Saint Nicholas of Myra

In the old stories of Saint Nicholas, what is most beautiful is the way he gave: slipping quietly through the night, so that a poor family could be rescued from destitution without ever having to lay its misery bare before the curious eyes of the whole neighborhood.

Myra was then one of the six most important cities of the Lycian League, important enough to hold three votes in the league’s council — no small standing among the coastal city-states. The harbor serving the city was called Andriake, a few kilometers from the center of Myra toward the sea. A huge granary built under the emperor Hadrian still stands there today, along with towering heaps of murex shells — traces of a time when Andriake processed purple dye, one of the most precious goods of the ancient world, which colored the robes of kings and nobles. The busy port later silted up, and today, standing in a dry field, it is hard to imagine ships once crowding in and out.

Tradition says Nicholas was born in Patara, a prosperous port city nearby, into a well-off family. His parents died early, leaving him a large fortune. Instead of using that money to live in comfort, the young man quietly shared it with people in need.

People who live by a harbor know how precarious life is: ships come in bringing goods, news and wealth, but when they weigh anchor and sail away, they leave mothers and wives anxiously watching for them every day. Someone might do brisk business today, and after one storm at sea be penniless tomorrow. In so uncertain a world, a man ready to share his wealth brought real comfort to many a table and many a home.

Nicholas was chosen bishop of Myra. He lived through the last brutal years of persecution under the emperor Diocletian, and witnessed the Church’s turn to freedom under the emperor Constantine. The stories that he was imprisoned for his faith, or was present at the Council of Nicaea in 325, come from tradition, and there is not enough evidence to confirm every detail. But what the faithful have treasured for centuries is the image of a shepherd steadfast in a pure faith, who wholeheartedly defended the weak and the friendless.

The story goes that in the city there was a father who had once been well-off but had fallen into destitution. He had three daughters of marriageable age but not a coin for their dowries. In those days a girl without a dowry had almost no future, and the father, in his desperation, was thinking of selling his daughters into prostitution to put food on the table.

The three poor girls did not just receive a few gold coins. They were given back an honest future that had been teetering on the edge of the abyss. That anonymous gift became a firm bridge on which they could walk on through life with their heads held high.

Later, the image of three bags of gold tossed through a window left an unexpected mark on Western folk culture: this detail is thought to have inspired the symbol of three golden balls — a sign still seen hanging outside pawnshops in Europe today, a distant reminder of the bishop who quietly rescued ruined families.

For seafarers, the ocean is both the livelihood that feeds the whole family and the place where people realize most clearly how powerless they are. When the shore has disappeared far behind, with wind and waves roaring all around, a prayer asking Saint Nicholas to intercede brings peace and trust in God.

Families in the fishing villages along Vietnam’s coast know well the anxious wait for loved ones after every trip out to sea. Even if not every place has a particular devotion to him, the heart of people who depend on the sea is the same everywhere: out on the open water a loved one is facing danger, and in the little house there is always a lamp kept burning, waiting.

Saint Nicholas is remembered as defender of children, protector of the falsely accused, and father of the poor. They are very different people, yet they share one need: someone kind enough to stand up for them when they can no longer defend themselves.

In 1087, amid the complex political and religious upheavals of the time — as Asia Minor was gradually falling into the hands of the Seljuk Turks — sailors from the city of Bari in southern Italy took most of his relics from Myra and brought them to be buried in their own city. The Basilica of Saint Nicholas in Bari, begun that very year to receive the relics, quickly became a bustling pilgrimage center, joining the devotion of both the Eastern and Western Churches — one of the few places in the world where Catholics and Orthodox come to pray together at the same altar.

Over many centuries in Europe, the custom of secretly giving presents to children on the eve of Saint Nicholas’s feast took firm hold, especially in the Netherlands, Germany and Central Europe. Much later, when the Dutch carried their image of “Sinterklaas” to the new lands of North America, the figure of Santa Claus at Christmas slowly took shape. Yet the bishop of Myra stands for something far deeper than gifts bought in a store: true generosity, which looks to those who have nothing to give back.

In 2004, forensic scientists at the University of Bari, working with facial reconstruction expert Caroline Wilkinson of the University of Manchester, rebuilt Saint Nicholas’s face from measurements of his skull kept for decades in the crypt of the basilica in Bari. The result showed a square face with high cheekbones, typical of the people of the eastern Mediterranean in the fourth century — and notably, a nose that had once been broken and had healed crooked. No one knows exactly where that injury came from: a beating in prison during the persecution, an everyday accident, or a mark of old age. But that small detail, lying quietly in his own remains for seventeen centuries, says something simple: we are used to picturing the saints with serene, gentle faces as in paintings, when in fact they were people of flesh and blood, bearing the marks of suffering and stumbles, just like any of us.