Ilyas

Ilyas comes from the Hebrew name Eliyahu, borne by the prophet known in English as Elijah. The Hebrew parts spell out a small declaration: "my god is Yahweh." Along the road from Hebrew into Arabic and Turkish, Eliyahu became Ilyas, the form named in the Quran and carried across a wide stretch of the Muslim world.

So the meaning stayed close to its source. Where a Polish reader might render it "bóg jest moim panem," the older sense held: one god claimed above all the rest.

In Poland the name arrives mostly through Tatar and later immigrant families, and it turns up now on a class register beside Jan and Filip without much fuss. It reads foreign and familiar at once.

Ilyas has no Polish diminutive of its own, no softened nursery form. What you get is the whole name, three sounds, the prophet's name meaning "my god is Yahweh."