Kasjan

Kasjan reaches Polish from the Latin Cassianus, a Roman family name built on Cassius. That older word was tied to cassus, meaning hollow or empty, so the short sense recorded here, próżny and pusty, sits in the root rather than being fastened on later. Few names admit emptiness so plainly.

The name has a cross-gender partner, Kasjana, which lets the same Latin root pass from a boy to a girl on the same school register. One consonant shifts and the ending softens. Nothing else about the origin changes.

History gives Kasjan real carriers. John Cassian, a monk of the early church, brought Cassianus west into Latin Christianity and left it in the calendars where Polish families later found it. Saint Cassian of Imola, remembered as a teacher killed by his own pupils, still holds a name day in the Polish calendar. A boy signing his name at the urząd, then, writes a word that once meant hollow, and carries it without any of that weighing him down. Whatever he makes of it, the name still points back to cassus, hollow and empty.