Empire: World History - 318. Heist of St Nicolas: Raiding Santa's Tomb (Part 1)

Episode Date: December 23, 2025

The original Santa Claus, Saint Nicolas, was a real bishop from Myra in modern-day Turkey, whose tomb there was popular with pilgrims, but 700 years after his death, a group of sailors decided to steal his magic bones… What myth about St Nicolas first associated him with gift-giving? How did his story get merged with the Greek god of the seas, Poseidon? How were the tombs in his hometown connected with Ancient India? Anita and William are joined by Sam Dalrymple to discuss his original research on the build up to the heist of St Nicolas’ body… Join the Empire Club: Unlock the full Empire experience – with bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to miniseries and live show tickets, exclusive book discounts, a members-only newsletter, and access to our private Discord chatroom. Sign up directly at empirepoduk.com  For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com. Email: [e-mail] Instagram: @empirepoduk Blue Sky: @empirepoduk X: @empirepoduk Producer: Anouska Lewis Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mpowerpoduk.com. Hello and welcome to Empire with me Anita Arnan. And me, William Turimple. Merry Christmas, almost Christmas. And you little people out there who are listening, I really, fingers crossed, you get what you want.

And for you big people listening, I really hope you get what you need, which is, let's face it, just five minutes of peace and quiet at this time of year. We've got a fabulous pair of Christmas episodes for you involving, and I love this so much, a heist, a cult,

the missing body of Santa Claus. Don't cry, it's not that one. Your one's still coming. It's a different one. And if you want to binge both episodes immediately treat yourself or gift a last minute present, Empire Club membership is out there for you. go to EmpirePod UK.com. That's EmpirePodukuk.com. And you managed to get something right at the last minute because you know you've forgotten and you know you should have remembered this earlier, but you haven't. Look, we are joined by a wonderful friend of the show, son of one of the presenters here, Sam Durimple. Yay! He's back. Hello, hello. Hello. But listen, in your own right, an absolutely fabulous author who is getting accolades by the bucket full this year for Shattered Lands.

Heard first on Empire Pod. Yeah, absolutely. And you're here because largely, Sam, you had an intriguing summer holiday which threw you into the world of St. Nick. Now, tell us a little bit about what happened to you and why we're here right now. So this summer I went to Lissia in southern Turkey. And there's this place that I've been sort of reading about and obsessing over for almost a year, which is the mortal tomb of Father Christmas, of Santa Claus, who was of course originally a Greek saint from what's now southern Turkey, St. Nicholas. And there you can see the tomb where he was once buried, surrounded by the most incredible Byzantine frescoes in this extraordinary very early basilica. The story of the story. of his life is a story that's far more interesting and crazy than I think we tend to realize. We all kind of know the Santa Claus myth where he lives in the North Pole. He has his reindeer

is and stuff. But the fact that his tomb was looted by relic thieves and that he's had this whole crazy journey. His story involves bits of Poseidon worship and Odin worship. And I've gone down this whole rabbit hole that is worth chatting about. Can I just say, Adel Rumpul down a rabbit hole is a condition that we've become well accustomed to here on a podcast. Can you just, I mean, you sort of describe Byzantine, you know, sort of splendor around it, but the tomb itself, what does it look like? I mean, it's not red and green with bells on. What does it actually? How does it count? It's not green with bells on. No. No, it's just kind of rather incredible Roman sarcophagus,

made of marble with these kind of acanthus leaves everywhere. I don't know, it feels very, very imperial. What survives today is mostly a kind of a later Roman construction built around 500 AD. But the sarcophagus itself is very, very old and feels like the sort of thing that you might find in Rome. Is it a reused Roman sarcophagus or is it built for St. Nicholas first off? It's built for St. Nicholas, who is a, you know, a Roman saint, essentially.

