Nicholas the Wonderworker of Myra

Era

Late third and early fourth century; died about 335

Region

Lycia, on the southern coast of what is now Turkey

Category

Hierarch and wonderworker

Principal feast for this profile

December 6

About 9 minutes to read Sources listed at the end

Jump to Begin With What Is Hard What Can Be Said The Stories, and Where Each One Comes From Nicaea, and the Slap The Relics, and What Was Actually Examined How He Became Santa Claus Why the Church Remembers Him What His Life Asks of Us

Begin With What Is Hard

There is no account of Nicholas written by anyone who knew him. No letters survive. No contemporary mentions him. Every story told about him — the gold through the window, the grain ships, the storm, the generals, the slap — reaches us first through texts written between one and five centuries after he died, by authors who do not name their sources.

That is an uncomfortable way to begin the life of one of the most loved saints in the Church, and it is the honest way. What follows separates what a historian can say from what the Church remembers, and the second is not diminished by being labelled.

What Can Be Said

A bishop named Nicholas was venerated at Myra in Lycia, and the veneration is documented early enough to be taken seriously. The emperor Theodosius II, reigning in the first half of the fifth century, is credited with building a church of St Nicholas at Myra — less than two hundred years after the traditional date of his death. Justinian, in the sixth century, renovated churches in Constantinople dedicated to him, which may have been standing since around 490. Around the 580s the theologian Eustratios of Constantinople cited the story of the three generals as evidence in a theological argument, which means a written Life already existed for him to use — a Life now lost.

Russian excavations in the 1990s in Myra’s harbour district at Andriake, and the church at the traditional tomb site outside the walls, give circumstantial support to a fourth-century bishop of that name in that place. Some scholars judge the local topographical detail in the later Lives to be essentially reliable as local colour.

So: a real bishop, a real see, a cult established within a couple of centuries. Beyond that, the historian stops and the tradition begins.

The Stories, and Where Each One Comes From

The three daughters and the gold. A poor man has three daughters and no dowries for them, and without dowries their future is prostitution. On three successive nights someone throws a purse of gold through the window — and on the third the father catches him, and Nicholas makes him promise to tell no one. It is the story that made him, it is the reason the pawnbroker’s sign is three gold balls, and it is the seed of every act of anonymous Christmas giving since.

Its earliest surviving appearance is in Michael the Archimandrite’s Life, the first complete biography we have. Scholars date that text variously: the St Nicholas Center places it in the first half of the eighth century, around 710–720; Gustav Anrich, whose two-volume study from 1913–17 remains foundational, placed it between 814 and 843. Either way, four hundred years or more after the event.

The grain ships. During a famine Nicholas persuades the captains of grain ships bound for the imperial capital to unload part of their cargo at Myra, promising the weight will not be short when they reach Constantinople. It is not. Same source, same date.

The storm at sea. Sailors in danger call on him and are saved. This is the root of his patronage of sailors, which is real and ancient and is the reason his icons hang in port churches all round the Mediterranean and the Baltic. Also from Michael the Archimandrite.

The three innocent generals. Three officers, condemned on a false charge, are saved when Nicholas appears in dreams to the Emperor Constantine and to the prefect Ablabius and threatens them until they release the men. This is the Praxis de Stratelatis, and it is the oldest surviving Nicholas text — how old is genuinely disputed, with Anrich putting it between 460 and 580 and the Italian scholar Cioffari arguing for something between Nicholas’s death and the mid-fifth century. It is the incident singled out in the Roman Martyrology.

These four are the cycle that Byzantine icon-painters put around the central image of the saint, and they are what the hymnography draws on. They are also, every one of them, attested no earlier than the texts named above.

Nicaea, and the Slap

This is where a reader deserves the most care, because the story everyone now knows is the one with the least behind it.

Did he attend the Council of Nicaea in 325? He is not on the shorter surviving lists of the bishops who attended, which run to about two hundred names. He does appear, tenth in the list, in the version transmitted by Theodore Lector around 510–515 — a longer list, and one several scholars regard as the most credible of them. But he is never mentioned by Athanasius of Alexandria, who was there and who chronicled the notable bishops of the council in detail, nor by Eusebius of Caesarea, who was also there and wrote the fullest surviving account.

Historians divide. Some hold that he did not attend and that his name was added later by copyists who could not believe so famous a bishop had been absent. Others hold that he attended and dropped off some lists for reasons now lost. The fairest verdict is that attendance is probable on circumstantial grounds — he was a bishop of the right era, in a see within reach, and the council concerned matters an eastern bishop would care about — and that there is very little certainty to be had.

Did he strike Arius? No documentary trace of the story exists for more than a thousand years after the council.

The earliest identifiable version is in Petrus de Natalibus, writing around 1370, and it says only that Nicholas struck a certain Arian — not Arius. The story as everyone now tells it, with Nicholas slapping Arius at the council itself, first appears in a Life by the Greek monk Damaskenos Monachus, printed at Venice in 1570.

The scene is not part of the classic cycle of life-scenes in Byzantine icons of Nicholas. Where it appears in his iconography, it is a late addition.

Here is the fair thing to say. The Church’s liturgical texts genuinely do celebrate Nicholas as a rule of faith and a defender of Nicene orthodoxy — the troparion calls him exactly that — and it has sung this for well over a thousand years. That tradition is real and it means something. The vivid scene of the slap, which has become a favourite internet image of the saint, is a late medieval narrative addition and not something that can be traced to Nicaea or to the centuries after it. Both of those statements are true at once, and a reader is better served by having both than by having only one.

