Levan

Levan comes from Greek, from leon, the word for lion. That fixes the meaning at the source, and Polish reads it plainly as lew. In Greek the lion signalled strength long before it named a boy. The lion comes first.

The Greek leon seeded a wide family of names across Europe: Leon, Leo, and the Latin Leonardus that stands behind Leonard. Levan keeps the lion at the front of its sound, a short form with an old animal inside. Different countries kept different shapes of the same beast.

Picture the name read out from a class register at a Polish school, sitting among the Kamils and the Jakubs. It is compact where the others run longer. Whatever the register holds, the meaning holds too: lion, or lew.