Right. And this place, I mean, it's sort of a crossroads of cultures at this time, at the time of his life. That's right, isn't it? It's one of the most extraordinarily beautiful and culturally fascinating bits of the Mediterranean. This is a world where Greek gods collide with Zoroastrian fire worshippers on the southern coast of Turkey. So this is an area, Sam, where you have early ancient Greek civilization, the Lysian civilization, that then gets a kind of Persian overlay, because it gets conquered by the Achaemenids, is that right? And that's when the Zoroastrian bit turns up. What sort of dates are we talking here?

550 BC, I think, it's conquered by the Achaemenids. The Achaemenids are the same Persians who finally reach the kind of, you know, the Greeks and fight the Spartans in 300. It's that moment that we know, the kind of this is Sparta moment when the Persians are pushing in from the east, conquering what we now call Turkey, and then finally, you know, facing up against the 300s, the Battle of Marathon, that whole story. Anthemopoli. And Thermopylae. What's extraordinary about Lissia is it's the kind of alternate reality. It's what would have happened had Greece been conquered by Persia. very quickly after this conquest, the local Lysseans are integrated into this new massive empire,

you know, centred on Persepolis in modern Iran. And you can see that they suddenly get much, much richer. The Lysian soldiers will very quickly begin erecting these extraordinary rock-cut tombs into the bedrock around Lissia. You got very excited, Sam, I remember when you first went there. because one end of the Persian Empire was in Lissia, the western end. But the eastern end is as far north as Afghanistan, and it's these types of architecture which are being built by the Persians in Lissia, which also influence Ashoka and the early architecture in northwestern India. Yes.

So the earliest monumental architecture in India is the Baraba caves, which, you know, if you're all listening to this on your phone, go look up a picture of it. It's extraordinary, this beautiful arch cut into the bedrock in modern Bihar. What's extraordinary is that it bears almost identical resemblance to these early Lissian caves. And we know for a fact that many Lysians are sent from Lissia all the way to India under the Achaemenid Empire. And so it seems that the kind of, you know, the early architecture of ancient India may have some sort of crazy link with Santa Claus's hometown. So just to explain this, we forget quite how big the Persian Empire was.

The Persian Empire, as you said, centered on Persepolis and centered on modern Iran, stretched out from modern Iran as far west as Afghanistan and even occasionally into beyond the Kaibah Pass. And then eastwards, it conquers Anatolia, modern Turkey, and they try to conquer Greece and are beaten back. That's the story we're telling. Now, eventually the Persians do get driven out and the Roman and the Byzantine Empire takes over. Romans convert to Christianity under Constantine, and that begins the Byzantine period.

And St. Nicholas is a Byzantine bishop. His apostolic sea is based on Lissia, which is now a modern southern Turkey. I mean, Sam, the Indian stuff is fascinating. But also, you know, when I was saying about the crossroads of cultures, I mean, look at a map. you have got the Greeks, the Zoroastrians, you've got their very sort of different beliefs also crossing over here. So just to remind people, we did an episode of Empire previously on the Zoroastrians in our Persian Empire and they very much, I mean, they wouldn't have had these closed tombs. They would have had the pillars of silence where they would take bodies out and put them on the top of these pillars and they would be exposed for vultures or birds of prey to consume because this is all the circle of life.

wonder whether you see some of that around the tomb of St. Nicholas or there are influences of the Zoroastrian and the Greek as well, you know, with their pantheon of gods on Olympus. Are they also there? So there's an extraordinary number of tombs dotting this area, all in an array of styles. Some of the more Greek-influenced ones will actually go on to influence the Temple of Haliccanarsus, one of the wonders of the ancient world. There are also tombs that clearly resemble the tombs north of Persepolis around Nakhshirustam. So not Zoroastrian pillars of silence per se, but these kind of, you know, imperial Persian tombs, because they're now under the Persian Empire. Which are in a sort of cube shape, aren't they? These tall towers, rectangular.

