Saint George (;Geʽez: ጊዮርጊስ, , , , , died 23 April 303), also George of Lydda, was an early Christian martyr who is venerated as a saint in Christianity. According to holy tradition, he was a soldier in the Roman army. Of Cappadocian Greek origin, he became a member of the Praetorian Guard for Roman emperor Diocletian. During the Diocletianic Persecution, he was sentenced to death for refusing to recant his Christian faith. He became one of the most venerated saints, heroes, and megalomartyrs in Christianity. Since the Crusades, he has been venerated especially as a military saint. He is respected by Christians, Druze, as well as some Muslims as a martyr of monotheistic faith.
In hagiography, he is immortalised in the legend of Saint George and the Dragon and as one of the most prominent military saints. In Roman Catholicism, he is also venerated as one of the Fourteen Holy Helpers. His feast day, Saint George's Day, is traditionally celebrated on 23 April. Historically, the countries of Portugal, England, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Georgia, Ukraine, Malta, Ethiopia, Catalonia and Aragon, and the cities of Genoa, Moscow and Beirut have claimed George as their patron saint, as have several other regions, cities, universities, professions, and organizations. The Church of Saint George in Lydda, now Lod in Israel, has a sarcophagus traditionally believed to contain St. George's relics.
History
The English historian Edward Gibbon (1737 – 1794)Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 2:23:5. argued that George, or at least the legend from which the above is distilled, is based on George of Cappadocia,Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 2:23:5. a notorious 4th-century Arian bishop who was Athanasius of Alexandria's most bitter rival, and that it was he who in time became George of England. This identification is seen as highly improbable. Bishop George was slain by Gentile Greeks for exacting onerous taxes, especially inheritance taxes. J. B. Bury, who edited the 1906 edition of Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, wrote "this theory of Gibbon's has nothing to be said for it". He adds that "the connection of St. George with a dragon-slaying legend does not relegate him to the region of the myth". "There seems, therefore, no ground for doubting the historical existence of St. George, even though he is not commemorated in the Syrian, or in the primitive Hieronymian Martyrologium, but no faith can be placed in the attempts that have been made to fill up any of the details of his history. For example, it is now generally admitted that St. George cannot safely be identified by the nameless martyr spoken of by Eusebius (Church History VIII.5), who tore down Diocletian's edict of persecution at Nicomedia. The version of the legend in which Diocletian appears as persecutor is not primitive. Diocletian is only a rationalised form of the name Dadianus. Moreover, the connection of the saint's name with Nicomedia is inconsistent with the early cultus at Diospolis. Still less is St. George to be considered, as suggested by Gibbon, Vetter, and others, a legendary double of the disreputable bishop, George of Cappadocia, the Arian opponent of St. Athanasius." Saint George in all likelihood was martyred before the year 290.
Legend
Christian traditions Very little is known about George's life. It is thought that he was a Roman military officer of Cappadocian Greek descent, who was martyred under Roman emperor Diocletian in one of the pre-Constantinian persecutions of the 3rd or early 4th century. Beyond this, early sources give conflicting information.
Before the Aswan Dam was flooded, excavations were carried out in Qasr Ibrim in Nubia. In 1964, a Coptic manuscript was discovered under a column in the ruins of the cathedral of Qasr Ibrim. This manuscript is dated between 350 and 500 and represents the oldest tradition of the legend of St George. According to this text, St George's father Gerontius was from Cappadocia and was in the service of the Roman Empire in Nobatia. His wife Polychronia was a Christian. George is said to have been born during the reign of Aurelian, i.e. between 270 and 275. Polychronia raised George as a Christian and had him baptised in secret, as Gerontius disapproved of this as he was a pagan.G. M. Browne: The Old Nubian Martyrdom of Saint-George. In Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium - 575
Herbert Thurston in The Catholic Encyclopedia states that, based upon an ancient cultus, narratives of the early pilgrims, and the early dedications of churches to George, going back to the fourth century, "there seems, therefore, no ground for doubting the historical existence of St. George", although no faith can be placed in either the details of his history or his alleged exploits.
The Diocletianic Persecution of 303, associated with military saints because the persecution was aimed at Christians among the professional soldiers of the Roman army, is of undisputed historicity. According to Donald Attwater,
The saint's veneration dates to the 5th century with some certainty, and possibly even to the 4th, while the collection of his intercessory miracles gradually began during the medieval times. The story of the defeat of the dragon is not part of Saint George's earliest hagiographies, and seems to have been a later addition.
