The story of St. Nicholas of Patara, Myra, Gemili and Bari; the model for Father Christmas and a Saint of the Eastern and Western Christian Churches

The story of St. Nicholas of Patara, Myra, Gemili and Bari; the model for Father Christmas and a Saint of the Eastern and Western Christian Churches

A young man named Nicholas was born in Patara on the coast of Asia Minor (now Turkey), about 270 AD, of wealthy parents; perhaps corn merchants since it was such a big centre of the corn trade. From an early age he seemed interested in Christianity and became devout and scholarly. Patara was an important city and port in the Roman Empire. Emperor Diocletian, (who did not retire until 305 AD), ordered ‘The Great Persecution’ of all Christians. Nicholas may well have suffered but when Constantine became emperor, he stopped the persecution and adopted Christianity for the whole empire, making himself ‘God’s Vicar on Earth’.

After Constantine’s Edict of Milan (314 AD) Nicholas became the Bishop of Myra, near another port east of Patara (where Paul of Tarsus - St. Paul - changed boats on his way to Rome, almost three hundred years before).

Nicholas may have attended the Council of Nicea (325 AD) as one of the two hundred and twenty bishops sitting in conclave under Constantine. However, it was as a miracle-worker that he came to be known and on which his cult was founded. One of his miracles being the reported gift of three bags of gold, thrown over the wall to save three daughters of a poor man who could not afford dowries from the fate of prostitution. Perhaps this is the origin of presents for children at Christmas. There is a church at Myra that bears his name, although it is much later and was heavily and incorrectly restored in the 19 th century. This degree of restoration is unusual on the Turkish coast.

No doubt Nicholas travelled up and down the coast and in someway he became associated with the mysterious island which bore his name, San Niccolo (now known as Gemili). This hilly island has extensive remains of a large early Christian community with churches, houses, two large necropoli (filled with tombs) and a lengthy commercial waterfront. The location of the island forms a very safe haven from the westerly winds.

Indeed it is the only haven available for boats working North North West from Patara. Sheltering sailors, who depended on sails, may well have progressed to the top of the island to give thanks for their life to Saint Nicholas, their patron saint. The top church shows signs of being able to handle pilgrims. It has remains of a white sarcophagus and four columns of a baldachino. Although damaged in the 7 th Century AD by the Arabs, it was possibly visited by Genoese traders in mediaeval times and, maybe, crusaders. There is also a rare vaulted processional way probably built in Emperor Justinian’s time, leading from a collection of large ruined buildings at the lower eastern end of the island. Was this the religious school mentioned in connection with St. Nicholas?

Nicholas’s bones, it is said, were removed from Myra in 1087, when the Saracens swept into Asia Minor in the eleventh century, and taken to Bari , southern Italy where there was a Greek colony. At Bari a new church was built and dedicated to Nicholas. Pope Urban II held a council there. Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury, attended and composed a prayer to Nicholas. From then onwards he was known as St. Nicholas ‘la Latina’. Thus he became a saint of the Western as well as the Eastern Church, revered in Greece and Russia and one of the most popular saints. The name Nicholas was used from Anglo-Saxon times in England. In 1492, when Christopher Columbus reached the island of Hispaniola in the Caribbean and founded his capital, San Domingo, his Franciscans dedicated the hospital to St. Nicholas.

The name Santa Claus came from a Dutch (Protestant) custom of presents at Christmas. The Dutch took the custom to New Amsterdam which the British renamed New York and so on to the famous figure in the Coca Cola advertisements of the ‘20’s.

It is an extraordinary story, but Nicholas’s popularity is widespread and it all started on what is now the Turkish coast.

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Patara – The life and death of a great city
The Roman capital of the province of Lycia and Pamphyllia in Turkey

The ancient land of Lycia was always different, with the potential for human settlements on rich fertile valleys between white-topped mountains up to 10,000ft high. In the centre of the coast is a wide valley, once the setting for a great port, seat of the oracle of Apollo second only to Delos, and a Roman city known to St. Paul, St. Tekla (an early female saint), St. Nicholas, Sarpedon, Alexander, Antigonus, Demetrius, Pompey, Vespasian and Hadrian to name but a few. Patara was an eastern Mediterranean port known to Bronze Age sailors, to the Lukka people, Hittites, Minoans, Egyptians, Phoenicians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, early Christians, Saracens, Arabs and Turks. Each helpful in developing a centre of a complex culture of language writing, astronomy, astrology, mathematics, navigation, science, philosophy, poetry, drama, religious contentions between pagan and Christian religions, all fuelled by the rich maritime trade from the time of the 2 nd Millennium BC until around the end of the 1 st Millennium AD. This trade stretched back from the Levant deep into the Orient and up the seacoast and across the ocean into the Aegean, Greece and Italy as far as Venice and Genoa and thus into Europe.

The great city rose to its zenith in Roman times but later as the sea level rose the rivers slowed, the harbour silted up and pestilence, plague, earthquakes, pirates, invasions and the sea finally snuffed it out.

The city was vast, extending over 100 hectares (250 acres of great buildings, walls, aqueducts and streets) all built in fine limestone and marble. As the sea drove relentlessly in rising higher and higher it threw up a mighty rampart of the whitest sand nearly fourteen kilometres long (nine miles) across the river feeding the harbour and spreading inexorably inland. The sand almost totally swallowed a great Roman theatre and one of the largest civic buildings in Asia Minor, the council chamber of the Roman city and the state and the province of Lycia and Pamphyllia.

Now, at last, the work of earlier pioneering archaeologists is being followed by extensive clearance and excavation. Already the theatre is cleared of all sand and the main paved street has been revealed. Great baths, basilicas, churches and necropoli are appearing and one can see the plans of a great city, shrinking smaller and smaller with ever decreasing defensive walls presenting less to defend against the marauders, after the great Roman battle fleet had left. Then most poignantly one can see the shrunken city retreating (a fighting withdrawal), abandoning the theatre, council chamber, back to the last piece of water front with the last small church (congregation no more than fifty but with the coloured murals still on the wall) until the sea finally closes the harbour completely and pinches out the life of a once great city.

At last we shall be able to see and comprehend what Admiral Beaufort of the Royal Navy and his midshipmen (about 1810) could only guess at when they climbed the mighty ramparts of sand from the sea to the top and gazed in amazement at the ghost of a once great city.

We always visit Patara when we cruise the Lycian shore and find more to see each time. Do join us.

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