Bazyl

Bazyl comes from Greek, from basileus, the word for a king. The short meaning stays close to that source: king, or royal, królewski in Polish. Bazyli is the fuller variant, and the two names have sat side by side in Polish records for a long time.

The name reached Poland through the Church. Saint Basil the Great, a bishop of Caesarea in the fourth century, gave it weight among Christians who never ruled anything. He wrote rules for monks and argued theology, and his feast keeps Bazyli on the Polish calendar, so the name-day returns each year.

So a word for royalty came to rest on ordinary shoulders. The root means king. A boy named Bazyl answers to that title on a school class register without holding a crown, and the sense sits plainly in królewski.