great-great-grandfather was arrested in Rhodes for stealing a potato. He was starving. The family name at the time was Christodoulou. In court he was asked his name and answered "Marcos, Marcos the son of Kiriakos", and the clerk wrote down Marcos Kiriakou. He never fixed it.

The consequence is a family split down two surnames: one branch remains Christodoulou and the other Kiriakou, a divergence never corrected.

Kiriakou tells the story against himself. Asked in a rapid-fire round about potatoes, he answered that he is a long-time fan but can no longer eat them, an answer that prompted the host to raise the origin of the name.

The other side of the family: Chrisopoulos

The paternal name came from a clerk's error. The maternal one, by Kiriakou's account, concealed something, and he says he reconstructed it from etymology before confirming it by test.

His mother's maiden name was Chrisopoulos. The -opoulos ending simply marks a family from the Peloponnese; it was the first element that did not fit, because chriso means gold. He put the problem to his mother, whose explanation was that somebody in the family must have been a jeweller. His objection was occupational, "we were farmers for 2,000 years", and his own reading was that the name was a Hellenised rendering of something nearer to Goldman, Goldberg or Goldstein.

A 23andMe test, he says, returned the answer he had reasoned his way toward: Jewish ancestry on his mother's father's side, from Lithuania. He puts his own overall figure at roughly two per cent.

See also

- John Kiriakou
- Kiriakou's Cypriot ancestry
