Have archaeologists proven the existence of Santa Claus ?
By Dr. Georges Kazan
St Nicholas is a major Christian saint, popularly revered as Santa Claus or Father Christmas. In 2017, for the first time, we found that a relic venerated by the Church as belonging to St Nicholas dates to his lifetime.
During the 4th century, St Nicholas served as bishop of Myra in Lycia, known today as Demre in modern Turkey. He gained a reputation for generously bestowing gifts upon the city’s inhabitants, providing food in times of famine, and release from unfair taxes. After his death, his tomb in Myra is said to have miraculously exuded holy oil, and became a place of pilgrimage.
In the late 11th century, after Myra had been captured from the Byzantine Empire by the Seljuk Turks, fears began to circulate that the relics might be at risk. A crew was dispatched from Bari, a city in southern Italy, under the guidance of two priests, to carry away the relics. These sailors broke into the church and smashed open the marble lid of the saint’s coffin. With all haste, a sailor named Matteo jumped into the sarcophagus and, still wearing his boots, waded around in the holy oil, rummaging in the murky oil for the saint’s skull, accidentally stepping on some of the fragile bones in the process. The sailors escaped with the skull and as many of the bones as they could. They arrived back in Bari on May 9th, 1087, where they were received with full honour. The relics were enshrined in a crypt, over which was built a great pilgrimage church, the Basilica San Nicola.
After this, it seems, the local Christian community in Myra recovered the remaining bone fragments, about 500 in all, from the damaged tomb and placed them in a copper urn, which they buried under the floor of the church. In in 1099, a crew of Venetian crusaders stopped at Myra on their way to Holy Land. They broke through the floor of the church and found the urn, marked as containing the relics of St Nicholas. The relics were brought back to Venice in 1101 and placed in the Church of San Nicoló del Lido, where they reside today.
Given their history, it is probably not surprising that most of the saint’s surviving relics consist of bone fragments, aside from the skull, which is almost complete. In 1992, Prof Luigi Martino, the anatomist who had studied the Bari relics in the 1950’s, examined the relics in Venice and concluded that they were from the skeleton of the same man. In 2016, I came across an interesting book by Father Dennis O’Neill, Relics in the Shrine of All Saints at St. Martha of Bethany Church in Morton Grove, Illinois. This documents in part the large collection of relics in his collection. Of the relics of St Nicholas, one in particular attracted my attention: a relatively large fragment of a human pubis, a bone from the lower left side of the pelvis. All that survives of pelvis in Bari is left ilium bone (upper hip bone), while it is as yet not clear what part(s) of the pelvis survives in Venice, if any. For this reason, the St Martha relic could, in principle, have come from the same individual.
On 4 November 2016, I visited Father Dennis O’Neill, at the Shrine of the All Saints, St Martha in Bethany Church in Morton Grove Illinois, near Chicago. I WAS accompanied by Professor Thomas Higham, Director of the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit. Professor Higham is my main research partner and a leading expert in the field of radiocarbon dating.
Father O’Neill told me: “Our relic comes from the stock of relics taken out of their reliquaries and hidden during the French Revolution. After the end of the Reign of Terror, when it was safe for them to be resurfaced, many ended up in the hands of the Archbishop of Lyon. Lyon is the oldest diocese in France, so he is the primate of the French bishops. Since many of the French churches lost their relics during all the destruction, if they wanted to replace them, they would contact the Archbishop of Lyon. All the relics were wrapped in papers, upon which was inscribed, in beautiful handwriting, the name of the saint in question. I know that the bone of St. Nicholas is St. Nicholas because someone put his name on the bone.”
I did some research and found that relics from Bari, possibly from Venice also, made their way to France soon after their arrival in Italy. At Saint-Nicholas-de-Port in Lorraine, for example, the Basilique Saint-Nicolas received a relic from Bari in 1090, just three years after they arrived from Myra. It therefore seems possible to me that relics of St Nicholas in Lyon could have a similar origin. Intriguingly, while the name tag attached to the bone appears to date to the 19th or 20th century, it uses the form of the name common in southern Italy (i.e. Bari), rather than the northern Italian forms, “Nicolo” or “Niccolò” (the form used in Venice), or the French version, “Nicholas”.
With Father O’Neill giving his approval at every step, a microsample of bone material was taken from part of the relic where it would be least noticeable, but still yield good results. Today, only 0.3 grams or so is required, the size of a pinch of salt, sometimes even less than that. At the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit, the sample was carefully treated to remove contamination, and successful radiocarbon dated by Professor Higham using Accelerator Mass-Spectrometry. The result suggests that the bone dates to the time of the saint’s death in ca. 343. This means that, while it is not possible to identify its precise origin, science cannot disprove the tradition that this is a relic of St Nicholas. For the faithful, this relic therefore bears witness to the life of the saint who is today celebrated by many as Santa Claus.