Nikolai

Nikolai grew from two Greek words: nikē, meaning victory, and laos, meaning the people. Put together they read as victory of the people, zwycięstwo ludu. The same root gave Poland its Mikołaj, the variant every child meets each December in the figure of Święty Mikołaj.

The name traveled far from Greece. It took hold in Russia, where tsars and peasants alike answered to it, and it settled across Scandinavia in forms like Niels and Nils. Saint Nicholas of Myra, the fourth-century bishop remembered for secret gifts to the poor, carried it into Christian devotion and fixed its place on the calendar.

Read a Polish class register and you may find a Nikolai seated near a Mikołaj, two branches of one Greek root. The victory in the name was never a private one. It belonged to the crowd, to the lud. And so a boy named Nikolai wears an old promise: zwycięstwo ludu, victory of the people.