John Stamos explores his Greek roots

Filmed in the US, Athens, Nafplio and Arcadia, the documentary Who Do You Think You Are? shows John Stamos getting in touch with his Greek side and learning remarkable details about his family history, including of a long-standing family conflict that deeply affected the childhood years of his grandfather's life.

After studying his family tree, he decides to find more information about his great-grandfather's family, the parents of his grandfather, who was originally named Ioannis Stamatopoulos and immigrated to the United States, changing his last name to Stamos. So, he comes to Athens.

 "In my family we are very proud to be Greeks", he declares to the camera in the Athenian taxi that takes him to the National Library of Greece and looking at the passers-by he sees in their faces "my dad, I see my grandfather. It's the energy, what would it be like if we lived here?' he wonders.

With the help of the historian Katerina Lagou, Stamos learns that he comes from the Arcadian village of Kakuri, where his grandfather, Ioannis Stamos, was born in 1904.

Determined to learn more, John Stamos visits the registry office in Tripoli, where he discovers records showing that his grandfather had lost his father at a young age. His great-grandfather, Vasilios, had been killed in 1905 by a man named Ioannis Koliopoulos, who even had the nickname "Judas".

However, a decade had to pass before a trial took place and as it emerged from the records found in Nafplion, the court convicted the culprit in absentia. However, his great-grandmother, with three young children and no husband, was struggling and his grandfather's decision to immigrate to the US seems to have been a one-way street.

John Stamos has previously written about his connection to Greece in his memoir If You Had Told Me. He describes the experience of passing on Greek culture to his wife and son, noting that it has brought his family closer to their roots and strengthened their bond with relatives back home.