Sebastian

Sebastian begins in Greek. The root is sebastos, meaning venerable, the word Greek speakers used to render the Latin title Augustus. So the name once belonged to emperors before it belonged to children, a mark of honor first and a given name second.

That honor found a face in Sebastian of the third century, a Roman soldier and Christian martyr whose story spread across Europe and gave the name its saint. His feast falls on 20 January, and that date became the Polish imieniny, still printed in calendars and marked in more than one school register.

Johann Sebastian Bach carried it into music, proof the name traveled well past the martyrology. In Poland it has stayed common for boys, familiar at the urząd and plain to write on a birth certificate. The meaning holds: venerable, worthy of respect, a title that turned into a name.