St. Nicholas

On December 6 the Church honors St. Nicholas, Bishop of Myra in Lycia (modern Demre, on the southern coast of Turkey), who died around 343 and whose cult spread across the whole Christian world to become, in the end, Santa Claus. Nicholas was a bishop of the early Church under the Emperor Constantine, and tradition holds that he attended the Council of Nicaea in 325 — where, according to legend, he struck the heretic Arius across the face and was briefly deprived of his bishop's robes for it. His name (nikê laos, "victory of the people") and his reputation for secret gift-giving — the dowry coins thrown through the window for the three poor sisters — made him the patron of children, of brides, and of all who give without seeking reward.

He is also patron of sailors, and his shrine at Myra was one of the great pilgrimage sites of the medieval Mediterranean until 1087, when Italian merchants translated his relics from Myra to Bari, the Adriatic port where the Basilica of San Nicola was built to house them, and which remains the chief shrine of the saint. The original tomb at Demre, still in the Church of St. Nicholas at Myra, is a pilgrimage site visited by thousands each year. In Rome a Greek community keeps the Feast of St. Nicholas at the church of San Nicola dei Greci; in Cologne the relics of three girls attributed to Nicholas's legend are kept in the cathedral.

The Basilica of San Nicola at Bari is one of the great Norman churches of southern Italy, built 1087-1197. It holds Nicholas's relics in a crypt chapel and has been a pilgrimage destination for both Catholic and Orthodox pilgrims for nine centuries — one of the few sites in Western Europe where the two traditions venerate the same shrine.