Preservation of American Hellenic History
Preservation of American Hellenic History
by Jason C. Mavrovitis
Sozopolis' social life centered about the Orthodox Church, its fasts, feast days and liturgical dramas; the seasonal activities of fishing, salting, curing, sowing, harvesting, crushing grapes and making wine, threshing the grain, and preparing for winter; the family's joy (name days, weddings, births and baptisms) and sadness (deaths, funerals and memorials services). The people lived on the coast of the sea fearful of periodic military conscription of their young men to fight in far away places, and of armies that descended on them for reasons unknown.
The Pontic Greek whose name the sisters bore was that of their paternal grandfather Ziso Ortakioglis. Born in about 1800, he was one of the millions of Greeks whose unknown ancestors had populated Anatolia, Thrace and the cities of the Pontos. In the nineteenth century, Ziso left his namesake city of Ortaköy to settle in Sozopolis. Ortaköy was one of two towns, either modern Corum or Sivas,(51) each located on an ancient northern trade route in Turkey that led from central Asia Minor to the Black Sea port of Amisos, today's Samsun.
Ziso was not actually his given name. It derived from the surname Zissimos, which may have been a corruption of Zosimos, an early fourth century Christian saint of Cilicia, a region in modern Turkey. When this young man arrived in Sozopolis from Ortaköy, people referred to him as Ziso, an abbreviation of his surname, and identified him as being from Ortaköy or, "Ortakioglis." He settled in Sozopolis and in about 1835 married an eighteen-year-old woman named Sofia, who was of Greek parentage.
Conventions for given and surnames varied in the Balkans. Bulgarians and Greeks had different traditions. When they intermarried the form generally followed that of the husband's nationality. Greek women took their husband's first and second name. Thus, Sofia became Sofia Zisova Ortakioglis (the feminine Bulgarian form Zisova used to indicate "wife of Ziso").
Use of masculine, feminine and diminutive forms, the whim of administrative officials, and errors in spelling introduced variants of the family's surname. By the early twentieth century the original Zissimos evolved to include Zissis, Ziso, Zisu, Zisou, Zison, Zisova, and even Zysopoulos and Zissopoulos, the latter two forms created by late nineteenth century family members to elevate their social standing. The suffix, ~poulos, implied upper class cosmopolitan Greek origin from Athens or Constantinople.
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