Searching for St. Nicholas

To the undiscerning eye, the Turkish city of Demre is not much to look at, let alone stop for. Rows upon rows of greenhouses covered in clear plastic sheeting cover nearly every plot of land. The drab outpost in southwestern Anatolia lacks the luxuriant resorts and Turquoise Coast panache of such places as Bodrum, Marmaris, and Antalya, the latter a renowned haven for Russian vacationers.

But when it comes to historical personages, Demre hit the jackpot. In its previous incarnation, the town was known as Myra and was home to a fourth-century bishop named Nicholas. The beloved clergyman went on to achieve sainthood and become one of the most celebrated figures in both Western and Eastern Christianity, particularly in Russia, where he has long held a special place as revered heavenly intercessor and protector. Indeed, he is the patron saint of sailors, merchants, archers, repentant thieves, prostitutes, children, brewers, pawnbrokers, unmarried people, and students in various cities and countries around Europe. In much of the world, St. Nicholas, who legendarily had a habit of secret gift-giving, came to embody Christmas generosity and joy in the form of his alter ego, Santa Claus (or in Turkey, Noel Baba, meaning Christmas Father).

The fame of St. Nicholas made Myra an attraction from the early days of Christianity, and over the centuries churches were built there to honor him. In fact, this is how Russia came to have a footprint in Myra that has persisted to the present. In 1850, a writer and avid traveler named Andrei Muravyov visited and found the previous Church of St. Nicholas overrun with silt and in a general state of ruin. On returning to Russia, he embarked on a campaign to raise money to fund the church’s restoration. Nicholas I was tsar at the time – a happy coincidence.

Muravyov’s initiative succeeded, and work began around 1852. Turkish archaeologists excavating at the site several years ago found a stone with a Slavonic hymn to St. Nicholas and an inscription reading “Constructed by pious Russians 1853.” In addition, the tsar commissioned an inscription on a marble slab that was placed in a burial chapel. Unfortunately, the Turkish artisan etching the words had no knowledge of Russian, so the slab contains numerous errors. The inscription reads: “The truth of things revealed thee to thy flock as a rule of faith, an icon of meekness and a teacher of temperance. Therefore, thou hast achieved the heights by humility, riches by poverty. O Father and Hierarch Nicholas, intercede with Christ God that our souls be saved.”

Renovation continued past the death of Nicholas I in 1855 and was completed during the reign of his successor, Alexander II. A bell tower was added in 1862, but a shortage of both time and money allowed only the main area of the church to be restored. By 1863, the Russian refurbishment of the Church of St. Nicholas had been completed, at a cost of about R40,000.

The church project coincided with an Ottoman time period called the Tanzimat, during which the fading empire sought to implement a program of modernizing reforms. An unforeseen side effect of this was an outpouring of nationalist fervor among its subjugated peoples, and Russia aimed to shepherd fellow Slavs under Ottoman rule into a more suitable political arrangement under tsarist auspices. Of course, the Orthodox element and the conception of the “Third Rome” also factored into Russia’s thinking. There was just one hitch: Greek Orthodox adherents and the patriarch of Constantinople had similar designs of their own.

“The mid-nineteenth century was a time when the competition between the Russians and Greeks for the control of the eastern patriarchates… heated up,” said Pınar Üre, a scholar of Russian history in Ottoman Turkey. “Russians who financed the [church’s] restoration cared more about the political implication of their ecclesiastical control, rather than the archaeological value of the monument.”

Particularly notable in this regard was Nikolai Ignatiev, who became Russia’s ambassador to Constantinople in 1864. His grandson George Ignatieff, a long-serving Canadian diplomat in the twentieth century, wrote in his memoirs, The Making of a Peacemonger, that “in the heyday of European imperialism, grandfather was clearly convinced that it was his duty to assert Russian interests, whenever and wherever the opportunity presented itself.”

Ignatiev intently believed that such an opportunity was presenting itself in Myra. However, his ambition was not satisfied with Russian dominion over the restored Church of St. Nicholas, the rights to which he had been given control of by Muravyov. He dreamed of having an adjoining Russian Orthodox monastery on the grounds. To that end, he entrusted care of the church to the abbot of the Russian monastery on Mount Athos (Greece) and asked him to send some monks to Myra. Although the abbot did not share Ignatiev’s enthusiasm for the idea, he nevertheless sent two monks in 1868. Donations to bring this vision into reality slowly accumulated over the ensuing years.

