St. Nicholas’ coffin may have been found, but there’s a problem

After years of excavations, the leader of an archaeological expedition at the Church of Saint Nicholas in Demre, Turkey, announced this week that her team found a sarcophagus that could contain the body of Saint Nicholas, a discovery that could cloud conventional wisdom about the true resting place of the saint’s relics, currently believed to be Italy.

In one interview Recently, the leader of the expedition, Professor Ebru Fatma Fındık, said that sources point to the southern Turkish province of Antalya as the resting place of Nicholas after his death, which took place around the year 340.

According to her, after the earthquake that hit the region in 529, archaeologists believe that the Church of Saint Nicholas, long a popular pilgrimage site, especially for Russian Orthodox Christians, “may have been built near the site of burial of the saint.

In another interviewFındık speculated that the sarcophagus, “the first sarcophagus unearthed in the church” after drilling work began in 2022, could have been covered by gravel and sand from a flood or tsunami, which she said is the reason why it is so well preserved.

Turkish claims to the burial place of Saint Nicholas they are not new. In fact, Turkish authorities have been admitting for years that if they can prove that Saint Nicholas is buried there, “tourism will get a big boost.” The current excavations at the church were initiated by the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism.

“We have been carrying out excavations in the church for months… During our drilling work in the two-story building that borders the church courtyard from the south, we came across a sarcophagus” that they believe belongs to Saint Nicholas, Fındık said.

“Geologists specialized in this topic will soon come and investigate and examine it,” he said.

Who was Saint Nicholas?

Nicholas was a Christian bishop born in the 3rd century in Asia Minor, modern-day Turkey, at a time when Christians suffered sporadic but often brutal persecution under the Roman Empire. He was ordained a priest and later Bishop of Mira, an ancient port city that corresponds to the current Turkish city of Demre.

There are numerous legends about Nicholas, known for his generosity; Perhaps the most famous of them is the one that tells how he once dropped three bags of gold through an open window or down the chimney of a house in Mira to pay the dowries of the three women who lived there, thus saving them from a life of prostitution. This is probably the explanation why the modern Christmas character of Santa Claus clandestinely brings gifts to children.

Nicholas was imprisoned for a time during the persecution of Emperor Diocletian, and was only released when Constantine the Great came to power and made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire. Nicholas later participated in the Council of Nicaea in 325 and fervently defended the Church against heretics such as Arius.

He died on December 6, the day on which his feast day is celebrated in the Roman Catholic Church. It is also highly revered in the East, especially in the Russian Orthodox Church.

Where are the relics of Saint Nicholas?

The location of the mortal remains of Saint Nicholas It is already a cause of controversyand the discovery of the additional sarcophagus, depending on what it contains, will likely complicate matters further.

Churches around the world (including those in Germany, Russia, and even Virginiain the United States) claim to possess relics of Saint Nicholas, but the Basilica of Saint Nicholas in Bari, in the Apulia region of southern Italy, perhaps has the best claim to the final resting place of Saint Nicholas in the present.

Amid the takeover of the Turkish region by the Muslim Seljuks, Nicholas’s bones were supposedly moved by merchants from Mira to Bari in 1087 (and some bones would have reached Venice) shortly after the Great Schism between Catholics and Orthodox in 1054.

Previously it was thought that a desecrated sarcophagus located in the Turkish church contained Nicholas’s body until it was taken (for pious or opportunistic reasons, depending on who you ask) to Italy.

Pope Francis has visited Bari twice during his papacy, and during the 2018 and 2020 visits he stopped at the basilica’s crypt to venerate the relics of Saint Nicholas. In the crypt where Saint Nicholas is supposedly buried there is an altar for the celebration of Eastern Orthodox and Catholic liturgies, making it an important ecumenical site.

In 1953, scientific studies confirmed that the bones from Bari and Venice belonged to the same individual, although it is not known with certainty whether they were both from Saint Nicholas, reported Archeology Magazine.

Translated and adapted by the ACI Prensa team. Originally published in CNA.