Saint Nicholas
In May 2017, over a million people queued in Moscow to glimpse a gilded ark holding a rib of Saint Nicholas of Myra. The rib was lent from Bari in Italy after talks between Pope Francis and the Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill. It was displayed at Christ the Savior Cathedral, then taken to Saint Petersburg in mid-June before returning to Bari.
Tradition dates Nicholas from the 15th of March 270 to the 6th of December 343. He was a Greek Christian bishop from the port city of Patara in Anatolia, in what is now Antalya Province, Turkey. The faithful called him Nicholas the Wonderworker because of the many miracles credited to his intercession.
Sailors, merchants, archers, repentant thieves, children, brewers, pawnbrokers, toymakers, students and unmarried people have all claimed him as a patron. Yet the man himself is hard to find. What can really be said about his life? Why do his bones rest in Italy rather than Turkey? And how did a bishop from Lycia become tied to Santa Claus?
Nothing Nicholas may have written survives, and no chronicler of his own era mentions him. That silence is unsurprising, since he lived through a turbulent stretch of Roman history. The earliest signs of him come from buildings and from texts composed long after his death.
By the sixth century, his following was already well established. Less than two hundred years after his probable death, Emperor Theodosius II, who ruled from 401 to 450, ordered a church built in Myra. The historian Procopius adds that Emperor Justinian I, who ruled from 527 to 565, renovated Constantinople churches dedicated to Nicholas and to Saint Priscus. Those churches may have been built as early as around 490.
Between 510 and 515, Theodore Lector wrote a church history that includes a list of attendees at the Council of Nicaea. On its tenth line stands the name 'Nicholas of Myra of Lycia.' A single offhand mention also turns up in the Life of Saint Nicholas of Sion, written around 250 years after Nicholas of Myra died. Nicholas of Sion had apparently taken his name as a tribute, and the biography says he visited the older saint's tomb. According to Jeremy Seal, the existence of a tomb that pilgrims could visit is almost the only definitive proof that Nicholas was a real man.
Around 583, the theologian Eustratius of Constantinople cited the miracle of the three generals in a treatise called De statu animarum post mortem. He used it as evidence that souls can act independently of the body, and he credited a lost Life of Saint Nicholas. Nearly all his sources date from the late fourth to the early fifth century. That suggests the lost Life was written soon after Nicholas died.
The earliest complete biography to survive was written in the early ninth century by Michael the Archimandrite, nearly 500 years after Nicholas's probable death. It seems to draw heavily on older writings and oral tradition, though the identity and reliability of those sources remain uncertain. Catholic historian D. L. Cann and medievalist Charles W. Jones both treat it as the only account likely to hold any historical truth.
Dutch historian Jona Lendering notes that Michael's Life lacks a conversion narrative, which was unusual for saints' lives of its day. He argues that Michael may therefore have relied on a source from before such narratives became popular. Lendering also sees many of its stories echoed in the Life of Apollonius of Tyana, an eight-volume biography written in the early third century by the Greek writer Philostratus. Apollonius was a first-century Neopythagorean philosopher from Tyana, a town not far from Myra. Christian saints often absorbed older pagan tales, so stories about Apollonius may have attached themselves to Nicholas. The most famous of those stories involves gold coins and a window.
Some accounts name Nicholas's parents as Epiphanius and Johanna, while others give Theophanes and Nonna. Either way, they were wealthy Greek Christians in Patara. In some versions, an uncle who was bishop of Myra recognized his nephew's calling and ordained him a priest. After his parents died in an epidemic, Nicholas is said to have given their fortune to the poor.
His most celebrated deed is first recorded in Michael the Archimandrite's Life. A devout man had lost his money through what the text calls the 'plotting and envy of Satan.' He could not afford dowries for his three daughters. Without marriages, the girls would probably have been forced into prostitution for lack of other work. Nicholas was too modest to help in public, or perhaps wished to spare the family the shame of accepting charity. He went to the house at night and threw a purse of gold coins through a window opening.
The father at once arranged his eldest daughter's marriage. After the wedding, Nicholas threw a second bag of gold through the same window late at night. The father then kept watch, and when Nicholas came for the third daughter, he was caught. The father fell to his knees in thanks, and Nicholas ordered him to tell no one.
Few scenes appear as often in Christian devotional art as this secret gift, in icons and frescoes across Europe. Nicholas is often shown in a cowl, while the daughters lie in bed in their nightclothes. Many versions include a cypress tree or a cross-shaped cupola.
