Angelos “Ange” Postecoglou is an Australian who was until recently the manager of the English Premier League football club Tottenham Hotspur. He has, rather extraordinarily, been sacked from this position in spite of having just won the prestigious Europa League with Spurs. Once again he has to move on.
I say “once again,” because his family has a rather considerable history over the generations of needing to uproot themselves and move.
Ange’s Greek father, Dimitris, fell out of favour with the fascist junta that had illegally seized power in Greece in the military coup of 1967 and lost his business, so the family emigrated from Athens to Melbourne, Australia when Ange was five years old. (Melbourne is the third-largest Greek-speaking city in the world, after Athens and Salonika/Thessaloniki.)
But even if we did not know these details, at least some of the family’s history of relocating would be rather clear to us anyway because of the family name. Although Ange has in his time also used the surname Postekos, he was actually born in Athens under the name of Postecoglou, which is the form he favours and normally uses.
Greek surnames which end in –oglou tell a tale. They are formed using the Turkish word oğlu, which means “son”. So the name Postecoglou has the same type of origin as English-language names such as Johnson, Welsh-language names like Uprichard, and Scottish Gaelic surnames such as Macdonald, where Ap and Mac both translate as “son”.
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We need to understand, though, why ethnic Greeks came to have Turkish-based family names in the first place.
From about 1300, Greeks fell under the rule of the vast Ottoman empire based in Constantinople – in some areas for as long as 400 years – and families often took on or were assigned Turkish-language names by the Ottoman bureaucracy, even if they were Greek-speaking Christians. There was a great deal of cultural assimilation involving the two groups over the centuries.
Under the terms of the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, which formally resolved the remaining issues between Turkey and the allied powers after the first world war, millions of Greek-speaking Orthodox Christians were moved from territory which had been under the control of the Ottoman empire to the newly formed nation of Greece, and millions of Turkish-speaking Muslims moved in the opposite direction to the newly formed nation of Turkey. Christian Armenians, Muslim Kurds and other ethno-linguistic groups were also caught up in the chaos that ensued.
These disastrous exchanges of population took place at the end of the Greco-Turkish war of 1919-1922, which had involved massacres as well as horrific instances of ethnic cleansing. Greeks who relocated voluntarily or fled as refugees from Turkish territory to Athens and Thessaloniki often took their Turkicised names with them; this may be what happened to the Postecoglou family, or they may have already lived in an area that came under Greek control after the treaty was signed.
Their move from Turkey to Greece, then from Greece to Australia, and Ange’s later professional transfers to Japan, Scotland, and England, might now be followed by a further relocation from England to another country or continent. Football supporters will be following his journey with interest.
Ottoman
The term Ottoman refers to a member of the dynasty which ruled the Turkish empire established by Osman or Othman I in northern Asia Minor in the late 1200s. It expanded under his successors into the Balkans, Arabia, the Middle East and North Africa.
“Ottoman” can also refer to a piece of furniture resembling a divan, a low upholstered seat without a back or arms.
