Spelling variations of this family name include: Cosmas, Cosmos, Kosmin, Kosmas, Cosimo, Cosumano, Gosmin, Gosmas, Kusmin, Kusmas and many more.
First found in Silesia, where the name gained a significant reputation for its contribution to the emerging mediaeval society.
Kosman
Kos
From the words of my dad:
I grew up believing that my grand-grandma was Jewish. The following is as told by grandparents from my father’s side.
The last of a line of Bohemian knights named Wotzel (“vocel” meaning steel) married in Vienna an irresistibly beautiful Jewish girl. That was a social no-no and he, ostracized by the establishment, ended up drinking to death. They had two children. The boy as a young man went to America and vanished in the Wild West. Perhaps something like “Dancing with Wolves.” The girl, nurtured by relatives, grew up in Vienna, where she married my grandfather Karel Kosman. He was sent by his father, a Bavarian freehold farmer, to the high society to “learn manners.” He landed a job with the Austrian-Hungarian Empire railroad, that eventually relocated him as a train inspector to Bohemia. My father, who was six at the time, had to learn Czech while starting school.
Grandma, considered 50% Jewish, could have been taken away to a concentration camp during the reign of Hitler, but she was saved by marriage to an “Aryan.”
Ironically, however, his family may have actually originated from Serbia, where there is a village of the same name. You can google their hero Kosman still today. Historically, people from the general area (notably Turkey) often migrated to Germany.
Later, when I googled our not-very-common name, I found it could also be Jewish or Turkish. The Jewish version’s original meaning is a cupbearer. The Slavic originates from a “man of the world (Kosmos).” I like that, except I was still apparently 12.5% Jewish, so decided to check some more. Turns out that Eastern European Jews (known as Yiddish) aren’t Jewish by ethnicity but by conversion. From nomadic tribes roaming the Russian planes.
Bohemia, where we come from, is the original homeland of the Celtic tribe Boii. Early AD, Czechs migrated in following the river Danube from the East. The two tribes apparently liked each other, blending in a 60/40 ratio. Thus, my Bohemian mother Helena was 60% Celtic and 40% Slavic. Assuming that my Viennese father was 75% Slavic and 25% Yiddish, I, Karel Kosman the 3rd, am 57.5% Slav, 30% Celt, and 12.5% Yiddish.
More of my dad’s writings on the history of Czechs with some tips to friends what to enjoy there.
So as far as I’ve collected (as told by my aunt Jana), there was some mad German Albino genius named Wotzel, a choleric.
About the first and very tall Kosman: the rich aunt with the rich uncle had great and influential friends and later moved to Vienna, where they often spoke German at home. This Kosman was a poor sod because Baba Jana would commandeer him and often would throw things at him. Baba Jana was a half Jew and feared for the lives of her two sons, and some of our relatives eventually died in German concentration camps.
After the Prague Spring and when the communists rolled in to “save us”, we packed up all our stuff and scrammed for the border. The communists gave all rebel rousers till midnight to get out of the country (better to let such elements out now than to deal with an underground movement later), so at the age of 26, I at the age of 3 and half and my sister at the age of 2, we went with our mom in our 2 cylinder Lada, packed up our stuff, and made a dart for the border. But the Czechs, in their miscalculated endeavour to slow down the Russian tanks, littered the roadways with nails and my father had to patch up our tires six times. At some point we got to a fork in the road and stepped out to ask a neighbouring home which way to go, but they were hiding inside in fear and did not come out to guide us. So we took a wild guess and made it to the border by 3 in the morning. Very afraid, we handed the border guards our documents, but they just smiled and let us go on our way.
My mom didn’t like how in Switzerland everyone was separated by status, and she always dreamed of Vancouver, in Canada which many Czechs look on in fondness, since they love freedom and nature, so we went to Canada, but my dad instead found a job in Ottawa at Bell Northern Research, working on fibre optics. We stayed in Ottawa 12 years, and Canada for a long time has led the world in fibre optics.
About a year after he moved back is when I came to Prague. He is Karel Kosman III and I am IV, but we would both just use our simplified versions on our business cards. Not having such a rich background in education and experience as he, I tried my luck with several ideas in venture entrepreneurialism, such as starting a waterbed emporium or a modelling agency (Czech girls are very beautiful). I made a studio in my apartment and would often hand out pink business cards to attractive females inviting them to a photo shoot back in my flat. My dad would plead with me to put Karel Kosman Jr., or SOMETHING distinguishing on my business cards, but this felt too derogatory and I respectfully declined. He told me that he often got approached by people with puzzled looks asking him about his various other activities, considering how small a town Prague really is.
The Kosman monkey or Marmoset (some friends like to call me Kosmankey) is the smallest monkey in the world, growing to a robust 20 cm in height (about 8 inches) and 125 g in weight.
Back to My Life – The Gypsy Traveler
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