Armenian Church remembers St. Nicholas – Panorama

The Armenian Apostolic Church commemorates St. Nicholas, Bishop of Myra, on Saturday 10 December.

Due to the various miracles attributed to his intercession, he’s also called Nicholas the Wonderworker.

Little is thought concerning the historic Saint Nicholas. The earliest accounts of his life have been written centuries after his dying and doubtless comprise legendary gildings. He’s mentioned to have been born within the Greek seaport of Patara, Lycia, in Asia Minor to rich Christian dad and mom.

In one of many earliest attested and most well-known incidents from his life, he’s mentioned to have rescued three ladies from being compelled into prostitution by dropping a sack of gold cash by the window of their home every night time for 3 nights so their father might pay a dowry for every of them. Different early tales inform of him calming a storm at sea, saving three harmless troopers from wrongful execution, and chopping down a tree possessed by a demon. In his youth, he’s mentioned to have made a pilgrimage to Egypt and Palestine. Shortly after his return, he turned Bishop of Myra. He was later solid into jail throughout the persecution of Diocletian, however was launched after the accession of Constantine.

An early listing makes him an attendee on the First Council of Nicaea in 325, however he’s by no means talked about in any writings by individuals who have been on the council. Late, unsubstantiated legends declare that he was briefly defrocked and imprisoned throughout the council for slapping the heretic Arius. One other well-known late legend tells how he resurrected three youngsters, who had been murdered and pickled in brine by a butcher planning to promote them as pork throughout a famine.

Fewer than 200 years after Nicholas’s dying, the St. Nicholas Church was inbuilt Myra beneath the orders of Theodosius II over the location of the church the place he had served as bishop, and his stays have been moved to a sarcophagus in that church.

In 1087 Italian sailors or retailers stole his alleged stays from Myra and took them to Bari, Italy; this elimination enormously elevated the saint’s reputation in Europe, and Bari turned some of the crowded of all pilgrimage centres. Nicholas’s relics stay enshrined within the Eleventh-century basilica of San Nicola at Bari, although fragments have been acquired by church buildings all over the world. In 2017 researchers dated one such relic fragment, a chunk of hip bone, from a church in the US and confirmed it to be from the 4th century.