www.byzcath.org Forums News & Events Church News Turkey may request the relics of Saint Nicholas to be returned.

http://www.france24.com/en/node/4960358

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8432314.stm

And when will Turkey return Hagia Sophia???!!!!

Chutzpah.

And when will they return Constantinople?

When there is a trade for Cordoba? (....just kidding, we need to be reality-based sometimes!) Seriously, the remains of Saint Nicholas ought to be in a Church - not a musuem of a supposedly secular(i.e. Muslim) state like Turkey where they would be solely a tourist attraction for non-believers to profit upon.

They fail to mention what they did to the Christians of this town when they captured it in the war with Greece in the 1920s. They only want it for a museum piece and make money from it. Sending relics to Turkey is a strange practice. What will the Moslems do with them when the remaining Christians have either left of died.

It is interesting to me, as a journalism student, that the BBC article refers to the Italians as "sailors" who took the relics to Bari and the article from France refers to them as "pirates" who stole the remains. The holy relics should remain in a church, not in a museum.

If Bari decided to give the relics to Turkey, it would be time for Russia to send in the Spetsnaz to take possession of them, before they leave Italy.

Christ is Born!! Glorify Him!!

I thought the reason that the relics of St. Nicholas were given to the Italians was to keep them out of the hands of the invading Muslims. So why would the Catholic Church surrender them now?

On anotehr note, don't the Turks understand that Italy does not own the relics? They are in the stewardship of the Catholic Church for the present.

As for what happens to them when the last Christian leaves, what happens to the relics given to the EP by the Catholic Church--St. John Chrysostom's relics come to mind?

Why doe the French refer to the carriers of the relics to Bari as "pirates"? Maybe it's some of that self-loathing that seems to have infected so much of the West, especially the intellectual and cultural elites, whether it's about it's political or religious history or both.
BOB

There are multiple accounts of how and why the relics of St. Nicholas were transferred to Bari, and one of them at least definitely shows the bones being taken against the will of the people of Myra, which would make the sailors from Bari thieves, if not pirates (though the line between merchant and pirate was rather blurry back then). Let's just say the whole matter is rather confused, but the relics are in possession of the Church in Bari, possession still remains nine tenths of the law, and the Turkish government has no right to Christian religious relics in any case.

I agree.

First off--Italy doesn't "own" the relics, the Church has possession of them. And secondly, the response should be "H-E-double toothpick NO!"

May 9 is the feast of the translation of the relics of St. Nicholas to Bari, at least to the Slavs. Whatever the circumstances of their removal, we (Slavs) believe that it was God's will that they be brought to Italy. Since the Orthodox have access to the relics and even have a chapel within the Basilica, there is no reason why we Orthodox shouldn't support the retention of the relics by the Catholic Church.

David

I thought the Latin Church gave the relics of St Nicholas to the Russian Orthodox Church am I mistaken?
Stephanos I
Hopefully at least some of the relic of the Saint would be returned to Turkey to the Church of St Nicholas, and let's make it a place of international pilgrimage.
So as to make the Turkish government relax its discrimination of Christians.

Good luck with that.

Wikipedia gives us a good description of how the Turks would treat the relics, as they removed a statue of St. Nicholas given by the Russian government in 2000 and replaced it with a 'more recognizable' red and white statue of Jolly old St. Nick, a/k/a Santa Claus.
"The metamorphosis of Saint Nicholas into the more commercially lucrative Santa Claus, which took several centuries in Europe and America, has recently been re-enacted in the saint's home town: the city of Demre. This modern Turkish town is built near the ruins of ancient Myra. As St. Nicholas is a very popular Orthodox saint, the city attracts many Russian tourists. A solemn bronze statue of the Saint by the Russian sculptor Gregory Pototsky, donated by the Russian government in 2000, was given a prominent place on the square in front of the medieval church of St. Nicholas. In 2005, mayor Suleyman Topcu had the statue replaced by a red-suited plastic Santa Claus statue, because he wanted the central statue to be more recognizable to visitors from all over the world. Protests from the Russian government against this action were successful only to the extent that the Russian statue was returned, without its original high pedestal, to a corner near the church."