The last Koyzis

My Dutch Canadian friends and acquaintances tell stories of how, in 1811, Napoleon compelled residents of the Netherlands to adopt surnames. Prior to that year, many people in the Low Countries had gone by patronymics based on their respective fathers’ first names. Assuming that surnames were a passing fashion, many Netherlanders adopted humorous names, with which, two centuries later, their descendants are still stuck.

In my father’s native island of Cyprus, fixed surnames weren’t adopted until the island’s independence in 1960. Thus my father was born with only a first name and a patronymic: Theodoros Antoniou – Theodore son of Anthony. His first published poem in the Cyprus Mail at age 8 showed his name as such.

However, in 1943 he began his secondary-school studies at the English-language American Academy in Larnaca, Cyprus, operated by Reformed Presbyterians, the same group that runs Geneva College near Pittsburgh. Headmaster Dr. William W. Weir told him that all students were to have first, middle and last names. My father’s family had gone by more than one additional surname depending on circumstances. Koyzis was one of these. So my father became Theodore Anthony Koyzis. Eventually his entire household adopted Koyzis or Koizis as the family name.

At one time my father thought that the name was originally French – perhaps something like Coisy or Coizy. But DNA analysis late in life revealed no western European ancestry whatsoever. So what are the name’s origins?

A rare surname

There is no longer a natural “oy” sound in modern Greek, which indicates that its roots are in another language. Some 20 percent of the island’s population is Turkish Cypriot, so the closest non-Greek language is, of course, Turkish. The Turkish word for village is köy, which could simply mean that our family were villagers. But that seems a little too generic. The island is filled with villagers, after all.

Someone suggested years ago that our surname’s root might be in kuyu, the Turkish word for well. One of our forebears might have been a well-digger, an important occupation in a place whose few rivers are impermanent and dependent on melting snow in the mountains. If so, then there is a rather peculiar coincidence from my mother’s Appalachian side of the family. My 3rd great-grandparents were surnamed Wells, and their first names were Nancy and David, the same names my wife and I bear.

I am reasonably certain that I was the first person to be born with Koyzis as a surname. I am just as certain that our daughter Theresa was the last, as there are no longer any males to hand it down. Even as my surname is destined for extinction, I can nevertheless take comfort in the reality that I belong to Jesus Christ and that I will go by his name now and for all eternity.