It remains to be seen whether the World Cup will result in an upsurge in the number of Irish baby boys named “Pico”.
Perhaps, as with the original Roberto Carlos Lopes, the term will just be added as a nickname (it means “strong lad” in Cape Verdean Portuguese) to big central defenders from Crumlin in Dublin.
But the tournament will surely increase membership of the unlikely cult of an Irish saint whose feast day falls on July 8th and who, by next week, may have a two-time winner of the Golden Boot called after him.
Kylian Mbappé bears the standard French spelling of a forename presumed to derive from the Irish cillín, meaning “little church”, which mysteriously made its way into the lists of French boys’ names sometime in the late 1980s.
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Since when it has also attached itself to Kylian Hazard, the youngest and least known of a trio of Belgian footballing brothers who also include Eden and Thorgan.
But the original St Kilian (or Cillian, as we now tend to spell it in Ireland) was born at Mullagh, in modern-day Cavan, about 640AD.
Forty-nine years later, he was martyred at Würzburg in the Kingdom of the Franks; meaning that today, outside Ireland, the main focus of his commemoration is southern Germany.
Hence the Kiliani-Volksfest, now under way in Würzburg, which includes an annual beer festival dating back almost a millennium, to 1030, and therefore, as the organisers boast, “much older than the Oktoberfest” in Munich.
Another regular feature of the event is an amateur boxing tournament, with a ring set up in the festival tent, where music, drinking and fighting combine. I’m not sure the saint would have approved.
It was his disapproval of certain local lifestyles that earned Kilian martyrdom. Tradition records that in the summer of 686 he left Ireland with 11 companions, travelling through Gaul to Rome, where the Pope dispatched them to Franconia to preach Christianity to the pagans there.
They made their base in Würzburg, and early converts included the local Herzog (or Duke) Gozbert. Kilian was less successful with the Herzog’s wife Geilana, however, who happened to be the widow of Gozbert’s brother.
The holy man felt bound to point out that the marriage was in violation of Christian laws.
And while Gozbert wrestled with the implications, Geilana made her objections known by sending soldiers to Würzburg’s main square, where Kilian was preaching, and having him beheaded alongside his companions Colmán and Totnan.
Their skulls are still preserved in Würzburg Cathedral, which was built on the spot where they died. And on St Kilian’s Day, a glass case containing the relics is still paraded through the streets.
We might pause briefly to wonder why the name Colmán, although it has its followers, too, has not enjoyed the same modern popularity Kilian/Cillian. Or why nobody, anywhere, is named Totnan.
But even without naming them, the trio martyred at Würzburg must have been among those about whom Heinrich Böll was thinking when in 1954, on the deck of a ship steaming into Dún Laoghaire, he romanticised “the isle of saints still hiding from the sun in the morning mist”.
In his Irish Journal, he wrote: “Here on this island, then, live the only people in Europe that never set out to conquer … all they sent out was priests, monks, missionaries, who … brought the spirit of Thebaic asceticism to Europe”.
Böll’s book, published in 1957, sent generations of spiritually inclined German tourists to Ireland. Among the first may have been a group of hitchhikers from Würzburg that the late Cardinal Tomás Ó Fiaich, then a professor in Maynooth, picked up one day in 1960.
That sparked a lifelong devotion to the three saints and in 1989, on the 1,300th anniversary of their deaths, Ó Fiach led a delegation of 50 members of the Armagh Historical Society and another 70 pilgrims from Mullagh on a commemorative visit to Würzburg.
It must have been those or related celebrations that inspired the latter-day fashion for the name Kylian in nearby France, where at least two churches dedicated to the saint exist.
The one in Mullagh, by the way, is spelt St Kilian’s. But getting back to the subject of strong men, named Pico or otherwise, the Cavan village may have at least one other claim to fame.
It’s said that while staying with his clergyman friend Thomas Sheridan there in 1725, Jonathan Swift met a local man mountain named “Big Doughty”. A former circus act who had settled in the area, Doughty was known for his prodigious strength and for a physique so large he could hide “a man being sought by a process server” under his coat.
At the time Swift was writing Gulliver’s Travels (300-years-old this year). So it seems fair to speculate that the man mountain from Mullagh is immortalised, in spirit at least, among the giants of Brobdingnag.
