Turkey hometown has few ties to Santa

DEMRE, Turkey -- The jagged Taurus Mountains rise on one side of the church, while the Mediterranean Sea gleams in the distance on the other. The bougainvillea is in bloom, the orange trees bursting with ripe fruit. It is, in other words, a long way from Demre, Turkey, to the North Pole.

And yet there, in the center of town, is a familiar face, white-bearded and dressed in red. He is Demre's most famous son: Santa Claus.

Yes, Santa Claus is from Turkey. But this year, Christmastime in Demre is far from cheery.

The man who would capture the imaginations of children the world over got his start as a fourth-century bishop in what is now Turkey, centuries before the Ottomans invaded and established a towering Islamic empire. His name was St. Nicholas, and his church is now a museum. Born a rich man's son, he took his inheritance and gave to the poor, in anonymous gifts that some residents say were dropped down the chimneys of homes.

As millions of children around the world drag their parents to shopping malls to sit on Santa's lap and tell him their wishes, hardly anyone is heading to Demre. Turkey has an abundance of problems -- frequent terror attacks, a swelling population of Syrian refugees, mass arrests after a failed coup -- that have driven tourists away. The only foreign visitors to Demre these days seem to be a small number of Russians, many of whom revere St. Nicholas as the third-holiest figure in Christianity, after Jesus and the Virgin Mary.

"The Russians don't get as scared as the Europeans," said Okan Ozel, who works in the cafe at St. Nicholas Church. Don't worry about terrorist bombs, he admonished a visitor, and "tell the world they shouldn't be scared."

"There is police here," he added, "and they won't even allow us to put trash bins outside."

With few visitors to tend to, Ozel, a Muslim who said he regarded St. Nicholas as an important historical figure, had plenty of time on a recent sunny afternoon to sit and drink tea and Turkish coffee on the museum's grounds and talk about Santa Claus.

"It's true that he dropped gifts from the chimney," he said. "Because poor people from here are very proud people, they wouldn't have accepted gifts if he had just handed them to them. That's why he dropped them from a chimney."

One story about St. Nicholas that has been passed down through history goes like this: Hearing that a poor man was forcing his young daughters into prostitution because he could not afford dowries, St. Nicholas gave him gold. But he did so anonymously -- tossing the gold through a window or, maybe, down the chimney.

It is easy to imagine Demre trying to profit from its history -- to transform, perhaps, the city center into an Anatolian Santa's village. But there is little commercialization of Christmas, save for a car rental agency called Noel Rent a Car and the Noel Cafe, each of which uses Santa Claus as its logo.

And across the street from the church is a gift shop, with a life-size figurine of Santa Claus out front, that sells ornaments, magnets and mugs as well as Turkish teas and soaps.

Residents tend to stick to the history of the man, St. Nicholas, and largely scoff at the popular image of Santa Claus in the West, which they regard as a product of crass commercialism.

Erdal Karakos, a tour guide who was taking a few Russians through the museum recently, said, "You call him Santa Claus, but the Orthodox call him the wonder maker."

Karakos added, "He was a holy man. He didn't have this red dress or beard."

He noted that the popular image of Santa Claus -- the big belly, the beard, the red suit and the reindeer -- largely came from depictions of Santa Claus in Coca-Cola advertisements beginning in the 1930s. Those ads, in turn, drew inspiration from the 1823 poem "A Visit From St. Nicholas," famous for its description of Santa as a "jolly old elf." Nowadays the poem is more often referred to by its first line: "Twas the Night Before Christmas."

Information for this article was contributed by Ceylan Yeginsu of The New York Times.

A Section on 12/18/2016

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