Saint Nicholas

Saint Nicholas, also known as Nicholas of Myra and Nicholas of Bari, was a fourth-century Christian bishop whose historical life is known only in outline and is heavily overlaid with later legend. Tradition places his birth in the Lycian port of Patara, in what is now southwestern Turkey, to a prosperous Greek Christian family. Orphaned while still young, he is said to have inherited substantial wealth, which he devoted to charity. The best-known story attached to his youth recounts that he secretly provided gold as dowries for three daughters of a destitute man, thereby saving them from being sold into prostitution; versions of the tale have him throwing the gold through a window or down a chimney, where it landed in stockings or shoes left to dry. This episode later furnished the kernel of European gift-giving customs associated with his feast.

Nicholas became bishop of Myra, a neighboring Lycian city. Later hagiography claims that he suffered imprisonment during the persecution under Diocletian and was released after the accession of Constantine. He is frequently listed among the participants at the First Council of Nicaea in 325, although his name is absent from the earliest surviving attendance lists; subsequent tradition even asserts that he struck the heretic Arius, an anecdote that first appears centuries after the council. In life he acquired a reputation as a wonder-worker and as a defender of the innocent, including sailors in peril and those unjustly condemned. Contemporary documentary evidence for any of these events is lacking; the earliest substantial Greek life was composed by Michael the Archimandrite in the ninth century, and Latin lives followed thereafter.

Nicholas died in Myra, traditionally on 6 December in the mid-fourth century, and was buried in his cathedral. A liquid known as manna or myrrh was said to exude from his tomb and was collected as a relic. In 1087, amid the advance of the Seljuk Turks, sailors from Bari in southern Italy removed the greater part of the bones and carried them to Bari, where they were enshrined in a newly built basilica; a smaller portion of relics was taken to Venice around 1100. The translation made Bari a major pilgrimage center and spread Nicholas's cult rapidly through Latin Christendom. He became one of the most widely venerated saints of the Middle Ages, invoked as patron of sailors, merchants, children, and numerous cities and nations, including Russia and Greece.

In the later Middle Ages his feast on 6 December was marked by gift-giving to children, especially in the Low Countries, the Rhineland, and Alpine regions. Dutch colonial transmission of the Sinterklaas figure to New Amsterdam, combined with other European winter customs and nineteenth-century literary elaboration, produced the modern secular Santa Claus. In the Christian East he remains a central saint, commemorated on 6 December (19 December on the Julian calendar in some churches) and invoked as a miracle-worker. The Bari basilica continues to collect the manna annually. Historians generally accept the existence of a fourth-century bishop of Myra named Nicholas while treating almost all narrative details as pious legend developed between the sixth and ninth centuries.