Ahti's name entered modern Finnish public life through an unrelated but well documented channel: the late nineteenth and early twentieth century movement to Finnicize personal surnames, in which many Finnish families, particularly during the period of heightened national consciousness under Russian rule, replaced Swedish-derived surnames with new ones drawn from Finnish nature, place names or the Kalevala's own store of mythological figures. Compound surnames built partly on Ahti's name became part of this stock of newly adopted Finnish surnames, among them Ahtisaari, combining Ahti with saari, island, a surname most widely known today through Martti Ahtisaari, President of Finland from 1994 to 2000 and recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2008 for his international mediation work, whose family name traces to this same nationalist naming movement rather than to any ancestral claim of descent from or devotion to the water god himself.
The practice illustrates a broader pattern in how Kalevala mythology was absorbed into ordinary modern Finnish identity: not chiefly through continued religious devotion to figures such as Ahti, whose actual worship had lapsed centuries earlier, but through a deliberate, nationally motivated adoption of mythological vocabulary into everyday personal names, place names and institutional branding, so that a water god once petitioned by fishermen for a good catch survives today, for most Finns, primarily as a familiar and dignified sounding element in modern surnames rather than as an object of belief.