Exactly. And so within Lissier, you have all these extraordinary tall burial chambers so that you can see them from far away, raised on plinths. But where in Persepolis you would have, you know, all sorts of images of the Shahin-Shah, the King of Kings. Here you have images of the Sirens in the late Archaic Greek style, these kind of beings believed to carry the souls of the dead to the underworld. So you get this kind of crazy fusion of traditions here. And this is the world into which St. Nicholas is born.

And obviously he grows up once it's Christianised. But there are all these monuments dotting the town where he's preaching. But when you say the sirens carry the souls of the dead, I mean, are these the same sirens who would have sung from the rocks? Trapped, waiting sailors. Yeah, sailors and pulled them onto the rocks and drown them. Are they the same sisterhood? I think so.

These are more land-lobbing sirens, maybe. I didn't know they were so variously employed. I thought it was a full-time job, drowning, But yes, go on, Willie, you were going to say something. We've come through the Persian period with all these wonderful Zoroastrian remains. Then, of course, Alexander the Great, again, this is something we've done on the pod before, this extraordinary blitzkrieg as Alexander moves out of Macedonia through Anatolia and heads for the heart of the Persian Empire.

And so this is the point at which, in the sense, the Greeks return to power in this area. And tell us about that period, Sam. He shows up, you know, around 300 BC, and suddenly all these Greeks return to this region. And by about the second century BC, you've got his town, Myra, joining the earliest known version of the UN, which is the Lysian League, this kind of federation of autonomous city states,

which includes towns like Xanthos and Pinar. And it's recognized by scholars as one of the first known democratic unions in history. So rather extraordinary. And then later it becomes a Roman province. And so today, when you go to these areas, you've also got these extraordinary vast amphitheaties. Some of them were the capacity of 11,000 spectators.

So, you know, this is a big, big town. The Romans very much, you know, transform it in their own way. So you suddenly have temples established in the region to Poseidon, to Ephesian Artemis. And there's a wonderful book called Santa Alive. by Jeremy Seal, which is very worth reading for anyone listening to this podcast, because it goes into all sorts of ways in which the myth of St. Nicholas becomes tied to all these older Greek mythologies. So, I mean, there is a story, isn't there, of St. Paul passing through Myra on the way to Rome. And just give us a little bit of a concept of when that happened,

and why was he passing through anyway? So, yeah, 62 AD, I think it is. that he passes through this area en route to Rome. And there is actually, you know, one of the big things that you can do when you're in Lissia is there's the Lysian Way, which is, which follows his old path and follows all of these very early kind of Christian sites, essentially. St. Paul, for those who don't know, is one of the most important early Christian saints. He probably never actually met Jesus, but he has a vision of Jesus. He has a vision on the road to Damascus.

And then as he's heading towards Rome and his eventual martyrdom, he's visiting all the early Christian communities that are already there in Anatolia and writing the epistles, the letters of St. Paul that are still important part of Christian worship. Anyone goes to church is likely to get a St. Paul letter. His letters are read out at marriages. There's a poem I was taught when I was little. It's so silly. And of course, you know, feel free to comment on how vacuous this comment is. I know it is. Let me just preface. I know. Paul the Apostle, he had an epistle, it was a colossal, it made the girls whistle. There we are.

I've never heard that. That's very good. I love it. Good. That's yours for free. Now, so look, we should really return to the subject that brought us to this extraordinary place, and that is St. Nick. Let's talk about where his story begins, Sam.

The dates around him are famously uncertain. We know that he died on the 6th of December because that's kind of, you know, venerated every year. But December, crucially, he's a different. December Saints. But yeah, the most common dates that people seem to think he's lived is around 280 to 352 AD. He's probably born in the nearby tourist town of Patara and then moves to Myra when he becomes a bishop. And like so many early Christian saints, there are so many legends attributed to him that it's difficult to separate this fact from fiction. But crucially, the most important and earliest story regarding him is one where he's giving gifts.

