Iryna

Iryna is the Ukrainian form of a name that means peace. Poles recognize its relatives at once: Irena in the parish books, Irina in Cyrillic. All three descend from the Greek Eirene, the word for peace, which Byzantine missionaries and Orthodox saints carried into Slavic lands. Saint Irene of Thessalonica gave the name a fixed place on the calendar.

The meaning here is literal. Eirene was a Greek goddess of peace, one of the Horae, and that sense stayed with the name as it moved north and east. To carry Iryna is to carry that plain word, pokój in Polish.

In Ukraine the name is everywhere. It marks Ukrainian belonging, and in recent years it has traveled with Ukrainian families onto official forms at a Polish urząd, where an Iryna and an Irena can sit on the same page. The spellings differ by a letter. The name still means peace.