LJMU
Saint Nicholas, the original Santa Claus, lived in Türkiye and was believed to perform miracles. He was a bishop and defended the Church — almost 2 thousand years ago.
It was born long before Coca-Cola — around 280 AD, to be precise. He was Greek, but lived in present-day Türkiye, says
It was a great defender of the Church during the Great Persecution of 313when Bibles were burned and priests were executed. Many miracles were attributed to him, and he became the protector of many types of people, from orphans to sailors and prisoners.
Nicholas then gained prominence among the saints by being the patron saint of many groups. Around 1200, explained the historian Gerry Bowler, from the University of Manitoba, author of Santa Claus: A Biographybecame known as a protector of children and bearer of magical gifts due to two great stories of your life.
One of them was when saved three girls from a life of prostitution by secretly delivering three bags of gold to her indebted father, which can be used for her dowries.
“The other story is not as well known today, but it was very well known in the Middle Ages,” Bowler said. Nicolau entered an inn whose owner had just murdered three boys and kept their dismembered bodies in barrels in the basement. The bishop not only sensed the crime, but also resurrected the victims. “That’s one of the things that made him the patron saint of children.”
But after the At the beginning of the Protestant Reformation in the 1500s, saints like Nicholas fell into disuse across much of northern Europe. “That was problematic,” says Bowler. “Now who is going to bring the children presents?”
“Baby Jesus’ carrying capacity is very limited, and he’s not very scary either,” as tradition dictated, Bowler said. “For this reason, the Baby Jesus often received a scary helper to carry the gifts and threaten the children, which doesn’t seem appropriate coming from Baby Jesus.”
Like this, there are several figures from the Germanic tradition who are again inspired by Nicholas to create diabolical figures that threaten children and deliver gifts, like Krampus.
Meanwhile, Santa Claus as we know him was also not born from Coca-Cola, as we have heard, but from a book.
Washington Irving’s book, Knickerbocker’s History of New Yorkfrom 1809, portrayed for the first time a Pipe-smoking Nicholas who flew over the rooftops in a flying cart, delivering gifts to good children and exchanging them for the bad ones.
What did Saint Nicholas look like?
In 2014, a team from the University of Liverpool reconstructed, using artificial intelligence, the true face of Saint Nicholas.
A university spokeswoman stated, at the time, to , that the new representation uses “the most up-to-date anatomical standards, data from depth of Turkish fabrics and computer graphics techniques“.
Reproduction also includes the St. Nicholas’s severely broken nosewhich, according to the spokeswoman, “healed asymmetrically, giving him a characteristic nose and a robust facial appearance.” His nose was broken during the persecution of Christians under the rule of the Roman emperor Diocletian.
The size and shape of the facial muscles that once covered Nicholas’s skull had to be inferred and the shape of the skull itself was rcreated from two-dimensional data. Digital artists added details based on guesswork, including the olive skin most common among Greeks Mediterranean people like Nicolau, brown eyes and the gray hair of a 60-year-old man.
“It is likely that we have lost some of the level of detail that would be obtained working from photographs, but we believe that This is the closest we’ll ever get to it“, stated the facial anthropologist Caroline Wilkinson.