This is the story of the three daughters. The dowry story, yes, yes, yes. So the basic story is that there is this nobleman in the town is destitute. He's lost all of his money and he's got these three daughters. And things are so bad they've not eaten in months that he's finally thinking of basically selling them into prostitution. But the night before he sells the first one into prostitution, St. Nick creeps up to the house and drops a bag of gold into the house at midnight. Can I just say crucially, not through a chimney, but through the window.

It's sort of imagery that I've seen is of the hand reaching and a sleeping maiden underneath and just a bag of gold being dropped through the window by St. Nicholas outside. He does this three times. So each time one of the daughters is about to be sold, he arrives at midnight, drops a bag of gold through the window, and suddenly the nobleman can pay the dowry and get them married off and not have to sell them into prostitution. So it was a rather dark story in some sense. In many sense. They don't tell that to the kids around the Christmas tree. Exactly.

But it creates this link between him and gift giving. Interestingly, the other story that is there from the very earliest days is to do with him chopping down a tree that's possessed by demons, which may be in some sense why we have kind of, you know, chopped down trees sitting in our living rooms every Christmas, Christmas trees. Although, of course, it's not a, it's not a pine tree back then. No, no, I mean, I thought the tree thing, I mean, the conflation I was always told was that it's a pagan festival of, you know, sort of winter and then renewal was the tree business. But, you know, listen, I'll take your word for it because you've been there. When you went there, was it sort of very crowded by people who still wanted to see, or is this a,

kind of a forgotten part of southwest Turkey now is two. It's on the turquoise coast in the south, near Antalya and all the kind of lovely tourist resorts. And the town that it's closest to is Demer. It's right. In fact, the church is in Demeray. What's extraordinary is you've got these kind of beautiful rock-cut mausoleums all over the hill behind, including all these kind of, you know, Persian Zoroastrian tombs with archaic Greek sculpture. But then you enter a rather grotty kind of town filled with kind of malls and cabab shops. And then you go, you turn right up this small little lane. And suddenly there's all these statues of Santa Claus in his kind of modern incarnation with a kind of, you know, Christmas hat and

with. Oh, what, the Coca-Cola colours, you know, the red and white. The Coca-Cola colors. They've got that way. Oh, really? There's lots of statues of him in his Coca-Cola colors, basically advertising the icon shop where they're selling much older icons. but then you go into the actual church and there are these very, very early images of him and they are probably the earliest images that we have of him. Sam, very kindly you sent as an image from the church and here we see a man, an elderly man, bald, dome-headed,

no hat of any description on, a halo of light behind him, which I guess would have been in gold back in the day. He is crucially, though, sporting a very white beard and carrying what in his hands? He seems to have a very ornate box, a book in his hands. No, it's a book with a lovely golden cover and jewels on it. That's how gospels were ornamented. And often when people come looting, when, for example, the Turks turn up,

that's the first thing they pitch, the gold covers of all these gorgeous gospel books. Yeah, no, so I mean, these are images, again, that are probably about 200 to 300 years after his death. He seems to die in 343 AD and is placed in a sarcophagus that he would later be nicked from. That's an Anita quality pun. No, I was just saying Saint Nicked, but I thought, no, that's not suitable. Let's not say it.

But I did now. You made me. Okay, carry on, Sam. Yes. So, yeah, there are a few traditions that dispute the year. Some say it's 352 AD. Some say it's in the 340s. But everyone agrees on the day of his death.

So he dies on the 6th of December, 343 AD, and he's put in his sarcophagus that you've described so beautifully. Let's take a break. And when we come back, let's find out how his mythology comes alive and travels all around the world. Welcome back. Now, Sam, I'm very envious of this because I've never been to Mara. And when you went there, you sent us all these gorgeous pictures of this very early Byzantine basilica, which looks one of the biggest and best preserved in the region. I mean, it's a magnificent looking basilica.

