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Bones of contention

Christmas is big business - especially for the Italian town of Bari which pulls in the punters with the mortal remains of the real Saint Nicholas. The trouble is, Turkish officials say that Santa was stolen... and now they want him back. Rory Carroll reports on a saintly tug of love
Special report: Christmas 2000

Friday 22 December 2000
The Guardian

For the town that stole Santa, every day is Christmas Day. He is the real thing. He has magical powers. He likes children. He has a beard. He brings presents, cash, fame and veneration. Without him, Bari would be just a bunion on Italy's heel.

Long may the little ones remain misled about a jolly Scandinavian, because the true story of Santa lurks at the opposite end of Europe, mired in prostitution, deceit, exploitation, mutilation, cannibalism and murder.

Forget the grotto. Santa resides in a leaky crypt beneath a basilica on a waterfront famed for handbag snatching. Forget the fat, rosy cheeks; the real Santa was a skinny Turk. And forget about being good: in this saga, the only moral is that crime pays.

Rewind to 1087 and a city in depression. Bari has been conquered by the Normans. Its glory days as a Byzantine regional capital are over; a slide into decay and anonymity beckons. To vault back into the big league, it badly needs a marketing wheeze, a great and wonderful attraction with guaranteed pulling power. No, not a dome. Bari needs a skeleton.

With Christianity all the rage, every town is scrabbling for saintly relics. The bigger the saint, the greater the prestige, the more the pilgrims. And they don't come much bigger than Nicholas. His posthumous reputation for generosity has turned into a cult sweeping Europe.

Venice wants him, too, but Bari strikes first. Seventy sailors embark on a daring 2,000-mile voyage to the city of Myra, landing in three ships at night on what is now the southern coast of Turkey. Under the noses of the Saracens, they bluff their way into the tomb, smash it open, grab the bones and sprint back to their ships, pursued by a howling mob. Nick nicked, they return home in triumph.

"The inhabitants of Bari, on hearing them, ran with one accord to see the endless, unhoped-for spectacle," wrote the contemporary chronicler Nicephorus. On a carriage pulled by oxen, the bones are brought to the site of a Romanesque basilica to be built in his honour.

And there they remain to this day, enclosed by blocks of reinforced concrete, ringed by candles in silver cups and guarded by two stone angels. Spiked steel grilles keep out the uninvited: a wise precaution. For the Turks have decided they want him back. Myra's mayor and town council have made a formal request to Bari's authorities that the relics be returned and reunited with the few fragments of the saint's bones that, back in the 11th century, the thieves were in too much of a hurry to take. Then they want to create their own shrine and build their own tourist industry out of Saint Nicholas.

He was stolen, they cry. Well, yes, but that is the point. The leitmotif of the Santa story is theft and opportunism; his bones were just the beginning. Medieval chroniclers, 19th-century poets and multinational corporations would all follow, plundering, faking and ripping off a legend. The real Santa is missing from Christmas - and the Grinch had nothing to do with it.

The story of how a flesh-and-blood man became a cultural icon takes some cleaning and scraping before the encrusted myths fall away. Nicholas was born in AD265 in Patara, a port in south-west Asia Minor. Within minutes of delivery, goes the legend, he stood up in the midwife's basin to pray and made it clear he would suckle milk only once on Wednesdays, Fridays and other holy days.

Growing up rich in a major port left Nicholas receptive to new ideas, such as Christianity. As a young man, he heard of an impoverished aristocrat who, unable to supply dowries for his three daughters, was going to sell them into prostitution. According to the 10th-century biographer Symeon Metaphrastes, on three successive nights Nicholas sneaked up to their house and threw bags of gold through the window, at which point "he hastily returned to his home, disquieted at the thought of being seen". Within a week, the daughters were married off.

Soon after, Nicholas moved to Myra and was appointed bishop. Attendance lists identify him as number 151 of the 300 bishops at the council of Nicaea, the world's first ecumenical council. In one well-documented incident, Nicholas saved three innocent soldiers from beheading on the orders of a judge. In a dream, he told Emperor Constantine to spare some other innocents.

But it was generosity that made his name. Any day could be Christmas Day for the bishop of Myra. When famine loomed, he forced captains of wheat ships bound for Alexandria each to leave behind 100 hogsheads of corn and then magically replenished their stocks. He squeezed a huge tax cut from the emperor.

