Gaia

Gaia comes straight from Greek, where Gaía was the earth itself. In Hesiod's Theogony she is the first mother, the ground from which the sky and the Titans came. The meaning has not drifted. It still says earth, the word a Polish speaker hears as ziemia.

Italy is where Gaia grew into an everyday name for girls. Dante names a Gaia in Purgatorio, Gaia da Camino, a noblewoman from the region of Treviso, so the name was in use among Italian families in the fourteenth century. It remains common on Italian birth records today.

In Poland the name is rarer. It turns up on a class register or an official form at the urząd as a short, clear choice. Four letters, two of them the same vowel. Whatever else a bearer carries, the name keeps its first sense, the earth itself.