St. Nicholas is Coming to Town!
An icon of St. Nicholas with scenes from his life around the edge. Christ and the Mother of God are shown returning his vestments to him, based on a dream-vision he had while he was in prison, deprived of serving his flock because the emperor disagreed with his theology.
St. Nicholas was a bishop in 4th-century
Turkey but is commonly known as “Santa Claus” in much of the Western World. He
brings gifts to good children on his feast day (December 6) or on Christmas
Day; in some places, he is said to take away bad children in his empty gift
bag. He is sometimes accompanied by a servant or devil who takes away the bad
children or leaves switches for their parents to beat them.
His tomb is in Myra (a small town
in modern Turkey) but many of the remains were stolen by Italian sailors and
taken to Bari in 1087. The sailors
from Bari only took the main bones of Nicholas’s skeleton, leaving all the
minor fragments in the grave. The city of Venice had interest in
obtaining the remaining fragments of his skeleton and, in 1100, a fleet
of Venetian ships sailed past Myra on their way to Palestine for the First Crusade. The Venetians took the remaining bones of
Saint Nicholas, and brought them to Venice. This story was lent credence in two scientific
investigations of the relics in Bari and Venice, which confirmed that the
relics in the two cities are anatomically compatible and may belong to the same
person.
In
the late 1950s, while the crypt was undergoing much-needed restoration, the bones were
removed from it for the first time since their interment in 1089. A
special Pontifical Commission permitted Luigi Martino, a professor of human
anatomy at the University of Bari, to examine the bones under the Commission’s supervision.
Martino took thousands of measurements, detailed scientific drawings,
photographs, and x-rays. These examinations revealed the saint to have
died at over seventy years of age and to have been of average height and
slender-to-average build. He also suffered from severe chronic arthritis
in his spine and pelvis.
Another
test in 2017 in Oxford involved radiocarbon dating, which confirmed that the bones
date to the fourth century AD, around the same time that Saint Nicholas would
have died, and are not a medieval forgery.
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