Tsitiridis
Welcome. I am Niko, health economist in Berlin, dad, serial buyer of books I have not opened yet, and chronic over-researcher of niche subjects.
I translate clinical evidence into funding arguments for cardiac monitoring innovations in health economics and market access.
The name
çıtır
Turkish: crispy, crackling. Fresh bread, wood in the fire.
ίδης
Greek: son of. The patronymic of Pontus and Asia Minor.
Τσιτηρίδης
Son of the crispy one.
The suffix is the giveaway: names in ίδης cluster among the Greeks of Pontus, the south coast of the Black Sea, where Greek towns had traded since roughly 700 BC. The root is Turkish, because after 1461 the two languages shared every marketplace on that coast. Çıtır is the sound of a fresh crust giving way. Somewhere out there an ancestor answered to it as a nickname. A baker, if the family is lucky. A crackling temperament, if not.
In 1923 the Lausanne Convention made it final: the Orthodox Christians of Anatolia, about 1.2 million people, were exchanged to Greece, the Pontic Greeks among them, many already refugees before the ink dried. Most of those families were resettled in Macedonia. The nickname made the crossing, the suffix made it official, and a market stall joke became a surname. The map below has no borders. At no point in this story did borders help.
41.0°N 39.7°E → 40.6°N 22.9°E
c. 700 BC
Ships from Miletus plant trading towns along the Black Sea's south coast. Sinope is one of them, and ships from Sinope plant Trapezous, a market town under the Pontic Alps.
1461
Eight years after Constantinople, Trebizond surrenders to Mehmed II. Pontic Greek stays on the coast and starts trading words with Turkish.
1800s
Somewhere in Pontus, an ancestor earns a nickname: çıtır, the crispy one. Probably a baker. Possibly just loud.
1923
After a decade of war and persecution, the Lausanne Convention makes the uprooting final. The nickname boards a ship west, wearing its Greek suffix, and lands in Macedonia.
Today
The name lives in Berlin, answers email in three languages, and still sounds like fresh bread.
Send a signal.