Saint George

• 1. Introduction

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  Saint George died on the 23rd of April 303, beheaded at Lydda in Palestine after refusing to renounce his Christian faith before the Roman emperor Diocletian. He was a soldier, possibly a member of the elite Praetorian Guard, of Cappadocian Greek descent. Those bare facts are nearly all that historians can verify with confidence. Yet from that slender biographical thread, a figure emerged who became the patron saint of England, Portugal, Georgia, Ethiopia, Catalonia, Aragon, and dozens of cities and regions across four continents. He is venerated by Christians, Druze, and Muslims alike. He slew a dragon in a Libyan city called Silene, according to the most famous legend, and his lance was said to have borne the name Ascalon. Winston Churchill named his personal aircraft after that lance during World War II. How does a soldier whose life left almost no historical trace become one of the most widely worshipped figures on earth? That is the question this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. A Soldier Behind the Legend

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  In 1964, a Coptic manuscript was discovered beneath a column in the ruins of the cathedral of Qasr Ibrim in Nubia, before the site was flooded by the Aswan Dam. Dated between 350 and 500, it is the oldest surviving textual tradition of the legend of Saint George, and it names his father Gerontius, a Cappadocian serving the Roman Empire in Nobatia. His mother, Polychronia, was a Christian who had George baptised in secret because his father was a pagan. According to that manuscript, George was born during the reign of Aurelian, placing his birth between 270 and 275.

  The earliest Greek hagiography that preserves fragments of George's narrative is a palimpsest identified by Hippolyte Delehaye of the Bollandist scholars as dating to the 5th century. Pope Gelasius I stated in 494 that George was among those saints whose names are justly reverenced among men but whose actions are known only to God. That phrase from the pope is as close as official Rome ever came to admitting that the biographical record was nearly empty.

  The historian Donald Attwater put the matter plainly: no historical particulars of George's life have survived. What can be reasonably surmised is that he was apparently martyred at Diospolis, also called Lydda, at the end of the third or the beginning of the fourth century. The work of the Bollandists Daniel Papebroch, Jean Bolland, and Godfrey Henschen in the 17th century was among the first systematic scholarly efforts to establish even that much, drawing on their publications in the Bibliotheca Hagiographica Graeca.

  The English historian Edward Gibbon put forward a provocative theory: that the historical George behind the legend was actually George of Cappadocia, a notorious 4th-century Arian bishop who was the bitter rival of Athanasius of Alexandria, and who was killed by a pagan Greek mob for levying harsh taxes. The scholar J. B. Bury, editing Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in 1906, dismissed this cleanly, writing that the theory has nothing to be said for it.

• 3. Dragon, Lance, and Legend

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  The earliest known record of Saint George and the Dragon appears in an 11th-century Georgian source. It reached Latin Europe in the 12th century, and its most enduring form was written by Jacobus de Voragine, the Archbishop of Genoa, in his 13th-century compilation the Legenda Aurea, or Golden Legend. After the invention of the printing press, that book became a bestseller, and William Caxton's 15th-century English translation made the dragon story the version most familiar to English readers.

  The legend is set in the city of Silene in Libya, where a dragon had been terrorising the population. The inhabitants fed it two sheep each day to keep it from ravaging the city. When sheep were no longer enough, people were sacrificed by lot. When the king's daughter was selected, George arrived, slew the dragon with his lance, and refused the king's offer of treasures, urging him instead to give the wealth to the poor. The entire city converted to Christianity and was baptised.

  In the medieval chivalric romances, the lance George used was named Ascalon, after an ancient city in southern Palestine. Records at Bletchley Park show that Winston Churchill used that name for his personal aircraft during World War II.

  The dragon story was not part of George's earliest hagiographies. Scholars trace it as a later addition, and the connection can be followed to the close of the 6th century in the Levant. The French archaeologist Charles Simon Clermont-Ganneau noted that near Lydda, at Apollonia-Arsuf or Joppa, the mythological hero Perseus had slain a sea monster threatening the virgin Andromeda. Clermont-Ganneau argued that George entered into the inheritance of veneration that had once belonged to Perseus, and that the myth then travelled through the crusaders into medieval European imagination.

