Dardan relates to ancient Dardanus in Greek tradition, a mythic ancestor tied to Troy.
Dardan carries one of the most storied mythological lineages in Western literature. In Greek mythology, Dardanus was the son of Zeus and the Pleiad Electra, who sailed from Samothrace to found the city of Dardania on the slopes of Mount Ida in Asia Minor — the settlement that would eventually become Troy itself. From Dardanus descended the entire Trojan royal line: Tros, Ilus, Laomedon, Priam, Hector, Paris.
Every hero and tragedy of the Iliad flows from that founding ancestor. Homer invokes the Dardanians repeatedly, Virgil traces Aeneas's bloodline directly to Dardanus in the Aeneid, and the Dardanelles strait bears his name to this day. The name found a second, equally powerful identity through the ancient Dardani, an Illyrian people who inhabited the western Balkans and gave their name to Dardania — the region corresponding roughly to modern Kosovo.
That historical geography has made Dardan a living name among Albanians and Kosovars, worn as cultural pride and historical memory simultaneously. In Kosovo especially, naming a son Dardan is an act of identity: connecting him to an ancient land and an unbroken presence upon it.