The real father of Christmas

The sun was so hot I thought I was hallucinating. In the Turkish city of Antalya, in the sweltering heat of early summer, stood a woman selling enormous transparent balloons with a dancing, jingling red figure suspended in the middle. As I approached, sweating, something familiar about the red figure stopped me in my tracks. He had a huge belly and a white beard. I blinked, astounded. Santa Claus? In the Mediterranean? In May?

Several days later, in the air-conditioned luxury of the icon room at the Antalya Museum, there was another jolt of recognition. Staring out from a glass case were the stern, sad features of St Nicholas, his right hand raised in his familiar two-crossed-fingers blessing. I had gazed at him, and he at me, in places as far apart as the icon chapel at Glenstal Abbey in Co Limerick and the Russian Orthodox cathedral in Helsinki. But what was he doing in a Turkish tourist resort?

Well, far from being the last place on earth you'd expect to come across Santa Claus, the southern coast of Turkey is the original stomping ground of the real St Nicholas. In a beautifully-lit reliquary in the Antalya Museum lie a few charred pieces of bone, said to be fragments of the jaw, skull and other bones of the third-century bishop of the bustling Lycian port of Myra, now a sleepy town known as Demre.

The known facts about the life of St Nicholas are - in view of his current all-conquering celebrity - extraordinarily few. He was born (probably) some time around AD 300; he was imprisoned (maybe) during the clampdown on Christianity in the reign of the Roman emperor Diocletian; he attended (possibly) the council of Nicea summoned by the Emperor Constantine in the summer of AD 325. He died (surely) on December 6th, some time after AD 342. And then, in a public relations triumph which would turn modern wannabes green with envy, he turned into one of the most instantly recognisable icons of the developed world.

The deed which catapulted Nicholas of Myra to fame was his intervention in the case of a local nobleman who had fallen on hard times. As the man had no money to pay the dowries of his three daughters, there was talk of the girls being sold into prostitution. Nicholas went to the house on consecutive nights and dropped a bag of gold through the windows of the first, then the second, daughter. When he returned on the third night, all the windows were unaccountably locked. Undeterred, the good bishop climbed on to the roof and dropped the bag of gold down the chimney, where the coins fell into the girls' stockings, hanging on the mantle to dry.

Various other acts of charity, ranging from the calming of storms at sea to the raising of the dead, were also documented, and after his death Nicholas's bones began to exude a fragrant healing oil. Reports of miracles increased, and shrines began to appear throughout western Europe. But it was only when a group of Italian merchants stole his body from Myra in AD 1087 and reburied him in Bari that the cult of St Nicholas really made it to the big time, particularly - because of his concern for sailors - in the seafaring ports of Holland and Germany.

Dutch settlers brought traditions of St Nicholas's Day, mainly feasting and the giving of gifts, to New York in the 17th century; and during the war of independence, New Yorkers on the lookout for a saint to counteract the British St George decided that good old "Sinter Klaas" would fit the bill nicely. The American genius for commercialisation, notably a determined marketing campaign by Coca-Cola in the post-war years, did the rest - and so, as we approach the 21st century, Santa Claus is no longer associated with acts of selflessness, but with the out-of-control consumerfest that is Christmas.

The real St Nicholas would, almost certainly, not be amused. On the sleeve of their glorious new CD of medieval chant and polyphony, Legends of St Nicholas, the vocal group Anonymous 4 paint a more complex picture of their subject. Among others, they recount the tale of how, enraged by the failure of a certain French prior to include the St Nicholas liturgy in his monastery's church services despite repeated pleas by the monks, the saint appeared at dead of night, dragged the recalcitrant prior from his cot by the hair, shoved him to the floor and, beginning with the anthem O pastor eterne, taught him the liturgy note by note.

Clearly the real St Nicholas - giver of charity, scourge of evildoers, tougher than Bruce Willis in a vest - was not a guy to be messed with. And the face which looks out from the icons - experienced, intelligent, slightly mournful - suggests that the real St Nicholas would make a considerably more appropriate role model for us children of the new century than the round red roadrunner we've had to put up with for so long.

A special celebratory service for St Nicholas is held at the fourth-century Byzantine church at Demre on December 6th every year. The CD Legends of St Nicholas, by the Anonymous 4, is on the Harmonia Mundi label.