  The dragon was not merely a monster in the later tradition. Among Druze interpreters, the slaying was read allegorically as the triumph of good over evil. The Dodecanese and Crete developed their own variant, where George is called "Saint George the Drunken", a figure presiding over the blessing of new wines each spring.

• 4. Faith Across Three Traditions

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  At the shrine of St. George's Monastery at Al-Khader, near Bethlehem, the writer William Dalrymple visited in 1995 and asked the Orthodox priest whether Muslims came to pray there. The priest answered: we get hundreds, almost as many as the Christian pilgrims. Often, when I come in here, I find Muslims all over the floor, in the aisles, up and down.

  That scene captures something central about George's appeal in the Middle East. J. E. Hanauer, writing in his 1907 book Folklore of the Holy Land, described the same monastery as a kind of madhouse, where deranged persons of all three faiths were brought and chained in the courtyard, kept on bread and water, and subjected to prayers or whippings. Tawfiq Canaan's survey in the 1920s found the situation unchanged, with Christians, Muslims, and Jews still visiting and praying side by side.

  In Islamic sources, George appears as a prophetic figure known as Jirjis or Girgus. The Persian historian al-Tabari describes a George who resurrects the dead, makes trees sprout and pillars bear flowers, and whose death brings darkness over the entire world until he is raised again. Al-Thaʿlabi records that when the king of Mosul tried to starve George, he touched a piece of dry wood brought by a woman and it turned green, covered in fruit and vegetables. Ibn al-Athir compared one of George's deaths to the apparent crucifixion of Jesus, writing that when he died, God sent stormy winds and thunder and lightning and dark clouds, so that darkness fell between heaven and earth.

  The mosque of Nabi Jurjis in Mosul, restored by Timur in the 14th century, was believed to contain George's tomb. In July 2014, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant destroyed it, along with the Mosque of the Prophet Sheeth and the Mosque of the Prophet Younis.

  Due to the Christian influence on Druze faith, George became one of the two most venerated figures among the Druze alongside Saint Elias. Scholar Ray Jabre Mouawad explains that the Druze were drawn to warrior saints whose bravery resembled their own militarised society. George's epithet al-Khidr, meaning the verdant prophet, is shared across Christian, Muslim, and Druze folk piety, linking his identity to themes of renewal and fertility that predate the Christian tradition itself.

• 5. Patron Saint of Nations

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  Belief in an apparition of George heartened the Frankish forces at the Battle of Antioch in 1098, and a similar appearance was reported the following year at Jerusalem. Those accounts fixed George as the defining military saint of the Crusades. Edward III of England placed his Order of the Garter under George's banner, probably in 1348. The chronicler Jean Froissart recorded English troops invoking George as a battle cry on several occasions during the Hundred Years' War.

  George did not officially become the patron saint of England until the 14th century. He remained obscured by the traditional patron, Edward the Confessor, until 1552, during the reign of Edward VI, when all saints' banners other than George's were abolished in the English Reformation. Saint George's Day continued to be observed even as the Reformation curtailed most other saints' days. The scholar Muriel C. McClendon has written that because George had no legendary connection with England and no single localised shrine like that of Thomas Becket at Canterbury, numerous shrines were established during the late 15th century, and his name did not become identified with any one occupation or ailment.

  In Portugal, devotions to George date to the 12th century. Nuno Álvares Pereira attributed the Portuguese victory at the Battle of Aljubarrota in 1385 to George's intercession. During the reign of D. John I, who lived from 1357 to 1433, George became the patron saint of Portugal, and his image on horseback was carried in the Corpus Christi procession. The battle cry of the Portuguese Army remains Portugal e São Jorge to this day, while the Navy uses São Jorge alone.

  In Aragon, the pivotal moment was the Battle of Alcoraz in 1096, when King Pedro I of Aragon defeated the Muslim forces of the Taifa of Zaragoza and took the city of Huesca. According to legend, George appeared on horseback bearing a dark red cross and led the Christian cavalry. The battle had claimed the life of King Pedro's own father, King Sancho Ramirez, and had stretched over two years from 1094. After the victory, the Cross of St. George was adopted as the coat of arms of both Huesca and Aragon. By 1117, the Templars had adopted that same cross on the left side of their tunics, above the heart, as a unifying sign for international Christian forces.