The earliest text which preserves fragments of George's narrative is in a Greek hagiography which is identified by Hippolyte Delehaye of the scholarly Bollandists to be a palimpsest of the 5th century.Acta Sanctorum, Volume 12, as republished in 1866 An earlier work by Eusebius, Church History, written in the 4th century, contributed to the legend but did not name George or provide significant detail.Church History (Eusebius), book 8, chapter 5; Greek text here , and English text here. Eusebius's full text as follows: The work of the Bollandists Daniel Papebroch, Jean Bolland, and Godfrey Henschen in the 17th century was one of the first pieces of scholarly research to establish the saint's historicity, via their publications in .. Bibliotheca Hagiographica Graeca 271, 272. Pope Gelasius I stated in 494 that George was among those saints "whose names are justly reverenced among men, but whose actions are known only to God".
The most complete version, based upon the 5th-century Greek text but in a later form, survives in a translation into Syriac from around 600. Text fragments preserved in the British Library enabled an English translation in 1925., online here.
In the Greek tradition, George was born to noble Christian parents, in Cappadocia, Greater Syria. After his father died, his mother, who was from Lydda, in Palestine, Greater Syria, returned with George to her hometown. He went on to become a soldier in the Roman army; but, because of his Christian faith, he was arrested and tortured, "at or near Lydda, also called Diospolis"; on the following day, he was paraded and then beheaded, and his body was buried in Lydda. According to other sources, after his mother's death, George travelled to the eastern imperial capital, Nicomedia,. . . where he was persecuted by one Dadianus. In later versions of the Greek legend, this name is rationalised to Diocletian, and George's martyrdom is placed in the Diocletian persecution of AD 303. The setting in Nicomedia is also secondary, and inconsistent with the earliest cults of the saint being located in Diospolis.
George was executed by decapitation on 23 April 303. A witness of his suffering convinced Empress Alexandra of Rome to become a Christian as well, so she joined George in martyrdom. His body was buried in Diospolis, Palestine where Christians soon came to honour him as a martyr...
The Latin (6th century) follows the general course of the Greek legend, but Diocletian here becomes Dacian, Emperor of the Persians. His martyrdom was greatly extended to more than twenty separate tortures over the course of seven years. Over the course of his martyrdom, 40,900 pagans were converted to Christianity, including the Empress Alexandra. When George finally died, the wicked Dacian was carried away in a whirlwind of fire. In later Latin versions, the persecutor is the Roman emperor Decius, or a Roman judge named Dacian serving under Diocletian.Michael Collins, St George and the Dragons: The Making of English Identity (2018), p. 129
St. George and the Dragon
The earliest known record of the legend of Saint George and the Dragon occurs in the 11th century, in a Georgian source, reaching Latin Europe in the 12th century. In the Golden Legend, by 13th-century Archbishop of Genoa Jacobus de Voragine, George's death was at the hands of Dacian, and around the year 287.
According to tradition, a fierce dragon was causing panic in the city of Silene in Libya when George arrived there. To keep the creature from ravaging the city, the inhabitants gave it two sheep each day, but when the sheep were no longer enough, they were forced to sacrifice people chosen by the townsfolk themselves. Eventually the king's daughter was selected, and no one was willing to take her place. George saved her by slaying the dragon with a lance. The king was so grateful that he offered George treasures as a reward for saving his daughter's life, but George refused and urged him to give them to the poor instead. The townspeople were so astonished by what they witnessed that they all became Christians and were baptised.
Saint George's encounter with a dragon, as narrated in the Golden Legend, would go on to become very influential, as it remains the most familiar version in English, owing to William Caxton's 15th-century translation..
In the medieval chivalric romances, the lance with which George slew the dragon was named Ascalon, after the ancient city of the same name in southern Palestine. The name Ascalon was used by Winston Churchill for his personal aircraft during World War II, according to records at Bletchley Park. Iconography of the horseman with a spear overcoming evil was widespread throughout the Christian period.Charles Clermont-Ganneau, 'Horus et Saint Georges, d’après un bas-relief inédit du Louvre', Revue archéologique, 1876.
St. George in Greek folklore
St. George is considered a folk hero in Greece, with many legends surrounding him.«Λαογραφικά του αγίου Γεωργίου», Απόστολος Βαρνάβας 81: 4 (2020), σ. 597-604. The patron saint of farmers and shepherds. His main feast day in Greece is associated with spring agricultural rituals and festivals, ceremonies of blessing the vines, processions with flowers and green wreaths (e.g. in Thrace) and traditional festivals with dances, litanies of worship of icons and symposia. In the Dodecanese and Crete, he is also known as "St. George the Drunken" (Greek: Άι Γιώργης ο Σποράρης/Μεθυστής), where new wines are blessed, and where afterwards the villagers drink them.
Most Greek legends about Saint George regard his killing of the dragon, however there are a few notable exceptions. For example, in some islands, there are stories of the Saint as a liberator; in particular, a legend states that Saint George freed a young man or woman from Ottoman Turkish kidnappers or pirates. Often, in similar traditions, it is mentioned that pirates attacked Christians who were celebrating during the saint's feast day, however the latter saved the believers from danger.