Yet the prospect of a Russian monastery in Myra did not sit well with the Greek Orthodox clergy. According to Lora Gerd, a church historian in St. Petersburg, the Greeks had allowed the Russians to rehabilitate the Church of St. Nicholas based on the presumption that the property would pass into the hands of the patriarchate, despite the absence of any concrete plan for realizing that goal. Ignatiev’s intentions to entrench Russian control thus presented a problem. Things reached a turning point after 1878. Ignatiev had departed, and, over the following two decades, the Greeks gradually wrested away leverage until the Church of St. Nicholas was finally theirs.

Ignatiev’s grandson describes the legendary tsarist diplomat as “a remarkably brave, astute, and fiercely patriotic individualist whose public service career was as colorful and controversial as any to be found in Russia’s diplomatic history.” Yet his longing for the evasive prize in Myra continued well after his days as a public servant ended. He remained fixated on it until the end of his life, according to Gerd. She paraphrased the thinking of Charykov, a successor of Ignatiev’s as ambassador to the Ottomans who also happened to be named Nikolai. “The military and political considerations which had previously guided the thinking of the Russian government were no longer relevant, and the construction of a magnificent church in Myra would no longer give Russia its accustomed moral status.”

The money that had been collected for the establishment of a Russian Orthodox monastery in the hometown of St. Nicholas was handed over to the Bargrad Committee, which was seeking to fund construction of a Russian church in Bari, Italy (located across the Adriatic and just above the spiked heel in Italy’s boot). The bones of the saint had been transferred there in the eleventh century after their removal from a sarcophagus in the Myra church. Failure in Turkey was mitigated by success in Italy. Rising from the Corso Benedetto Croce in Bari, the Russian Orthodox Church of St. Nicholas, built during the reign of Nicholas II, represents the fulfillment of a dream deferred.

Fate was not as kind to the Russian presence in Myra. Greek Orthodox control of the church, at least initially, saw fractious relations with local residents and the incursion of sizeable debts. With the population exchange between Greece and the new Turkish Republic in 1923 emptying the city of its Greek community, the Church of St. Nicholas once again succumbed to the ravages of abandonment.

After Myra gave way to Demre, new restoration work began in the late 1980s. Later, the Turkish Culture and Tourism Ministry took charge of the place and turned the derelict church into the St. Nicholas Museum. Today, the regular torrent of Russian tourists to Antalya Province is further reinvigorating the site. The church is a sought-after setting for Russian couples’ marriages, and just outside the entrance to the museum stands a statue of St. Nicholas in clerical garb that was sculpted by Grigory Pototsky and presented to the city by Yury Luzhkov, the late former mayor of Moscow. Across the street, God and mammon are joined seamlessly at the StNicholas.ru souvenir shop. Inside, St. Nicholas icons and memorabilia of all sorts are hawked by Russian-speaking clerks, while a Bakelite Santa Claus stands sentinel at the shop entrance.

Demre’s allure also boasts a less visible but no less powerful side. Beneath the surface of the Church of St. Nicholas is a reliquary that Turkish archaeologists have been painstakingly unearthing. In 2017, a BBC story proclaimed that researchers at the site believed that they had found the skeletal remains of the saint, and that testing would eventually confirm their authenticity. According to their version, the bones that had been spirited away to Bari belonged to a different priest, and Demre was in fact the place of St. Nicholas’ eternal repose. That “news,” however, was actually publicity-driven speculation, a specialist at the museum said.

Meanwhile, in 2017 a rib from the relics in Bari was displayed in Christ the Savior Cathedral in Moscow, and hundreds of thousands stood in line to see it, some for up to eight hours. It was a testament to the inveterate spirituality of the Russian soul, said Roman Lunkin, a leading researcher on religious matters in the country. “He was an unpretentious and private-sector saint who is known not for strengthening the unity of the state or blessing warfare and fighting, but for doing the proverbial dirty work that bishops don’t usually do,” Lunkin said.

To emphasize this point of distinction, Lunkin called attention to Ilya Repin’s painting Nicholas of Myra Saving Three Innocent Prisoners from Death. It portrays an elderly man with a white beard, clad in bishop’s attire, his extended hand blocking an executioner’s sword in its downward arc toward the neck of a shackled, kneeling man. The tableau poignantly reminds its observers that prisoners too are among the many who count Nicholas as their patron saint.