Oleg

Oleg belongs to the Slavic world, and it is best known through Russian. The meaning attached to it is "holy, blessed." That sense reaches back to the Old Norse name Helgi, which Oleg grew out of when Scandinavian settlers moved into the lands of the early Rus. Helgi meant holy, and the Slavic form kept the meaning while reshaping the sound.

The first famous Oleg was a prince. Oleg of Novgorod, remembered as Oleg the Wise, ruled the early Rus around the turn of the tenth century and appears in the old chronicles. Centuries later Pushkin retold his legend in "The Song of the Wise Oleg," a poem many Russian schoolchildren still learn.

In Poland the name stays rare. A boy called Oleg in a class register reads as a visitor from the eastern Slavic tradition, a name with no Polish diminutives of its own. There is no soft variant, no feminine twin. What holds instead is that early sense: holy, blessed.