Bari wanted a religious tourist attraction. Since the city had no special saint, its citizens would have to steal one, and the tomb of Saint Nicholas at Myra seemed vulnerable, with Arab intrusions weakening the power of Constantinople in the region. Apparently Venice had the very same idea, so merchant ships from Bari raced to beat the Venetian ships to Myra. Bari won. Their landing party deceived the monks who watched over the Nicholas shrine, broke open two covers of the tomb, dug up the bones of Saint Nicholas, and carried the relics back to the ships.
According to other narratives, the monks who guarded the tomb willingly gave the bones to the Bari representatives for safekeeping, fearing the depreciations of Arab forces in the region, but the claim sounds to many like sugarcoating a clear case of theft. Church historians are delicate in their descriptions, seldom using terms like "robbery" or "raid" to describe how Bari acquired the body of Saint Nicholas. It has become customary to speak of the "translation" of the Nicholas relics from Myra to Bari.
The ships set sail for home, but winds pushed the boats back into the harbor. Then the captain learned that members of the raiding party had kept some bones for themselves; he searched the ships and collected all the relics into a proper casket, after which the winds shifted and the ships departed. In the view of some chroniclers of the story, Nicholas finally permitted them to leave.
Contention continued when the vessels reached Bari, because the archbishop wanted the relics in his cathedral, monks wanted the bones at their monastery, and city merchants had their own ideas. The eventual decision was to build a new basilica for Saint Nicholas in Bari, and it is, to this day, one of the most majestic churches in southern Italy.
Yet the final resting place for the bones of poor Saint Nicholas would be somewhat more divided. Thirteen years alter Bari conducted its raid, representatives of Venice returned to Myra and dug up what they claimed to be the remaining bones of Nicholas that Bari had missed, almost 25 percent of them. On that basis, Venetians assert that they have Nicholas. A church in Bucharest and a monastery in Athens both claim to have Nicholas' right hand, and other locations display Nicholas’ bones as well. To top it oft, residents of Myra (today’s Demre, Turkey) now claim that the raiders long ago were fooled into taking the wrong body, and that Demre still has the relics of Saint Nicholas.
Source:
Forbes, Bruce David: Christmas - A Candid History, p.75f
Further Reading:
- Basilica of St. Nicholas in Bari, Italy
- Saint Nicholas of Myra, who would later be popularized as Santa Claus
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