Nikos

Nikos is the everyday Greek shortening of Nikolaos, two syllables sharpened to a working edge. Where the full form belongs to feast days and baptismal records, Nikos belongs to the café table and the fishing boat, the name called across the square at dusk. It keeps the root meaning of victory people, nike and laos, but lets the ceremony fall away. Writers Nikos Kazantzakis and Nikos Gatsos gave it a twentieth-century literary halo; millions of ordinary Greeks have given it the warmth of common use. It is a name with dust on its boots, unpretentious, loyal, always the first to pour another round.