As you walk down Tompazi street towards the well in the city of Rethymnon, you can read many Cretan names on the windows and name plates.

Most of them end in -akis. In Greek written with the letters alfa, kappa, yotta, sigma OR alfa, kappa, ita, sigma. In the latter case, when written in capitals it looks like a Latin H.

There exists a popular urban legend that during the Ottoman Turkish occupation the Turks used this –akis suffix to belittle and insult the Cretan people. They addressed the Cretan men using the neuter diminutive “-aki” along with a neuter article in front of the name.

Muslims were forbidden to address women, so that’s why it only happened with the man. So the Turks would say “To Antonaki” to the person with the name o Anton.

The Cretans turned this into a badge of honour. They “masculinized” the name by adding an “s”. Thus, it became “O Antonakis” instead of; To Antonaki.

Nowadays, Cretans are proud that their names have the –akis ending that distinguishes them from everyone else!

Extra Info:

A proof of this theory is the fact that in most mountainous villages of Crete, which were not occupied by the Turks, many of the names don’t have the -akis ending. For example in Anogia, a village up in the Ida mountains, one finds names like Skordlis, Kallergis and Xylouris.

Examples of names that are written with the -άκις (“iota”) form are composer Manos Hatzidakis and the so called father of Greek linguistics Georgios Hatzidakis.

An important one is Kyriákos Mitsotákis. Since 2016 the Prime Minister of Greece. He has Cretan roots. Although born in Athens in ’68, he is the son of former Prime Minister Konstantinos Mitsotákis, who was born in 1918 in a suburb near Chania.

Some other examples of real Cretan men are the philosopher and writer Nikos Kazantzakis and the composer Mikis Theodorakis. These both names are written with the –άκης (“eta”) form.