Ilya

This article is about the given name. For other uses, see Ilya (disambiguation).

Ilya
Gender	male
Origin
Word/name	Russian-language or alternatively Kurdish
Meaning	"My god is He" (Hebrew meaning) or "great or glorious" (Kurdish meaning)
Other names
Related names	Elijah, Ilija, Ilya, Iliya, Ilja, Ilyusha, Ilyushenka, Ilyich, Ilyinichna, Ali or Ilia

Look up Ilya in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Ilya, Illya, Iliya, Ilja, Ilija, or Ilia (Cyrillic: Илья) is the East Slavic form of the male Hebrew name Eliyahu (Elijah), meaning "My god is He". It comes from the Byzantine Greek pronunciation of the vocative (Elia) of the Greek Elias (Ηλίας). It is pronounced with stress on the second syllable. The diminutive form is Ilyusha or Ilyushenka. The Russian patronymic for a son of Ilya is "Ilyich", and a daughter is "Ilyinichna".

Ilya is also a Kurdish name meaning great and glorious.

Famous namesakes

Real people

Ilya Averbukh, Russian ice dancer
Ilja Bereznickas, Lithuanian animator, illustrator scriptwriter and caricaturist
Ilya Bryzgalov, Russian ice hockey goalie for the Anaheim Ducks
Ilya Ehrenburg, Russian writer and Soviet cultural ambassador
Ilya Grubert, violinist
Ilya Ilf, Russian author of Twelve Chairs and the Golden Calf'
Ilya Ilin, Kazakh olympic weightlifter
Ilya Kabakov, Russian-American conceptual artist of Jewish origin
Ilya Kaler, violinist
Ilya Kovalchuk, Russian ice hockey winger for SKA Saint Petersburg
Ilia Kulik, Russian figure skater
Ilya Lagutenko, lead singer of the Russian rock band Mumiy Troll
Elia Abu Madi, Lebanese-American poet
Ilya Mechnikov, Russian Nobel Prize-winning microbiologist
Ilya Petrov (born 1995), Russian footballer
Ilya Prigogine, Nobel Prize-winning physicist
Ilya Piatetski-Shapiro, Russian-Jewish-Israeli mathematician
Ilya Yefimovich Repin (1844–1930), Russian painter
Ilya Salkind, movie producer
Ilya Salmanzadeh, music producer
Ilja Szrajbman, Polish swimmer
Ilya Ulyanov, father of Soviet revolutionary Vladimir Lenin
Ilya Zhitomirskiy American/Russian founder of Diaspora
Ilja Hurník Czech composer, pianist and essayist
Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer Dutch poet, novelist, polemicist and classic scholar

Mythical/Biblical figures

Ilya Muromets, Russian folk hero
Elijah, a Hebrew prophet of the ninth century BCE, known in Russian as Ilya
Ali or Eli (Arabic name), a cousin and son-in-law of the Islamic prophet Muhammad, and the first Imam of shiahs

(There is a quote from Imam Ali "I am called Elya / Alya among Jews, Elia among Christians, Ali for my father, and Haydar for my mother"),^[1]^[2]

Fictional characters

Ilya Pasternak, fictional character from the video game Ace Combat 6: Fires of Liberation
Illya Kuryakin, a main character in the TV show The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
Ilya Tretiak, a character in the 1997 film The Saint
Ilya in the book Letters from Rifka
Ilya Afanasyevich Shamrayev, a character in Anton Chekhov's The Seagull
Ilya Stepanovich Igolkin, a character in Vladimir Obruchev's Plutonia
Ilya (Ilyusha) Snegiryov, a character in Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov

References