Sunday, January 05, 2014

Not Quite Turkish

I'm not sure what it is, but I've seen quite a few people in the past month refer to St. Nicholas of Myra as Turkish. I find this somewhat interesting. He is associated with Myra, which is in modern Turkey, but that's the only thing about him that has anything whatsoever to do with anything Turkish. Myra was an Anatolian Greek colony in Lycia in the Roman Empire. Chances are that he would be of an ethnically Greek family; chances are also that he would have considered himself culturally a Roman. He would certainly have spoken Greek and would have had no idea what 'Turkish' meant, since the Seljuk Turks didn't invade Anatolia and begin its Turkification until more than five hundred years after his death. One could as easily claim that Attila the Hun was Polish, or that Hannibal was a Roman.