Nicholas of Myra

Grain that did not run short

Famine struck Myra. Ships loaded with wheat for the emperor put in at the harbour. Nicholas asked each ship for a hundred measures. The sailors were afraid: the grain had been measured, and would be counted again at Alexandria. He promised nothing would be missing, and nothing was. The story is first told in the Life by Michael the Archimandrite. The Golden Legend says of the wheat:

“it sufficed for two years, not only for to sell, but also to sow”

Sailors in a storm

A ship was going down. The sailors called on Nicholas. A man who looked like him appeared on board and helped them work the ship, and the storm died away. Later they came to his church to thank him, and knew him at once, though they had never seen him. On board, he had said to them:

“Lo! see ye me not? ye called me”

Oil from his tomb

After his burial, the Golden Legend says, oil flowed from his body and healed the sick. When the next bishop was driven out, it stopped. When he came back, it flowed again. In Bari the liquid is still drawn every year.

“a fountain of oil sprang out from the head unto his feet; and unto this day holy oil issueth out of his body, which is much available to the health of sicknesses of many men”

A later legend: the three boys

The most painted of his wonders is in none of the early Greek accounts of his life, and not in the Golden Legend. Three young clerks on their way to school are murdered at an inn, and Nicholas raises them to life. It first appears in Latin hymns of the 1000s, a Latin play from Hildesheim of about 1100, and Wace's French Life of about 1150. Later tellers made the killer a butcher, who hid the boys in a salting tub. Wace's version begins, in our translation:

“Three clerks were going to school”

A later legend: the boy carried home

A rich man named his son Deus dedit, God gave, and kept the feast of St Nicholas every year. The boy was captured by raiders and made to serve their king as cupbearer. A year later, on the feast day, he sighed at the thought of home. The king mocked him. Then a great wind shook the house, and the boy was carried home, still holding the cup:

“the child was ravished with the cup, and was set tofore the gate where his father held the solemnity of S. Nicholas”

The raid of 1087

By 1087 the Turks held Lycia. Merchants of Bari, sailing home from Antioch, put in near Myra in April 1087. Forty-seven armed men went up to the church, where four monks kept the tomb. They offered the monks 300 gold coins, and the monks refused. So the men bound them and broke open the tomb. The townspeople ran to the shore too late. On 9 May 1087 the relics were carried into Bari. To the men of Bari it was a rescue: they meant, says the Orthodox Church in America, “to save the relics of Saint Nicholas”. To the Greeks it was a loss. Alban Butler, a Catholic priest writing in 1756, said the raid “could only be justified by the laws of a just war”, together with the fear that the Turks would profane the relics.

“they opened it and found the bones swimming in the oil, and they bare them away honourably into the city of Bari”

The manna

A clear liquid gathers in his tomb. The Greeks call it myron, and Bari calls it manna. Each 9 May since 1980 it has been drawn out in front of a Catholic and an Orthodox bishop: no more than about 50 ml a year. Mixed with blessed water, it is bottled for the sick. Scientists at the University of Bari found in 1925 that it is water. Britannica calls it most likely condensation, since the tomb lies below ground in a port city. The basilica's own study centre answers that the casket has been proven watertight. Earlier, the Catholic Encyclopedia of 1911 had called it oil:

“an oily substance, known as Manna di S. Nicola, which is highly valued for its medicinal powers, is said to flow from them”

Venice, and a bone in Illinois

Bari has most of his bones, but not all. The church of San Nicolò al Lido in Venice keeps as many as 500 fragments. An anatomical study found they fit with the bones in Bari, as if from one body. In 2017 Oxford scientists dated one of the smaller relics: a piece of pelvis kept at Morton Grove, Illinois, which had come from Lyon. It dates from the 300s. Bari has the upper part of the left hip bone. This piece is from the lower part, so the two could come from one person. The scientists did not claim it was his for certain:

“Science is not able to definitely prove that it is, it can only prove that it is not”

A children's saint

In the Middle Ages his feast became a schoolboys' day. Wace, in his French Life of about 1150, links it to the legend of three murdered schoolboys he raised to life. After the Reformation his feast faded in Protestant lands, but not in Holland, where he stayed Sinterklaas. Wace, in George McKnight's English of 1917:

“Because he did such honor to schoolboys, they celebrate this day by reading and singing and reciting the miracles of St. Nicholas.”

Irving's New York

Washington Irving's comic History of New York, of 1809, made St Nicholas the patron of the old Dutch town. In later editions, from 1812, Irving gave him more to do. In the text we read today he rides over the treetops, drops presents down chimneys, and in a dream lays “his finger beside his nose”. The book says:

“for the good St. Nicholas has ever been a great giver of gifts, particularly to children”

The poem of 1823

On 23 December 1823 the Troy Sentinel, a New York paper, printed an unsigned poem, “Account of a Visit from St. Nicholas”. By the mid-1800s it was known as the work of Clement Clarke Moore, a New York professor. It has a sleigh, eight reindeer and a trip down the chimney. Two of the reindeer were first called “Dunder and Blixem”. The poem itself never says Santa Claus. It says St. Nicholas and St. Nick. The editor's note above it says “Sante Claus”. Two years before, a New York booklet had shown “Santeclaus” in a sleigh pulled by a flying reindeer.

“He was chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf, And I laugh'd when I saw him in spite of myself”

Who made Santa?

The older view is that Dutch settlers brought Sinterklaas to New Amsterdam. Britannica says so, and so does the Episcopal Church: “his name was brought to America by the Dutch colonists in New York”. In 1954 Charles W. Jones answered that there is no proof the colonists kept the custom. He gave the credit to Irving: “Without Irving there would be no Santa Claus.” In 2020 Tom A. Jerman answered Jones in turn. Irving's gift-giving lines came in 1812, he points out, and Santa grew from German winter figures by way of two New York poems. In his words, “St. Nicholas and Santa Claus were two different characters”.