Historians dispute whether it happened. Adam C. English sees a historical kernel, pointing to the story's early attestation and the fact that no other Christian saint has a similar tale. Lendering also defends it, even though Philostratus tells of Apollonius giving money to a poor father. In that version, the daughters' fate goes unmentioned and the motive is plain sympathy for the father. In Michael's account, Nicholas acts expressly to save the daughters from being sold. Lendering argues that this concern for women fits the fourth century, when women played a prominent role in the Christian movement. By the ninth century, he notes, women's position had drastically declined.
Painters later boiled the episode down to a symbol. In Roman Catholic art, Nicholas holds three purses, three coins or three balls of gold.
On a voyage to the Holy Land, Nicholas's ship is said to have nearly broken apart in a terrible storm. He rebuked the waves, and the storm died down. That story made him a patron of sailors and travelers. In Palestine he reputedly lived in a crypt near Bethlehem, where the Nativity of Jesus is believed to have taken place. A Church of Saint Nicholas now stands over that crypt in Beit Jala, a Christian town whose patron he is.
When Nicholas came home to Myra, the city's bishop, who had succeeded Nicholas's uncle, had just died. The local priests agreed that the first priest to enter the church that morning would become bishop. Nicholas went in to pray and was proclaimed the new bishop.
Tradition also says he was imprisoned and tortured in the Great Persecution under Emperor Diocletian, who ruled from 284 to 305. Constantine the Great, who ruled from 306 to 337, is said to have ordered his release. The tale sounds plausible but is missing from the earliest sources, so it is probably not historical.
One of his earliest attested stories saves three innocent men. The governor Eustathius had condemned them to death. As they waited for the executioner, Nicholas appeared, pushed the sword to the ground and freed them from their chains. He then angrily rebuked a juror who had taken a bribe. Lendering sees a direct parallel in Philostratus, where Apollonius stops the execution of a man falsely condemned for banditry.
Michael the Archimandrite tells a second tale of three innocents, this time famous generals. The consul Ablabius took a bribe to have them put to death. Nicholas appeared in dreams to both Constantine and Ablabius. He told the emperor the truth and frightened the consul into freeing the men for fear of Hell.
Later tellers wove the two stories together and gave the generals names: Ursos, Nepotianos and Herpylion. Constantine sent them to crush a rebellion in Phrygia, but a storm drove them into the harbor at Myra. Their soldiers inland were fighting local merchants and looting. Nicholas scolded the generals, who halted the destruction. Soon afterward, he learned of the three men about to be executed, and the generals helped him stop it. Eustathius tried to flee on horseback, but Nicholas stopped him and denounced his corruption. Threatened with a report to the emperor, Eustathius repented.
The generals then ended the rebellion and Constantine promoted them. Their enemies slandered them to Ablabius, claiming they had encouraged their own soldiers to join the revolt. Those enemies also bribed the consul, who imprisoned the generals. Nicholas then appeared in the dreams, and the generals went free.
A famine struck Myra in 311-312, according to another story. A ship loaded with wheat for the emperor in Constantinople lay at anchor in the port. Nicholas asked the sailors to unload part of it. They resisted because the grain had been weighed and was due to the emperor. They agreed only after he promised they would suffer no loss. In Constantinople they found the weight unchanged, although the wheat left behind in Myra was enough for two years and could even serve as seed.
In 325, Nicholas is said to have joined the First Council of Nicaea as a staunch opponent of Arianism and a firm supporter of Trinitarianism. He is also credited as a signer of the Nicene Creed. Theodore Lector's list of attendees places him as the 151st name.
Yet Athanasius of Alexandria, the leading defender of Trinitarianism at the council, never mentions him, even though he knew all the notable bishops of the period. The historian Eusebius, also present, is silent too. Adam C. English notes that attendee lists vary widely. Shorter ones hold roughly 200 names and longer ones around 300, and Nicholas appears only on the longer ones. Of three early lists naming him, Theodore Lector's is generally considered the most accurate.
Lendering sees two possibilities. Either Nicholas never attended, and someone at an early date, puzzled by his absence, added his name. Many scholars favor this view. Or he did attend, and someone early on removed his name, deciding it was better that nobody remember he had been there.
