Likely from Slavic Zorya, linked to dawn and the morning star.
Zoria is a variant of Zora and Zorya, names rooted in the ancient Slavic word *zora* (зора / зоря), meaning dawn, the first light of morning. In Slavic mythology, the Zorya were celestial goddesses of the dawn — twin sisters, the Morning Star (Zorya Utrennyaya) and the Evening Star (Zorya Vechernyaya) — who guarded the gates of the sun's palace and held the hound Simargl chained to the polar star to prevent the destruction of the world. They are among the most poetically compelling figures in Slavic cosmology, and their name carries that sense of threshold and radiance, of light holding darkness at bay.
Zora as a given name spread through South Slavic cultures — Serbian, Croatian, Bulgarian — and gained wider literary recognition through Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960), the towering American writer, anthropologist, and central figure of the Harlem Renaissance. Her novel *Their Eyes Were Watching God* (1937) is considered one of the great works of twentieth-century American literature, and her fearless documentation of African-American Southern folk culture changed how scholars understood the richness of vernacular tradition. Her Zora gave the name a distinctly American literary legacy layered over its Slavic origins.
Zoria specifically — with the -ia ending — feels simultaneously more feminine and more exotic than Zora, giving it an almost fantastical quality that has attracted parents drawn to nature-mystical names. It appears across Eastern European countries as well as in diaspora communities in the West, and its meaning remains its greatest strength: to name a child Zoria is to name them dawn itself, the daily miracle of light returning.