One on the 'bucket list' of places to visit must be the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul. This being the main topic of the series, seeing it on a HD screen of 42 inches really did take me off into wonderland.
For those who can get the BBC iplayer, you may be able to watch the series of three on catch up. Entitled 'Byzantium'.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0 ... Episode_1/
Watching the first episode of the Byzantine building of Byzantia/Constantinople/Istanbul, and establishing that the Hagia Sophia and the city itself was a pivotal part of religious history, especially the Greek,s it got us thinking of where surnames come from.
In particular the 'Hadji's'.
We know that the Hadji folk were such named because of their pilgrimages to Holy places, and were always told it was to Jerusalem. Our minds wandered and hypothetically concluded
What if it wasn't Jerusalem, and it was actually to the Hagia Sophia, being the all famous and mightiest place on earth for Orthodox Greeks of the time? Would it be absured to think this was the pilgrimage place?
This then led off to how the spelling of our surname should be. I have found a 'little' evidence that our name hasn't always been one singular spelling, but a double barrelled one. 'Hadji-Ktori(s). The 'S' isn't on ours but its puzzled me because I was given evidence on a fax that showed FIL name with an S, and relevant others in our family...along with the other name (presumably from my other halfs grandparents) Kountoureshi.
I have still found little evidence that there are an abundance of us on Cyprus either. Are these people hermits? Are they a dying breed? Don't want to be found by the black sheep in the UK? Every avenue I have been given has been concluded with nothing, or can't help.
So people of CF.....where the blooming heck are these people, can you help?