A legend first attested in the fourteenth century, over 1,000 years after Nicholas's death, says he lost his temper at Nicaea and slapped 'a certain Arian' across the face. Constantine responded by stripping him of his miter and pallium. Steven D. Greydanus concludes that the story 'has no historical value.' Lendering disagrees. He argues that nobody would have invented so embarrassing an incident.
Later versions name the target as Arius himself and have Nicholas punch him rather than slap him with an open hand. In these tellings Nicholas is jailed, but Christ and the Virgin Mary appear in his cell. He tells them he is imprisoned 'for loving you,' and they free him from his chains and restore his vestments. Eastern Orthodox icons celebrate the scene. A series of paintings from the 1660s in the Basilica di San Nicola in Bari shows episodes of Nicholas at Nicaea.
An even stranger tale sets Nicholas in a region struck by famine, where he had come to care for the hungry. A malicious butcher lured three small children into his house and killed them. He put their remains in a barrel to cure, planning to sell them as ham. Nicholas saw through the butcher's lies and brought the children back to life with the sign of the cross.
English says this story is a late medieval addition missing from all the earliest Lives. Lendering calls it 'without any historical value.' Even so, it was hugely popular in the Late Middle Ages and the early modern period, and ordinary people loved it. It appeared in stained glass, wood panel paintings, tapestries and frescoes. Artists eventually abbreviated it to Nicholas with three naked children and a wooden barrel at his feet.
English notes that viewers who had forgotten or never learned the story misread the pictures. Seeing children, they decided he was the patron saint of children. Seeing a barrel, they decided he was the patron saint of brewers.
Archaeologists have found signs that Nicholas may first have been buried on Gemile, a small Turkish island only twenty miles from Patara. A rock-cut church stands at its highest point, and Nicholas's name is painted on part of the ruin. In antiquity the island was called Saint Nicholas Island. Its Turkish name, Gemiler Adasi, means 'Island of Boats,' a nod to his role as patron of seafarers. The church dates to the fourth century, around the time of his death, and its design is typical of saints' shrines of that age.
In the mid-7th century, Arab fleets threatened Gemile, and the remains appear to have been moved to Myra, roughly 40 km east. Myra was where Nicholas had served as bishop for most of his life, and its inland position offered safety. There, each year, the relics reportedly exuded a clear liquid that smelled of rose water. The faithful called it manna or myrrh and thought it miraculous. Because everyone knew the relics lay sealed in their sarcophagus at Myra, forgers rarely claimed to hold any.
The year 1071 brought the Battle of Manzikert, after which the Seljuk Turks took most of Asia Minor from the Byzantine Empire. Myra's Greek Christians became Turkish subjects. The Western church had already declared the Greek church in schism in 1054. Some Christians worried that access to the tomb might become difficult. In the spring of 1087, sailors from Bari in Apulia seized part of the remains from the burial church in Myra, over the objections of Greek Orthodox monks.
The remains reached Bari on the 9th of May 1087. Two years later, Pope Urban II inaugurated the Basilica di San Nicola and placed the relics in the tomb beneath its altar himself. Several chroniclers, including Orderic Vitalis, reliably record the move, and western Christians still celebrate the 9th of May as the day of his translation. English calls the removal 'essentially a holy robbery.' Eastern Orthodox Christians and Turks have long called it theft, whereas the people of Bari insist it was a rescue from Turkish invaders. A legend painted on the basilica's ceiling says Nicholas once visited Bari and predicted his bones would rest there.
In the autumn of 1096, Norman and Frankish soldiers gathered in Bari for the First Crusade. They generally preferred warrior saints, which Nicholas was not, but his relics were now close at hand. His link with travelers and seafarers also helped. Before the move to Bari, he had been known in western Europe but was not especially popular. The crusaders' devotion carried his following across the region.
Venice wanted what Bari left behind, since the sailors had taken only the main bones. According to a single chronicle by an anonymous monk at the San Nicolò al Lido monastery, a Venetian fleet sailed past Myra in 1100 on its way to Palestine for the First Crusade. Bishop Enrico Contarini insisted on turning back. The Venetians took the remaining bones, along with those of several other bishops of Myra, from a church guarded by only four Orthodox monks. Two scientific investigations found the bones in Bari and Venice anatomically compatible, so they may belong to one person. Legend says someone dies each time the Venetian bones are disturbed. They were last examined in July 1992.
