Myron

Myron comes from the Greek word myron, the perfumed oil or myrrh used to anoint the honored dead and the newly baptized. The short meaning is plain: fragrant oil. In Ukrainian hands the name took on a life of its own, and a boy called Myron in Lviv or Kyiv wears something distinctly Ukrainian rather than Greek.

The oldest famous bearer worked in bronze. Myron of Eleutherae, an Athenian sculptor of the fifth century BC, cast the Discobolus, the discus thrower copied in marble ever since. The name later passed into Christian use through Saint Myron of Crete, a bishop remembered as a wonderworker.

The name stayed rare. In a school register it stands out among the Antonis and Aleksanders, and at the urząd it still reads as a borrowing from the east. No diminutive softens it, no feminine form answers it. What Myron keeps is its first meaning, myrrh, the fragrant oil pressed from a thorny tree.