Have you ever wondered which are the most popular names in Europe? I got the answer in this Wikipedia article. Of course, like everything European, the statistic collected there resembles “organized mess”. The information is compiled from various sources and different years, some of it represents the entire population at the time and some only the newborn in the specific year. There seems to be no data about Montenegro, Albania and Cyprus, while other countries are extensively covered, for example Belgium is cut in all its glorious regions. Guess which name is the most popular for Brussels (2008)! Mohammed.

Anyway, I loved this exercise, exactly because the data is so messy. It’s a beautiful metaphor for anything European. As many of you know, I am not trying to be scientifically accurate in my maps, that’s not the point of my project.

There are many surprising things on this map but the most intriguing are the cases in which one name is the most popular in more than one country. I tried to emphasize those groups, assigning to each one similar color shades. You can clearly spot what I would like to call the Luca Empire – spanning from Norway to Croatia. The Greek name Alexander is popular in many countries (and probably one of the most popular worldwide) but on the map it is absolutely dominating only in Russia, Ukraine and… surprise… Macedonia. George is spanning Greece, Bulgaria and… well… Georgia. The two remaining groups are significantly smaller. Jakub covers Poland and Slovakia and Robert(s) – Estonia and Latvia.

Fun, no?