Demand for pieces soared once the skeleton reached Bari. The sailors gave a tooth and two fragments chipped from the sarcophagus to the Norman knight William Pantulf. He placed them in the Church of St. Peter in Noron, Normandy, in June 1092. In 1096, the duke of Apulia gave several bones to the count of Flanders, who enshrined them in the Abbey of Watten. In 1101, a French clerk visiting Bari reportedly saw Nicholas in a vision and was told to take a bone home. He carried a finger bone to Port, near Nancy, where a chapel rose. The town is now called Saint Nicolas de Port.
The clergy at Bari handed out bone samples on purpose, to promote the cult. Others were kept in Constantinople until the Sack of Constantinople in 1204 during the Fourth Crusade scattered them across western Europe. In Rome, the church of San Nicola in Carcere, whose name means 'Saint Nicholas in Chains,' kept a hand said to be his. It stood on the site of a former municipal prison, and stories grew that Nicholas himself had been held there. Mothers came to pray for jailed sons, and repentant criminals left offerings. So he became the patron saint of prisoners and the falsely accused. Fingers were claimed by a chapel on the Ostian Way and by Ventimiglia in Liguria. An Irish tradition places his tomb near Thomastown in County Kilkenny, though the antiquarian John Hunt thought it belonged to a priest from Jerpoint Abbey.
The dispersal has never fully stopped. On the 22nd of September 2024, the Russian Orthodox Church announced that Holy Myrrhbearers Cathedral in Baku had received a part of the relic as a gift.
In 2000, the Russian government donated a solemn bronze statue of the saint, by the sculptor Gregory Pototsky, to the square before the medieval church in Myra. In 2005, Mayor Süleyman Topçu replaced it with a red-suited plastic Santa Claus, wanting an image foreign visitors would recognize. Protests from Russia succeeded. The bronze returned to a corner nearer the church, without its original high pedestal.
On the 28th of December 2009, the Turkish government announced that it would formally ask Italy to return the skeleton. Turkish authorities asserted that Nicholas wished to be buried in his episcopal town and that his remains were illegally removed. In 2017, an archaeological survey at St. Nicholas Church in Demre reportedly uncovered a temple beneath the modern church. A sarcophagus possibly containing his remains was found there in 2024.
Every year on the 6th of December, the saint's feast day, clergy at the Bari basilica draw a flask of manna from the tomb. Its source is unclear. It may come from the body, or from the marble itself. Bari is a harbor town and the tomb lies below sea level, so some have proposed that seawater travels to the tomb by capillary action. In 1966, a vault in the crypt was dedicated as an Orthodox chapel with an iconostasis, marking the lifting of the anathemas the Catholic and Orthodox churches had issued against each other in 1054.
Most saints' bones were divided among many churches, but most of Nicholas's remain in the Bari crypt. The archdiocese has allowed only one scientific survey. In the late 1950s, during crypt restoration, the bones left their tomb for the first time since their burial in 1089. A Pontifical Commission permitted Luigi Martino, a professor of human anatomy at the University of Bari, to examine them. He took thousands of measurements and made drawings, photographs and X-rays. They showed a man who died at over seventy, of average height and slender-to-average build. He had severe chronic arthritis in his spine and pelvis.
In 2004, Caroline Wilkinson and Francesco Introna at the University of Manchester used Martino's data to reconstruct the saint's face. The reconstruction showed a broken nose that had partly healed, so the injury came well before death. That fits reports that he was beaten and tortured during the Diocletianic Persecution. The face appeared on the BBC2 program The Real Face of Santa. In 2014, the Face Lab at Liverpool John Moores University produced an updated reconstruction.
In 2017, Oxford University researchers Tom Higham and Georges Kazan radiocarbon dated a fragment of a pelvis claimed to be Nicholas's. It came from a church in Lyon, France, and was held by Father Dennis O'Neill, a priest from St Martha of Bethany Church in Illinois. The fragment dated to the fourth century, so it is not a medieval forgery, and it was among the oldest bones the team had examined. Higham said most relics they test are too recent for their saints, but 'This bone fragment, in contrast, suggests that we could possibly be looking at remains from St Nicholas himself.'
Kazan thinks the fragment may come from the same man as the skeleton divided between Bari and Venice. The tested bone is a left pubis, and the only pelvic bone in the Bari collection is a left ilium. Without DNA testing, nobody can yet say whether the two belong to the same man.
