← Empire: World History
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- [00:01]
Anita Arnan
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 ad, free listening and a weekly newsletter. Sign up to empire club@www.empirepoduk.com.
- [00:20]
Sponsor/Advertisement Voice
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- [01:20]
Sam Dalrymple
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- [01:50]
William Dalrymple
Hello and welcome to Empire with me Anita Arnan and me William Durrymple. Merry Christmas. Merry almost Christmas and you little people out there who are listening are 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 empirepoduk.com that's empirepoduk.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 Dalrymple.
- [02:46]
Anita Arnan
Yay.
- [02:46]
William Dalrymple
Is back.
- [02:47]
Sam Dalrymple
Hello, hello, hello.
- [02:49]
William Dalrymple
But listen, in your own right, an absolutely fabulous author who is getting accolades by the bucketful this year for shattered.
- [02:57]
Anita Arnan
Lands heard first on Empire pod.
- [03:00]
William Dalrymple
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.
- [03:16]
Sam Dalrymple
So this summer, I went to Lycia 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 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 reindeers and stuff. But the fact that his tomb was looted by relic thieves and that he's had this whole crazy journey, you know, his story involves bits of Poseidon worship and Odin worship. And I've gone down this hole, rabbit hole, that is worth chatting about.
- [04:22]
William Dalrymple
Can I just say, Adalrymple down a rabbit hole is a condition that we've become well accustomed to here on the 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. It's not red and green with bells on. What does it actually.
- [04:40]
Sam Dalrymple
How does it green with bells on? No, it's this 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 kind of, you know, 500 AD. But the tomb, the sarcophagus itself is very, very old and feels like the sort of thing that you might find in Rome.
- [05:14]
Anita Arnan
Is it a reused Roman sarcophagus or is it built for St Nicholas?
- [05:18]
Sam Dalrymple
First off, it's built for St Nicholas, who is a, you know, a Roman saint, essentially. Right.
- [05:24]
William Dalrymple
And this. 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?
- [05:31]
Sam Dalrymple
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.
- [05:48]
Anita Arnan
So this is an area, Sam, where you have early ancient Greek civilization, the Lycian 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?
- [06:04]
Sam Dalrymple
550 BC I think it's conquered by the Achaemenids. The Achaemenids are the same Persians who finally reaped the kind of, you know, the Greeks and fight the Spartans in 300. It's that moment that we know, that 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 three hundreds, the battle of Marathon, that whole story.
- [06:32]
Anita Arnan
And Thermopylae.
- [06:33]
Sam Dalrymple
And Thermopylae. What's extraordinary about Lycia is it's the kind of alternate reality. It's what would have happened and had Greece been conquered by Persia. Very quickly after this conquest, the local Lycians are integrated into this new massive empire, you know, centered on Persepolis in modern Iran. And you can see that they suddenly get much, much richer. The Lycian soldiers will very quickly begin erecting these extraordinary rock cut tombs into the bedrock around Lycia.
- [07:08]
Anita Arnan
You got very excited, Sam. I remember when you, when you first went there, because one end of the Persian empire was in Lycia, 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 Lycia which also influence Ashoka and the early architecture in, in northwestern India.
- [07:33]
Sam Dalrymple
Yes. So the earliest monumental architecture in India is the Barabbah 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 Lycian caves. And we know for a fact that many Lycians are sent from Lycia 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.
- [08:14]
Anita Arnan
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 Khyber 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 see is based on Lycia, which is now modern southern Turkey.
- [09:05]
William Dalrymple
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 and 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. And I 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?
- [09:52]
Sam Dalrymple
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 Halicarnassus, one of the wonders of the ancient world. There are also tombs that clearly resemble the tombs north of Persepolis around Nakshirustam. 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.
- [10:23]
Anita Arnan
Sort of cube shape, aren't they? They're these tall towers, rectangular and.
- [10:28]
Sam Dalrymple
Exactly. And so within Lycia, 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. 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. Obviously he grows up once it's Christianized, but there are all these monuments dotting the town where he's preaching.
- [11:09]
William Dalrymple
But when you say the Sirens carry the souls of the dead, I mean, are these the same sirens who would have, you know, sung from the rocks and trapped.
- [11:16]
Anita Arnan
Waiting. Waiting. Sailors.
- [11:18]
William Dalrymple
Yeah, sailors. And pulled them onto the rocks and drowned them. Is that the same? Are they the same sisterhood?
- [11:23]
Sam Dalrymple
I think so.
- [11:25]
Anita Arnan
These are more land loving sirens, maybe.