It's extraordinary. It's on the site of the church that St. Nicholas actually preached in. It seems to have been rebuilt first under Theodosius II, and then the Emperor Justinian. Emperor Justinian is also recorded as restoring churches dedicated to St. Nicholas in Constantinople. So this is that moment when the kind of Eastern Roman Empire, is still surviving, but Rome has now fallen. And remarkably, very, very quickly, the cult of St. Nicholas seems to have spread. So by the time that the building that we see is erected,

already his cult has spread quite far across the Mediterranean and towards the Black Sea. The church that we see is very much the same sort of world. as the early Hyacophia, Istanbul, or what was then Constantinople. And it's a kind of mix of late Roman and early Byzantine architecture. There's archers, vaults, domes on a grand scale. And it all really points to how much of an extraordinary pilgrimage centre this has already become so early on. And why is he so renowned?

Just because he gave these presents to the girls and stopped them becoming prostitutes or other other myths. So there are other myths and particularly is this rather fascinating feature of his cult. He becomes very quickly known as the patron saint of sailors. Now there's a lot of work on this which seems to suggest that he takes on many of the attributes as a kind of Christianized form of Poseidon. Brilliant. Oh, improbable.

And so you, you know, the December the 6th, which was his death day, is speculated to have coincided with pre-Christian festivals honoring Poseidon. And crucially, early testimonies of Nick's life don't actually mention any sailing experience whatsoever. So we should explain perhaps how this all happens in general, which is that the early Pope's specifically write letters. We have letters from Augustine the Great saying that when you're trying to convert people, you should. should build Christian churches on the sites of previous temples, and you should talk in the language that these people will understand. And so you see a deliberate policy in the early Christian church, basically appropriating the sacred sites, that people continue to worship where they always have. And conflation of dates as well, because am I right in saying, actually, Poseidon

is celebrated around the same time, you know, the early part of December as well, which is, I don't know, maybe why the feast day of St. Nicholas is also December the 6th. Exactly. No. And there's a, there's a whole extraordinary series of myths, it seems, that are very much shared between the early St. Nicholas tradition and the kind of later Poseidon tradition. So St. Nicholas very quickly is known as the deliver of pilgrims to the Holy Land by sea. And in particular, there's this kind of quite specific legend that again doesn't seem to be part of the kind of St. Nicholas's actual life, but emerges later as the stories that grew up around him. He leaves a boat and says he's going to take his oar inland, and he's going to

take it inland until people no longer know what an oar is, and there he is going to become a hermit. So I think it's the kind of cathedral of St. Nicholas in Didima of Argolyss, which is built where there was once a Poseidon temple. This legend with the awe seems to have. have been a myth from the earlier Poseidon temples, if that makes sense. No, it makes perfect sense. So it's fascinating. So the mythology of Poseidon and his attributes get transferred into the iconography of St. Nicholas. So we've seen already the image of St. Nicholas delivering presence, and that's in the murals of the Myra Church. Are there any images of him holding oars or kind of wandering around with a soap? There are images of him

are holding oars. There's a couple of him on boats, standing with a bunch of sailors and basically kind of seemingly ticking them off. In the original church, they don't seem to be nearly as prominent, you know, in the later churches that are dedicated to him all across the Mediterranean. So this is the beginning of a massive accretion of different stories from around the world that will cling to this guy like sort of putty from a whole variety of different geographical areas in different mythological systems. I mean, these are sort of, you know, lots of different facets which are coming towards him, but still geographically located in the same place, which is this part of what is now Turkey.

But when does his image then get exported worldwide to a wider footprint? It happens slowly. So I think that by the 8th century, he's showing up in Rome. By the 9th century, he's in Kiev all the way, you know, far. to the north. And bearing in mind, this is kind of, you know, about 500 years after his death. So it starts slowly, but it's very much to do with his association to the sea. So he then begins to move up the rivers. Once he reaches Russia, obviously there's not much sea around. There in Russia, he becomes associated with travellers more generally.

