Did You Know Santa Is From Turkiye?

Well… we can all agree Santa as we know him today is a product of North America. Santa's original ancestor St. Nicholas, on the other hand, was a Bishop who lived in Turkiye.

Born to a wealthy Greek family 270 years after the birth of Christ, he became the Bishop of Myra; a small Roman town in modern-day Turkiye, now known as Demre.

Depictions of Nicholas the Saint vary considerably, but none of them look like the red-suited chubby old man we see covered in snow.

In fact, considering where he lived his whole life, Nicholas wouldn’t have even seen snow - ever!!!

While St. Nicholas’s fictional character Santa dominates, his true origin story remains mostly unknown and often misunderstood.

Despite what the world will have you believe, there is no evidence to prove Nicholas was plus-sized, or jolly… On the contrary, history portrays him as a wiry man, and a defiant defender of Church, who even got imprisoned for advocating Christianity before it got widely accepted in the region.¹

So how did this fiery man became the patron saint of children around the globe?

Researchers believe that as an orphaned child himself, St. Nick felt a renowned empathy for struggling children.²

The most common tale of his becoming is the story of him saving three young girls from a life of prostitution by secretly delivering three bags of gold to their father.

Some versions of this story say the gold landed in socks or shoes drying near the fireplace, leading to children leaving these items out for St. Nicholas to fill, which eventually evolved to today’s Christmas stockings.²

As St. Nick outgrew his realistic capabilities as a human and became more and more of a fictional character, his image had to follow. Eventually he started riding in the sky on a sleigh pulled by gliding Reindeer, and working in a factory as the boss of elves. So far there’s been Miniature Santa, Bad Santa, Cheeky Santa, Santa in the North Pole, Santa the Jolly Old Elf... And let’s not forget Uncle Nick!

Amongst all this and countless more, the only example known to us, hinting to a truer reality was on the cover of a book written by the author of The Wizard of Oz.

This made us wonder... Demre is located in Antalya, where thousands of Christmas lovers go on holiday every year. But how many of them know the real story of their gift-giving idol?

࿐
follow the trail

Written: [1]https://www.nationalgeographic.co.uk/history/2017/12/saint-nicholas-santa-surprising-origins-mr-claus
[2]https://edition.cnn.com/2020/12/06/world/saint-nicholas-day-santa-trnd/index.html
Visual (In Order of Appearance): Tim Mossholder, Nick Fewings, Ron Lach, Mary Cowles Clark.