Such an exotic, tongue-twisting last name, I thought when I invited Aristea Paraskewopoulos, junior Lecturer at FASoS, for an interview. When I met Aristea at Bandito, her looks seemed just as exotic, but the accent caught me off guard.
What was Aristea’s Greek story?
“My last name is Greek, but I actually don’t speak any Greek and neither do my parents,” Aristea explains. “In the 1960s, my grandpa came to Germany to study. Alongside, he worked in a factory, and now he is a professor in economics. He met my grandmother, who is German, when he was in his 20s, and they always spoke German at home. The funny thing is that we didn’t even take the effort to change our last name. In Greek, it is common to change the ending of your last name. When you are a male, your last name will end in ‘los’. When you are female, your last name would end in ‘lou’, but as you can see, I’m a female but my last name still ends with los.”
Despite her Greek roots and exotic last name, Aristea feels more German than Greek, given she grew up in Germany and her family always spoke German. “We do go to Greece once every year in summer to visit family, but I wouldn’t say I identify as Greek. I do have dual citizenship. Whenever I renew my passport, I get asked if I volunteered in the military, because there still is mandatory military service in Greece – though women are not required to enlist. I do have one male cousin, but he is also exempted from the mandatory military service because his mom is the one that’s Greek. Apparently you only have to enlist as male when your dad is Greek.”
Even though Aristea does not necessarily identify as Greek, she loves visiting her family and would like to see more of the country. “My family lives near Olympia, on the Peloponnese Peninsula. They live close to the beach so I love that and the food is just amazing. I’m obsessed with the dish pastitio that my aunt cooks, which is basically a Greek lasagna. I would say that that is the one thing that is Greek about my family: whenever we go out for dinner in Germany, we always go to a Greek restaurant,” Aristea laughs.
