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.[1] 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.[1][2]
The consequence is a family split down two surnames: one branch remains Christodoulou and the other Kiriakou, a divergence never corrected.[2]
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.[3][1]
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.[4]
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.[5][6]