Is Saint Nicholas really buried at the 'lost town' of Newtown in Jerpoint, Kilkenny?

Today, December 7 is the feast of St. Nicholas in the Liturgical Calendar. According to local legend the saint was buried in Newtown at Jerpoint in Kilkenny about 800 years ago.  A French family, the de Frainets, allegedly removed Nicholas' remains from Myra (Turkey) to Italy to France and eventually to Ireland, where his remains are now buried in a decorative grave in the Kilkenny countryside.

To add to the mystery, the location where St. Nicholas is interred is the site of an abandoned town which is known as the ‘ Lost Town of Newtown’ at Jerpoint. The town was founded by either Earl Marshal or Griffin Fitzwilliam in the 12th century, west of the local  Cistercian Abbey, and was abandoned sometime early in the 18th century.

St. Nicholas was venerated in both the Catholic and Orhodox churches and is a prominent figure in ancient Celtic Christianity. He died in Myrna in Turkey in 343AD and the Normans, travelling through the region during the Crusades, are reported to have taken his remains back to Barri, then Venice and eventually Jerpoint. 

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Such saintly relics and remains were believed to confer immense status on monasteries.

St. Nicholas of Myra was also known as Nicholas of Bari and was an early Christian bishop of Greek descent from the maritime city of Myra in Asia Minor during the time of the Roman Empire. Because of the many miracles attributed to his intercession, he is also known as Nicholas the Wonderworker. He is the patron saint of sailors, merchants, archers, repentant thieves, children, brewers, pawnbrokers, unmarried people, and students.

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His reputation evolved among the pious, as was common for early Christian saints, and his legendary habit of secret gift-giving gave rise to the traditional figure of Santa Claus. 

The decorative tomb in the graveyard at Jerpoint which claims to be the  final resting place of St. Nicholas, remains  a popular  site for tourists to visit. The origin of this myth may be traced to the mapping of the area for the first edition of the Ordnance Survey in 1839 as the surveyors of the day inserted a label, 'St. Nicholas’ Tomb’, near the location of the church.

The trail of the saint’s remains is complex and dimmed  by time. However, less than 200 years after Nicholas' death, the St. Nicholas Church was built over the site of the church where he had served as bishop, and his remains were moved to a sarcophagus in that church.

Later when the Greek Christian inhabitants of the region were subjugated by the newly arrived Muslim Turks, and their church was declared to be in schism, a group of merchants from the Italian city of Bari removed the major bones of Nicholas' skeleton from his sarcophagus and brought them to their hometown. According to this story, they are now enshrined in the Basilica di San Nicola.

The remaining bone fragments from the sarcophagus in Turkey were later removed by Venetian sailors and taken to Venice during the First Crusade. 

Small bones quickly began to be dispersed across western Europe as the cult of St Nicholas grew and demand for relics of the saint escalated. Allegedly one tooth and two fragments chipped from Nicholas' sarcophagus were given to the Norman knight William Pantulf. Pantulf then took these relics to his hometown in Normandy while the clergy at Bari strategically gave away samples of Nicholas' bones to promote the cult and enhance its prestige.

If all the locations where St. Nicholas (or parts of him) are reputed to be buried he would have to have many more bones than a normal human skeleton. 

Most recently a team of archaeologists now claim that they have found St. Nicholas' tomb underneath a Byzantine church in Turkey.  

The Kilkenny tradition which states that the relics of St. Nicholas were stolen from Myra by Norman crusading knights in the twelfth century and later buried at Newtown may actually be more grounded in myth than fact. According to the Irish antiquarian John Hunt, the tomb probably belongs to a local priest from Jerpoint Abbey. 

However, we are  holding on firmly to the legend of St. Nicholas at Jerpoint as it adds a spice of excitement to Christmas in Kilkenny. Happy St. Nicholas' Day to all.