Daphni is a variant of Daphne, from Greek, meaning laurel tree.
Daphni is the modern Greek form of one of classical antiquity's most poignant names. In Greek mythology, Daphne was a naiad nymph, daughter of the river god Peneus, whose beauty caught the unwanted attention of the god Apollo. To spare her from Apollo's relentless pursuit, her father transformed her into a laurel tree — *dáphnē* in Greek — at the moment Apollo reached out to embrace her.
The god, devastated, declared the laurel his sacred tree, and from that point forward the laurel wreath became the symbol of poetic and athletic triumph in the ancient world. Every Olympic victor, every crowned poet, every Roman emperor wore Daphne's transformed body as a crown of honor. The myth was retold ceaselessly across Western art: Ovid's *Metamorphoses* gave it its canonical literary form, Bernini sculpted its most celebrated visual expression in his breathtaking marble *Apollo and Daphne* (1622–25), now in Rome's Borghese Gallery, and the story shaped centuries of thinking about desire, transformation, and the cost of beauty.
In Byzantine and modern Greek culture, Daphni remained in common use — the monastery of Daphni near Athens, famous for its stunning 11th-century mosaics, kept the name embedded in the landscape of Greek Christianity. Daphni, as distinguished from the more internationally familiar Daphne, carries the specifically Greek phonetic rendering — softer on the final syllable, closer to its ancient source. It has gained admirers beyond Greece in recent years among parents who love classical names but want something slightly less expected than Daphne, preserving the myth's beauty while wearing it differently.