My name is Gala Takovski

So now it is official. My name will be Gala. Gala Takovska. I like it. Do you?

Gala (Гала) is a girl’s name of Greek and Russian origin, meaning ‘Calm’; it is also a Russian and Slavic name, short from Galina or Galena. Variant of Hebrew Gal, meaning ‘mound’,’ wave’.

The world’s most famous Gala was Gala Dalí, muse and inspiration, a model, a great love and a wife of Salvador Dalí, a Spanish Catalan surrealist painter.

Gala was born Elena Ivanovna Diakonova in Kazan, Tatarstan, Russia, to a family of intellectuals. Among her childhood friends was the poet Marina Tsvetaeva. As a young woman, living in Moscow, she graduated as a schoolteacher in 1915.

Dalí met Gala in August 1929. She was a Russian immigrant eleven years his senior, who at that time was married to surrealist poet Paul Éluard. Dalí and Gala, having lived together since 1929, were married in 1934 in a civil ceremony. They later remarried in a Catholic ceremony in 1958.

In the early 1930s, Dalí started to sign his paintings with his and her name as "it is mostly with your blood, Gala, that I paint my pictures". Gala was also a frequent model in Dalí's work, often in religious roles such as the Blessed Virgin Mary in the painting The Madonna of Port Lligat. Dalí's numerous paintings of her show his great love for her, and some are perhaps the most affectionate and sensual depictions of a middle-aged woman in Western art.

“Gala asomada a la ventana” (“Gala at the window”), a sculpture by Salvador Dalí, in Marbella, Spain.

“Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bumblebee around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening”, painting by Salvador Dalí, 1944.

Well… I know for most of you it will be difficult to get used to my new name, since you have addressed me as Mogly for almost nine months. So although I will be Gala when I am born, I won’t be mad if some of you still call me Mogly. I kind of started to like it as well :)