Wojtek

Wojtek grows from Slavic roots, a familiar form of Wojciech built from woj, a warrior, and ciech, an old word for joy or solace. Put together they give the short meaning that trails the name: joyful warrior. Poles rarely reach for the full Wojciech in daily talk. The boy on the class register is Wojtek.

The formal version belongs to Saint Wojciech, the bishop and missionary killed in 997, whose feast falls on 23 April. Every Wojtek shares that imieniny, so the name has a fixed date in the Polish calendar rather than a floating one.

The name also belongs to a bear. Soldiers of the Polish II Corps adopted a young brown bear during the war and called him Wojtek, and at Monte Cassino in 1944 he carried crates of artillery shells for the men who had raised him. So the joke in joyful warrior turns out half serious. The everyday Wojtek still holds the warrior sense of woj inside its short vowels.