Nikolaos

Nikolaos comes from Greek, built from nikē, meaning victory, and laos, the people. Put together they give the short meaning kept on this page: victory of the people. The Greeks passed the name across the Mediterranean, and it traveled north until Poland shaped its own form of it.

In Polish that form became Mikołaj, the variant most children here meet first. Mikołaj belongs to the saint whose feast falls on the sixth of December, a date still marked as imieniny across the country. Nikolaos and Mikołaj sit at either end of one road, one Greek and one Polish, the same two roots inside them both.

The victory here is a public one. Laos means the crowd, the assembly, the people counted together rather than any single man. A boy who writes Nikolaos on a form at the urząd signs a small Greek sentence about a shared win. Short and old. The meaning holds: victory of the people.