Jegor

Jegor arrives in Poland with a Russian accent. Across Russia it has long been a homely, everyday name, the kind entered in a village register beside a patronymic. Polish speakers meet it as a borrowing, a guest from the East that keeps its foreign vowels and refuses to be smoothed into something local.

The name's roots reach back to Hebrew. What it has come to mean, though, points squarely at the land: farmer, one who works the earth, in Polish rolnik, uprawiający ziemię. There are no kings or knights in that sense, only tilled soil and the labour of the harvest, and it has followed Jegor from one language into the next.

Picture a Polish class register with one Jegor among the Jakubs and Jans. The teacher pauses over it. The name stands slightly apart, and that is part of its pull. Whoever carries it carries an old word for the person who feeds everyone else: the earthworker, the farmer.