The Relics, and What Was Actually Examined

In April 1087, with Myra under threat from the Turkish advance, sailors and merchants from Bari forced entry into the church holding the tomb, opened the sarcophagus, found it filled with fragrant myrrh, and carried the relics away. They reached Bari on 9 May. That translation is the reason the Orthodox calendar keeps a second Nicholas feast in May.

Venetian sailors, passing the same church on the First Crusade in 1099–1100, recovered further fragments and installed them at San Nicolò on the Lido, and for centuries Bari and Venice each claimed to hold the real Nicholas.

In 1953, during restoration work and with the Church’s permission, the anatomist Luigi Martino of the University of Bari examined the Bari skeleton. He found a man of about 1.67 metres, of advanced age, with worn and missing molars and chronic degeneration of the spine; the skull was well preserved apart from part of the mandible. A fuller reconstruction followed in 1957. Then, in 1992, Martino examined the roughly five hundred bone fragments at the Lido in Venice and concluded that they were complementary to the Bari bones — consistent with being what a hasty extraction in 1087 had left behind. That is a genuinely elegant result: it reconciles two rival claims by showing that both cities probably hold parts of the same skeleton.

What it does not do is identify whose skeleton. Anatomy can describe a body; it cannot confirm that a body recovered in the eleventh century from a tomb venerated since the sixth is the man whose name was on it. No DNA testing is reported in these examinations.

Building on Martino’s measurements, a team at Liverpool John Moores University led by Professor Caroline Wilkinson produced a computer facial reconstruction, reported in 2014, using modern anatomical standards and regional tissue-depth data. It shows a broad-faced man with a nose broken and badly healed. It is an informed approximation of a face from a skull, not a portrait and not an identification — and the press coverage rarely said so.

In 2017, following the meeting between Pope Francis and Patriarch Kirill in Havana the year before, a portion of the relics — the left ninth rib — travelled from Bari to Russia, where it was venerated at the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow and then at the Alexander Nevsky Monastery in St Petersburg before returning. More than a million people came.

How He Became Santa Claus

This line is traceable and worth getting right, because it is usually told wrong at the last step.

Dutch settlers carried Sinterklaas — a bishop in mitre and red cope who arrives by ship and gives gifts on the eve of his feast — to New Amsterdam in the seventeenth century. The figure then went largely quiet in English-speaking New York until the early nineteenth century.

Washington Irving, 1809. A History of New York, published under the name Diedrich Knickerbocker, deliberately released on 6 December — St Nicholas’s Day — shortly after the New-York Historical Society had begun promoting Nicholas as the city’s patron. The satire contains some twenty-five references to St Nicholas, and invents or popularises the wagon, the annual presents, and the business with the chimney. One historian’s verdict, quoted by the St Nicholas Center: Santa Claus was a parasitic germ until the Knickerbocker History; after 1809 he spread like a plague.

Clement Clarke Moore, 1823. A Visit from St. Nicholas — “‘Twas the night before Christmas” — published anonymously, drawing directly on Irving’s imagery, and fixing the sleigh, the reindeer, the sack and the chimney as permanent furniture. (Authorship has since been disputed, with a case made for Henry Livingston Jr.; it does not affect the poem’s role.)

Thomas Nast, from 3 January 1863. Thirty-three drawings in Harper’s Weekly over more than twenty years gave Santa his round, bearded, fur-suited body. The earliest ones were Union war propaganda: Santa in stars and stripes, handing out gifts to Federal soldiers.

Coca-Cola, 1931 — and this is the part to get right. Coca-Cola did not invent the red-suited Santa. Haddon Sundblom’s advertising campaign began in 1931, by which time the red-and-white Santa was already standard: documented examples exist from 1906, 1908 and 1925, and a New York Times piece in 1927 already described the red suit, hood and white whiskers as standardised. Coca-Cola’s sustained advertising helped fix an image that already existed. It did not create it, and the claim that it did circulates endlessly.

Why the Church Remembers Him

Not for any of the above, in the end.

Strip out everything that cannot be dated and one thing survives that the Church has never stopped repeating: this was a bishop who gave his money away to people who could not ask for it publicly, and who took trouble not to be seen doing it. Every version of the dowry story, in every century, includes the detail that he threw the gold at night and asked the father to say nothing.

That is why the giving that carries his name is meant to be anonymous, and it is the one thing about Nicholas that the modern season has almost entirely lost. The commercial Christmas remembers the gifts. The saint asked not to be named.

What His Life Asks of Us

Give in a way that costs you and that nobody can trace back. That is the entire programme, and it is much harder than it reads, because most generosity would like to be noticed a little.

There is a second thing, quieter. Nicholas’s intervention in the dowry story was not a sentiment about poverty; it was cash, delivered in time to stop three specific women being sold. Almost everything he is remembered for is like that — grain that arrives before people starve, a legal case reversed before the execution. Wonderworking, in his case, mostly looks like somebody solving the actual problem.

Holy Hierarch Nicholas, Wonderworker of Myra, pray to Christ our God that we may give quietly, act in time, and not need to be thanked.

A note. These lives are written to introduce, not to direct. Ascetic feats described here belong to particular people under obedience, not to a method anyone should take up alone. Anything touching your own rule of prayer or fasting belongs with your priest or spiritual father.

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