Abadín

Abba, 'father', is among the rare Aramaic words that early Christianity incorporated into liturgical Latin without translation, preserving the affective weight of the original —⁠Jesus uses it to address the Father in the Gospel of Mark (14:36). From there it passed to the monastic lexicon as the title of the superior of a monastery: the abbas was the father of the monastic community. The derivative Abbatinus, with diminutive suffix, was a frequent personal name in early-medieval clerical onomastics, generally applied to sons of ecclesiastics (in a time when celibacy was not yet rigorous) or to monastic oblates. The Galician phonetics of the intervocalic -tt- cluster gives regular lenition to -d-: Abbatinus → Abadín. The hamlet, head of the eponymous council, is documented from the 11th century in charters of the Lourenzá monastery. It is a Gronze stage head between Mondoñedo and Vilalba. It preserves the parish church of Santa María, 12th-century Romanesque reformed in the Baroque. The region also gives its name to the cheese San Simón da Costa, a Galician cheese DO typical of the Terra Chá.