- [11:29]
William Dalrymple
I didn't know they were so variously employed. I thought it was a full time job drowning sailors. But yes, go on, Willi, you were going to say something.
- [11:35]
Anita Arnan
We 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 body 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 a sense, the Greeks returned to power in this area. And tell us about that period, Sam.
- [12:02]
Sam Dalrymple
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 Lycian League, this kind of federation of autonomous city states which includes towns like sort of Xanthos and Pinara. 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 amphitheaters, some of them with a 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 A Life 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.
- [13:16]
William Dalrymple
So, I mean, there is a story, isn't there, of St. Paul passing through Myra on the way to Rome. I mean, just give us a little bit of a concept of when that happened and why was he passing through anyway?
- [13:28]
Sam Dalrymple
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 Lycia is there's the Lycian 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.
- [13:58]
Anita Arnan
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 an important part of Christian worship. Anyone goes to church is likely to get a St. Paul letter. His letters are read out of marriages.
- [14:21]
William Dalrymple
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 so colossal it made the girls whistle. There we are. I've never heard that.
- [14:35]
Sam Dalrymple
That's very good. I love it.
- [14:37]
William Dalrymple
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 Saint Nick. Let's talk about where his story begins. Sam.
- [14:49]
Sam Dalrymple
The dates around him are famously uncertain. We know that he died on 6 December, because that's kind of, you know, venerated every year.
- [14:58]
Anita Arnan
But December, crucially, he's a December saint.
- [15:02]
Sam Dalrymple
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.
- [15:39]
William Dalrymple
Yes, yes, yes.
- [15:40]
Sam Dalrymple
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.
- [16:07]
William Dalrymple
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.
- [16:20]
Sam Dalrymple
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, and not have to sell them into prostitution. So it's a rather dark story in some sense.
- [16:38]
Anita Arnan
In many sense. They don't tell that to the kids around the Christmas tree exactly, but it.
- [16:45]
Sam Dalrymple
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, it's not a, it's not a pine tree back then.
- [17:09]
William Dalrymple
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, 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 his tomb, it's on the turquoise.
- [17:32]
Sam Dalrymple
Coast in the south, near Antalya and all the kind of lovely tourist resorts. And the town that it's closest to is Demre. It's right. In fact, the church is in Demre. 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 kebab 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.
- [18:11]
William Dalrymple
What, the Coca Cola colors? You know, the red and white Coca Cola colors. They've gone that way. Oh really?
- [18:15]
Sam Dalrymple
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.
- [18:33]
William Dalrymple
Sam, very kindly. You sent us 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. 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?
- [18:56]
Anita Arnan
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.
- [19:11]
Sam Dalrymple
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.
- [19:27]
Anita Arnan
That's Anita quality pun.
- [19:30]
William Dalrymple
No, I was just saying saint niched, 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.
- [19:37]
Sam Dalrymple
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.
- [19:48]
William Dalrymple
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.
- [20:05]
Anita Arnan
In Walmart Zoonuville time was ticking away. Only a few nights left till the big holiday. But last minute gifters had no need to worry. Walmart Express Delivery got their gifts in a hurry. From Nintendo to Nespresso and Lego flowers, they could check off their lists in.
- [20:19]
Sam Dalrymple
As fast as an hour.
- [20:21]
Anita Arnan
All of who, Newville, East, west, south.
- [20:23]
Sam Dalrymple
And north could order gifts up until.
- [20:24]
Anita Arnan
5Pm on December 24th.
- [20:26]
Sam Dalrymple
So this holiday just do as the who's do with gift delivery.
- [20:30]
Anita Arnan
This fast.
- [20:30]
Sam Dalrymple
They all gasped from Walmart. Who knew, subject to availability terms and fees applied, a massage chair might seem a bit extravagant, especially these days. Eight different settings, adjustable intensity, plus it's heated and it just feels so good. Yes, a massage chair might seem a bit extravagant, but when it can come with a car, suddenly it seems quite practical. The Volkswagen Tiguan, packed with premium features like available massaging front seats, it only feels extravagant.
- [21:06]
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- [21:33]
Anita Arnan
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.
- [21:50]
Sam Dalrymple
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, you know, Eastern Roman Empire is still surviving, but kind of 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 Hagia Sophia, 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, so early on.
- [23:07]
Anita Arnan
And why is he so renowned? Just because he gave these presents to the girls and stopped them becoming prostitutes or other myths.
- [23:15]
Sam Dalrymple
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 saint 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. Bizarre, brilliant.
- [23:40]
Anita Arnan
How improbable.
- [23:41]
Sam Dalrymple
And so you, you know, the December 6th, which was his, 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.
