Surnames of Greek origin

Every Turkish speaker knows the word temel: the foundation of a building, the basis of a matter. Dictionaries trace it to Greek themélion. Temel is also a common surname, and so are Kiraz, Fidan and Fener. All of them are words that passed from Greek into Turkish and came, over time, to be used like native words.

Turkish reference works use two terms. Rumca usually means the Greek spoken in medieval and Ottoman Anatolia, while Yunanca refers to the language in general. From the 11th century on, Turkish and Greek were spoken side by side in Anatolia for a very long time. That contact left its mark above all in the concrete vocabulary of daily life.

The sea comes first. Liman ‘harbour’ comes from Greek limáni, and fener ‘lighthouse, lantern’ from phanári. Fish names are especially rich in Greek words: lüfer ‘bluefish’, palamut ‘bonito’ and kefal ‘grey mullet’ are among them. Sünger ‘sponge’ has the same source. Nautical Turkish also holds many Italian words, and whether a term is Greek or Italian is sometimes disputed. Italian loans are covered on the site’s page for European languages.

Plants and fruit form the second field. Kiraz ‘cherry’ goes back to Greek kerási, and fındık ‘hazelnut’ to pontikón ‘(nut) of the Pontus’. Dictionaries also link fidan ‘sapling’ to a Greek plant word. Building and crafts are the third field: temel and kiremit ‘roof tile’ belong to construction, marangoz ‘carpenter’ to woodwork.

Andreas Tietze examined this layer through the Anatolian dialects in two studies, published in 1955 and 1962. They showed that many Greek words absent from the written language lived on in local speech. The words that became surnames, by contrast, were mostly ones everyone knew.

Turkish adapted these words to its own sound pattern. Stressed final syllables and Greek inflectional endings were dropped: limáni → liman, themélion → temel. Vowels were brought into Turkish harmony: phanári → fener. As a result, many of these words are taken for native Turkish today.

One title belongs to this layer too. Dictionaries derive efendi from a medieval Greek word for ‘master, lord’. In 1934 Law No. 2590 listed Efendi, together with Bey and Paşa, among the honorifics and titles it abolished. In surnames such as Efendioğlu the word lives on as an element.

Some words of Greek origin reached Turkish indirectly. Kalem ‘pen’ is a good example. Its oldest source is Greek kálamos ‘reed’, but it entered Turkish in the Arabic form qalam. İklim ‘climate’ is likewise the Arabic form of a Greek word. In such cases the site gives as root language the language that passed the word directly to Turkish and notes the older Greek source separately. A surname such as Kalemci ‘pen maker’ therefore sits on the Arabic page, while its record still shows the Greek source.

The etymologies of the examples follow the entries in the Nişanyan dictionary and the TDK Güncel Türkçe Sözlük. Each record on the site describes only the history of the word.