I initially ignored this #dailyprompts idea, saying to myself: who cares? But then I remembered that I have an interesting history related to my both first names. Ciprian and Marius are both of Latin origin, the first mainly used in Romania.
Ciprian is identifying somebody as original from Cyprus, the island in the Mediterranean Sea. My mom told me she chose it because she liked it and also because there was an inflation of the name Bogdan when I was born. Actually, only in my block there were three Bogdan my age. So, she was right with that. My maternal grandfather, with whom I later had the closest friendship possible, also said that he also liked it because it was difficult to de-Romanize it. He was concerned in particular about this aspect because he was coming from a family of Aromanians that emigrated from the Balkans to Romania. They faced a lot of denationalizing aggressivity from Greeks and Bulgarians, one of the main actions being the effort to arbitrarily change the names to sound more Greek or Slavic. The same thing happened in Transylvania by the same period, Romanian names being Magyarized: Ion became Janos, Gheorghe became Gyorgy etc. Romanians tried to counter this by adopting more Latin names that couldn’t be changed, like Tiberiu, Ciprian, Horatiu, Ovidiu. Even these days, if I meet someone named Horatiu or Tiberiu I can fairly guess his family is from Transylvania.
Marius is another Latin name which was used by the members of the Roman gens Maria, a family that traced its origin to the god Mars. The name is popular in Romania, France, Norway, and Lithuania, and it means ”warlike”, ”male” or ”of the sea”. But I got it because my grandfather insisted. He was such a fan of the character Marius in the book Les Miserables, of Victor Hugo, and of the Roman general Caius Marius that he was ready to gave up on his rule about not choosing a name that can be changed in Mario, Mariusz or whatever. He even insisted until my parents accepted to give me two first names instead of one. He would call me using both names, which was a little bit confusing at the start for me, but I got used to it. Now, most people call me Ciprian, because it’s the first one in the row, but I will turn to face the speaker even if someone is calling me Marius.
So, here it is, the story of my first names.
Ink And Reason 