Bartek

Bartek begins as a nickname and has grown into a name of its own. Behind it stands Bartłomiej, the Polish form of Bartholomew, and behind that a Hebrew and Aramaic phrase: bar-Talmai, "son of Talmai." The short meaning carried today, "son of Talmai the plowman," reaches back to that patronymic, where Talmai itself has been linked to the word for a furrow.

So the name points toward farming ground before it points toward any single person.

A boy called Bartek in a Polish school register is likely to share a bench with Bartosz, a close variant, and to write the fuller Bartłomiej on official forms at the urząd. The apostle Bartholomew gives the name its August imieniny, on the twenty-fourth.

Poland also keeps a famous Bartek that is no man at all: the Bartek oak in Zagnańsk, one of the oldest trees in the country, standing there for many centuries. Henryk Sienkiewicz gave the name to a peasant soldier in his 1882 story "Bartek Zwycięzca." The plowman sense fits both.