In centuries of Greek folklore, Nicholas was 'The Lord of the Sea,' which modern Greek scholars often describe as a Christianized version of Poseidon. He is the patron saint of all Greece and of the Hellenic Navy. On the 6th of December, many Greek cities celebrate their patron saint. Among Greeks and Italians alike, he is a favorite of sailors and fishermen, and he became patron of many harbor cities.
In the Eastern Orthodox Church, Nicholas is remembered on almost every Thursday of the year, together with the Apostles, with hymns found in the Octoechos. Many Orthodox churches display his icon even when not named after him. In Serbia, his day on the 19th of December is the most common Slava, the annual veneration of a family's patron saint. In Monaco, a children's Mass is still held each the 6th of December in the cathedral built from 1874 on the site of a church to Nicholas founded in 1252.
In late medieval England, parishes held boy bishop celebrations on his day. Youths performed the duties of priests and bishops and ruled over their elders. In 1948, Benjamin Britten completed a cantata, Saint Nicolas, on a text by Eric Crozier. A tenor soloist sings the saint, with a mixed choir, boy singers, strings, piano duet, organ and percussion.
Nicholas had a reputation for secret gift-giving, such as putting coins in the shoes of people who left them out for him. In medieval times, nuns in Belgium and France began leaving baskets of food and clothes anonymously on the doorsteps of the needy. According to another source, every sailor or ex-sailor of the Low Countries went down to the harbor towns on the 6th of December for a church celebration. On the way home they stopped at Nicholas fairs to buy hard-to-find goods and small presents for their children. The children's presents were handed over at once, courtesy of Saint Nicholas, while the real gifts waited for Christmas. Together with the resurrection of the butchered children, this made him a patron of children and later of students.
A twist in the dowry story involves fruit. In the Low Countries in medieval times, oranges mostly came from Spain. Some interpreted the three balls of gold as oranges. That led to a belief that the saint lived in Spain and visited each winter, bringing oranges, other wintry fruits and tales of magical creatures.
Santa Claus evolved from the Dutch Sinterklaas traditions. When the Dutch founded the colony of New Amsterdam, they carried the legend of Sinterklaas with them. Howard G. Hageman of New Brunswick Theological Seminary says the celebration existed in the early settlements of the Hudson Valley, though it had faded by the early nineteenth century. In Harlem, an area first settled by Dutch farmers, St. Nicholas Avenue and St. Nicholas Terrace honor Nicholas of Myra. St. Nicholas Park, nearby, sits at the intersection of St. Nicholas Avenue and 127th Street.
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Common questions
Who was Saint Nicholas of Myra?
Saint Nicholas of Myra was an early Christian bishop of Greek descent from Patara in Anatolia, in modern Antalya Province, Turkey. Tradition dates him from the 15th of March 270 to the 6th of December 343, and he is also called Nicholas the Wonderworker.
What is the story of Saint Nicholas and the three daughters?
Saint Nicholas secretly threw bags of gold coins through the window of a poor man's house so his three daughters could have dowries. The father caught him on the third night, and Nicholas ordered him to tell no one. The story is first recorded in Michael the Archimandrite's early ninth-century Life of Saint Nicholas.
Where are the bones of Saint Nicholas today?
Most of Saint Nicholas's main bones lie in the Basilica di San Nicola in Bari, Italy, taken from Myra in 1087. Venice holds the remaining fragments at San Nicolò al Lido, and many churches claim small relics such as a tooth or finger bone.
Why did Italian sailors take Saint Nicholas's relics from Myra in 1087?
Sailors from Bari seized part of the remains in the spring of 1087, after Seljuk Turks had taken control of the region. The people of Bari say it was a rescue from invaders, while Eastern Orthodox Christians and Turks call it a theft.
How did Saint Nicholas become Santa Claus?
Santa Claus evolved from Dutch traditions about Sinterklaas, which settlers brought to New Amsterdam. Saint Nicholas's reputation for secret gift-giving, celebrated on his feast day of the 6th of December, fed those traditions.
Did Saint Nicholas attend the Council of Nicaea?
It is uncertain. Theodore Lector's early list places Nicholas as the 151st attendee at the 325 council, but Athanasius of Alexandria and Eusebius never mention him. His name appears only on the longer attendee lists, and many scholars think it was added later.
What did scientists learn from the bones of Saint Nicholas?
Luigi Martino's examination in the late 1950s showed that the man died at over seventy, was of average height and had severe chronic arthritis. A 2004 facial reconstruction showed a healed broken nose. In 2017, Oxford researchers dated a pelvis fragment to the fourth century.
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