On his travels, he saved drowning sailors, rescued a kidnapped boy and brought back from the dead a cheating debtor run over by a chariot. But one final miracle sealed his reputation. Visiting an innkeeper who had murdered, sliced and pickled three infant boys in a tub of pork, Nicholas made the sign of the cross. Out jumped the boys, healthy and pink.

It was after his death in 334 that the bishop's fame really began to grow. Nicholas become a popular given name in the fifth century and spread west with monks fleeing the iconoclastic persecution. Nick became the patron saint of fishermen, prisoners, children, clerks, scholars, bakers, pawnbrokers, perfumiers, Russia, Aberdeen and those about to be mugged. More than 400 English churches were dedicated to him.


For Bari, knowing how he mutated is less pressing than ensuring that he stays put. The Turkish authorities, meanwhile, which were left with only the sarcophagus, are lobbying hard to recover the relics. "But they won't get him, ever," says Father Matera, Dominican rector of the St Nicholas basilica. "They are Muslim, not Christian. He is ours to keep."

But he was stolen. "Yes, yes. And you know what, we didn't do it out of devotion; it was a commercial decision. Bari needed prestige and money."

Mission accomplished. Down in the crypt are two naval officers, a gaggle of teenagers, an American honeymoon couple and several Russian families. Consecrated by Pope Urban II, this baroque altar has been attracting popes, kings and presidents ever since. Charles and Diana once hunkered down here for a closer look.



Every May, a flotilla of fishing boats re-enacts the saint's arrival with an ancient statue, in which he is black. In most shop versions, he is white. Around 100,000 pilgrims wander the medieval quarter each year, injecting cash into restaurants and hotels that would otherwise not exist.

Guidebooks warn that Bari is rife with muggings and not that interesting - except for Saint Nicholas. "He's all we have," says a grateful barman. Mention Santa and the priests bristle, for the saint is not to be confused with a tubby chimney-dropper. The rest of Bari is tickled by the transformation, though mystified at how it happened. They are not alone.

Some scholars, noting that Santa was sometimes depicted with animal furs and horns, say he comes not from Nicholas but from myths of pagan shamans harnessed by evangelising Christians. Others say the church, as it expanded north, fused the bishop of Myra with the Norse god Odin (or Wodan), giving him white whiskers and a flying horse.

A more plausible theory says it started with 12th-century French nuns who, inspired by the pickled boys and dowryless maidens, secretly left gifts at the houses of poor families on St Nicholas's Eve (December 5). The tradition spread and by 1212, Oxford citizens were giving students bread, fish, meat and booze.

Protestant countries condemned the practice as idolatrous, since only Jesus could do such things, but Dutch emigrants exported their saint to America in 1624. They called him Sinter Claes (literally, Saint Nicholas). As New Amsterdam became New York, so Sinter Claes became Santa Claus. He remained depicted as a lean, strict bishop, liable to dispense discipline instead of presents to naughty children, until the 1823 publication of the poem Account of a Visit from St Nicholas (also known as The Night Before Christmas).

"He was dressed all in fur, from his head to his foot, And his clothes were all tarnished with ashes and soot; A bundle of toys he had on his back, And he look'd like a pedlar just opening his pack. His eyes how they twinkled! His dimples how merry! His cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry!" This Santa, with his belly that shook like a bowl of jelly and transported by flying reindeer, was here to stay. The poem remains one of the world's most popular.

The trouble is, Clement Clarke Moore, the Manhattan bible scholar credited with the work for 150 years, has just been outed as a thief. Don Foster, an English professor, has amassed evidence suggesting the piece was written by Henry Livingston Jr. He published anonymously and died without stepping forward, leaving Moore free to claim it as his own.

Santa's jolliness was established but he was variously depicted by artists in green, blue, red or animal furs until 1931, when Coca-Cola decided customers should drink its product even in cold weather. A commercial artist, Haddon Sundblom, used the colour of Coke's livery for Santa's trimmings. Sainsbury's, among others, has tried to dress him in its own colours, without success. The image is set.

It doesn't snow in Bari. Beyond its whitewashed houses are fields baked brown and hard, sprouting cacti and olive trees. Locals are not bothered about sharing their Santa with a saccharine alter ego in Lapland; the season of goodwill is big enough for everyone to get a slice.

A gnarled trinket-seller watches another tour coach wheezing to a stop. "Not believe in Santa Claus? Hah! Send your children here if they don't believe. They'll hear the jingle." He rattles some coins in his hand.

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