Like St. Christopher is in the West. Yeah. At my Catholic school, we always had images of St. Christopher, as the patron saint to travellers. Although the Vatican, I think, had recently sort of announced that he was in fact a fake saint, and wasn't a real one. But I remember there were always little images of St Christopher on the dashboard of all the monastic vehicles. So, I mean, instead of St Christopher, they should really have been having St. Nicholas, it sounds like, there is a Russian proverb, isn't there, that says if something happens to God, we've always got St. Nicholas.

So even to this day, they rely on him where they can. No, Russian liturgy still dedicates Thursday prayers to St. Nicholas. He's hugely, hugely important. And again, today, I think in the English-speaking world, you know, St. Nicholas isn't that revered, whereas Santa Claus is very well known. Whereas in the entire Russian world, he is still one, and indeed the entire Orthodox world, in Greek and Russian liturgy, St. Nicholas remains one of the most famous saints in the entire Orthodox world. in Greek and Russian liturgy, St. Nicholas remains one of the most famous saints in the entire canon. I'd have some memory that in all those early pre-revolutionary train carriages in Russia, used to have icons of St. Nicholas to ensure you had good luck on your travels. But anyway, it's as a sailor that he gets better known in Europe.

And Sam, you're an I's local church in Chiswick, St. Nicholas, is one of the very first in the It's up river on the Thames, looking onto the river, and therefore an appropriate choice of patron-saint-I know that. That's a really old church. I mean, what are we talking about? 1500s or even before predating the 15-100s? It's 11-100s. It's within a century of the Norman conquest. And again, it's always along the rivers that his churches begin to. The present church is Victorian, but yeah, it got knocked down. But the tower, I think, is 15th century. But it's the actual structure. We have proof that it's built in, I think, at the 1180s. And again, it's not a coincidence that it's built on the river. Back in kind of pre-Reformation, England, you know, each of these churches would have been focused on specific saints. Obviously, what we see today is a very post-Reformation kind of view of Britain's churches. You know, pre-Reformation, they would have been colourful icons much more similar to what goes on in Italy or France. France today. And this, you know, the one in Chiswick would have been dedicated to St. Nicholas,

and it wouldn't have been a surprise that it was on the Thames, the local church where all the sailors along the Thames would have got. So if we're trying to imagine back to the pre-Reformation frescoes, which were whitewashed at the Reformation, we could have imagined in our local Chisic Church images of St. Nicholas delivering presents on one wall of the nave and on the other wall of him hanging around with an awl and going for a walk with his all. I know. I know. And I know this from chatting to you, Sam, that the mystery of why presents come down a chimney is solved in the most unlikely place and that place is Serbia. Because before, you know, all of the mythology was poor daughters, they have their dowries dropped through a window. But when do chimneys come into this?

Yeah, this is again, I mentioned Jeremy Seal earlier on in his brilliant book, Santa Alive. This was his big discovery, which was the first ever image of St. Nicholas dropping presents down a chival. chimney, and it's from a 1392 fresco in Ramacha, Serbia, on the south wall. And you can very clearly see it's in red. There's the father huddling on the floor, you know, destitute and worried that he's going to have to sell his daughters into prostitution. The three daughters are in bed, essentially, all asleep, not realizing what he's about to do. And on top of the house, you can see St. Nicholas with his halo in his ecclesiastical outfit, not yet red. and red and green or red and white.

But nice black and white's crosses on his. Exactly. But it's unmistakable what he's doing, which is he is dropping a bag of coins, the same coins that he, you know, the dowry gift from the legend, but he's dropping it through a chimney. That's fantastic. I mean, I just think, I knew there would be a reason for this. And now we have it.

Listen, we're going to continue this story in the next episode. We're going to look at, and this is a really remarkable story of how the real body of St. Nicholas, Santa himself, was stolen by Italian sailors. So do join us for that. Till the next time we meet, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnan. And goodbye from me, William Duremberg.