  In Georgia, exactly 365 Orthodox churches are dedicated to George, one for each day of the year. According to local legend, after George fell in battle his body was cut into 365 pieces, each spread across the country. The country of Georgia is not technically named after the saint, but the English name reflects a well-attested back-formation from the saint's name.

• 6. Cross, Flag, and Icon

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  The red cross on a white field that the world recognises as Saint George's Cross most likely originated in Genoa. The city had adopted George as patron and taken his cross as its flag by the 12th century. A vexillum beati Georgii is mentioned in Genoese annals for the year 1198, referring to a red flag bearing an image of George and the dragon. An illumination of that flag appears in the annals for 1227. A separate banner showing only the plain red cross was used alongside it from at least 1218, known as the insignia cruxata comunis Janue, meaning the cross ensign of the commune of Genoa.

  Edward III of England began using the red-on-white cross in the hoist of his Royal Standard in 1348, the same year he placed the Order of the Garter under George's patronage. The writer Thomas Fuller described the plain cross in 1647 as the mother of all the others in heraldry. That cross now forms the national flag of England, and overlapping with Scotland's flag of Saint Andrew produces the Union Jack, which appears on the flags of Australia and New Zealand among others.

  In iconography, George is most commonly depicted in armour rendered in gilding and silver, identifying him as a Roman soldier. Particularly after the Fall of Constantinople, he is often shown mounted on a white horse. A Vatican stamp issued in 2003, on the anniversary of his death, shows an armoured George on a white horse killing the dragon. When depicted alongside Saint Demetrius, the two soldier saints together were understood to resemble earthly manifestations of the archangels Michael and Gabriel. The visual rule distinguishing them is precise: George rides a white horse, Demetrius a red one. George carries a spear aimed at a dragon; Demetrius carries one aimed at a human figure representing the emperor Maximian.

  In the south Lebanese village of Mieh Mieh, the Melkite Catholic church of Saint George commissioned for its 75th jubilee in 2012 what are said to be the only icons in the world portraying the complete life of George, including scenes of his torture and martyrdom, executed in eastern iconographic style.

• 7. Feast Days and Living Devotion

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  In the General Roman Calendar, the feast of George falls on the 23rd of April, the date fixed to his martyrdom. In the Catholic Church's Tridentine calendar of 1568 it was ranked Semidouble; by Pope Pius XII's 1955 revision it had been reduced to Simple; by Pope John XXIII's 1960 calendar it became a mere Commemoration; and since Pope Paul VI's 1969 revision it appears as an optional memorial. In England and some other countries it retains a higher rank, celebrated as a Solemnity in the Roman Catholic church or a Festival in the Church of England.

  The Eastern Orthodox Church honours George as a Great Martyr. His principal feast on the 23rd of April in the Julian calendar corresponds to the 6th of May in the Gregorian calendar. The Russian Orthodox Church adds two further feasts: the 3rd of November, commemorating the consecration of a cathedral dedicated to George in Lydda during the reign of Constantine the Great, and the 26th of November for a church dedicated to him in Kiev around 1054.

  In Bulgaria and Serbia, George's Day falls on the 6th of May, when it is customary to slaughter and roast a lamb. In Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina the day is known as Djurdjevdan and is a common slava among ethnic Serbs. The Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria calls George the Prince of Martyrs and celebrates his martyrdom on the 23rd of Paremhat, equivalent to the 1st of May.

  In the southern Indian state of Kerala, at the pilgrim centre of Edathua in Alappuzha district, the saint is commemorated each year from the 27th of April to the 14th of May. The main feast is on the 7th of May, when the statue of the saint is taken in procession around the church. The sacred relics of George were brought from Mardin to Antioch in 900, and then taken from Antioch to Kerala in 1912 by Mar Dionysius of Vattasseril.

  In April 2019, the parish church of São Jorge on Madeira Island in Portugal solemnly received the relics of George during celebrations marking the 504th anniversary of the church's foundation. The relics were brought by the new Bishop of Funchal, D. Nuno Brás.