- [23:57]
Anita Arnan
So we should explain perhaps how this all happens in general, which is that the early popes specifically write letters. We have letters from Augustine the Great saying that when you're trying to convert people, you 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. The people continue to worship where they.
- [24:27]
William Dalrymple
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 6th.
- [24:41]
Sam Dalrymple
Exactly. No, and 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 Saint Nicholas very quickly is known as the deliverer 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 Saint Nicholas in Didyma of Argolis, which is built where there was once a Poseidon temple. This legend with. With the oar seems to have been a myth from the earlier Poseidon temple, if that makes sense.
- [25:41]
William Dalrymple
No, it makes perfect sense. It's fascinating.
- [25:43]
Anita Arnan
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 presents, and that's in the murals of the Myra church. Are there any images of him holding oars or kind of, you know, wandering around with a soapbox?
- [26:03]
Sam Dalrymple
There are images of him 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.
- [26:20]
Anita Arnan
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 and different mythological systems.
- [26:34]
William Dalrymple
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?
- [26:52]
Sam Dalrymple
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 that this is kind of, you know, about 500 years after his death. So it starts slowly, but is 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 travelers more generally.
- [27:24]
Anita Arnan
Like St. Christopher is in the West.
- [27:26]
Sam Dalrymple
Yeah.
- [27:27]
Anita Arnan
At my Catholic school, we always had images of St Christopher as the patron saint of travelers. 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.
- [27:46]
William Dalrymple
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.
- [28:01]
Sam Dalrymple
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, 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 canon.
- [28:31]
Anita Arnan
I have some memory that in all those early pre revolutionary train carriages in Russia, they 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 eyes local church in Chiswick. St Nicholas is one of the very first in the west, isn't it? It's upriver on the Thames, looking onto the river and therefore an appropriate choice of patron saint.
- [29:01]
William Dalrymple
I know that that's a really old church. I mean, what are we talking about, 1500s or even before predating the 1500s?
- [29:08]
Sam Dalrymple
It's 1100s, it's within a century of the Norman Conquest. And again, it's always along the rivers that his churches begin to.
- [29:16]
Anita Arnan
The present church is Victorian, but yeah, it got knocked down. But the Tower I think is 15th.
- [29:22]
Sam Dalrymple
Century, but it's the actual structure. We have proof that it's built in, I think, 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 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 gone.
- [30:04]
Anita Arnan
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 Trisyc church, images of St Nicholas delivering presents on one wall of the nave and on the other wall of him hanging around with a. With an oar and going for a walk with his oar.
- [30:22]
William Dalrymple
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 diaries dropped through a window. But when do chimneys come into this?
- [30:42]
Sam Dalrymple
Yeah, this is again, I mentioned Jeremy Seal earlier on in his brilliant book Santa A Life. This was his big discovery, which was the first ever image of St Nicholas dropping presents down a chimney. And it's from a 1392 fresco in Romacca, 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 green or red.
- [31:25]
Anita Arnan
And white, but nice black and white crosses on his.
- [31:28]
Sam Dalrymple
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.
- [31:38]
William Dalrymple
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 Saint 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.
- [32:02]
Anita Arnan
A goodbye from me, William Dalrymple.
- [32:11]
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- [32:38]
Sam Dalrymple
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- [33:02]
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- [33:07]
William Dalrymple
See mint mobile.com hello, I'm Professor Hannah Fry.
- [33:10]
Sam Dalrymple
And I'm Michael Stevens, creator of Vsauce. We thought we would join you for a moment completely uninvited.
- [33:16]
William Dalrymple
We are not going to stay too long. Unless you want us to, of course.
- [33:20]
Sam Dalrymple
We're here to tell you about our brand new show, the Rest is Science.
- [33:23]
William Dalrymple
Every episode is going to start with something that feels initially familiar and then we're going to unpick it and tear.
- [33:29]
Sam Dalrymple
It apart until you no longer recognize it at all.
- [33:32]
William Dalrymple
You know our banana flavor doesn't taste like bananas.
- [33:35]
Sam Dalrymple
Yeah, what is that about?
- [33:36]
William Dalrymple
So it is supposed to taste like an old species of banana that was wiped out in a bananapocalypse and now you will only find it in botanical collections in the gardens of billionaires.
- [33:50]
Sam Dalrymple
Wow. Banana candy is actually the ghost of a long extinct banana.
- [33:56]
William Dalrymple
So if you like scratching the surface.
- [33:59]
Sam Dalrymple
Thinking a little bit deeper or weirder.
- [34:01]
William Dalrymple
Yes, definitely, that too. You can join Michael and I every Tuesday and Thursday wherever you get your podcasts.