Sacred bones of saint who inspired Santa Claus destroyed in church raid just before Christmas

Daily Mail ^ | 9 November 2026 | Stacy Liberatore

[SunkenCiv]

Bone fragments attributed to Saint Nicolas were stolen from a church in France, then allegedly burned and crushed. 

Priests at Saint Nicolas de Port, one of France's few sanctuaries to hold a relic of the saint, reported the theft of a reliquary containing a fragment of the saint's body on November 2. 

Police later arrested the suspect, who reportedly admitted acting spontaneously out of a 'desire to destroy' the relic because he viewed devotion to the bones as a form of idol worship. 

Saint Nicolas, the inspiration behind Santa Claus, lived between 270 and 343 AD and is famous for inheriting money, giving it to the poor, and, in particular, for the story of how he gave three girls bags of gold to save them from a life of prostitution... 

The church desecration comes just weeks before the Feast of Saint Nicolas, which marks the anniversary of his death. 

The incident is also the latest in a string of high-profile thefts, vandalism and arson attacks targeting Christian heritage sites across France.

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TOPICS: History; Science; Travel
KEYWORDS: france; godsgravesglyphs; saintnicolas; santaclaus

[SunkenCiv]

selections from the FRchives, sorted:

• St. Nicholas, Bishop of Myra + December 6 [12/05/2025]
• Was St. Nicholas a Real Person? [12/24/2024]
• Could sarcophagus in Türkiye's Antalya hold remains of St. Nicholas known as Santa Claus? [12/06/2024]
• Possible Crusader Ring Depicting St. Nicholas Unearthed in Israel [02/28/2018]
• 'St Nicholas's Pelvis bone' DOES come from the fourth century [12/06/2017]
• Saint Nicholas and the Origins of Santa Claus [12/21/2015]
• The Real St. Nicholas -- Not Fat and Not Very Jolly Either [12/06/2012]
• Santa Timeline: Before He Was Cheery and Chubby [12/24/2011]
• Santa's Not Pagan [12/23/2011]
• The Real St. Nicholas -- How Did a Cantankerous but Holy Bishop Become Jolly Ole St. Nick? [12/06/2010]
• Turkey May Want Santa Bones Back [12/31/2009]
• Suds for Santa: Historically, St. Nick has been linked to drink [12/21/2009]
• The Real Saint Nick Fought Prostitution [12/04/2006]
• The Real St. Nicholas [12/19/2003]
• St. Nicholas belongs in any reclamation of Christmas [12/06/2003]

[SunkenCiv]

[BradyLS]

Another helpful “migrant” teaches the French the errors of their ways. 🙄

[BradyLS]

…Am I wrong? 🫪

[Apparatchik]

Note the suspect was not identified by name.

You can bet your baguette that it was something nine-eleveny.

[hanamizu]

Someone remind me, how many mosques were raided/robbed/burned during the ‘student protests’?

[TexasFreeper2009]

Wanna bet the perp was a muslim?

[mass55th]

Hopefully, those alleged bones of St. Nicholas were actually those of a cochon.

St. Nicholas's bones are supposed to be in several different countries:

The remains of St. Nick can be found on multiple continents.

[magooey]

Woody Allen might suggest replacing the relic with the nose of a President.

[ealgeone]

I think we’ll be ok without them.

[Verginius Rufus]

There is a church in Bari, Italy, which claims to have his bones (it's one of the sites mentioned in this story). When I was there about 15 years ago there were a lot of pilgrims coming to visit the relics. As I recall there was a bus from Poland and I met a Russian woman who had come there all on her own from Russia. I encountered her when buying a ferry ticket to get to Dubrovnik and helped her figure out how to buy a ticket. She was going back to Russia by bus from Croatia.

They would need to get some DNA from the bones and then find a relative to compare it to, which might not be easy.

A church in Heraklion, Crete, claims to have the skull of St. Titus. A church in Salerno, Italy, claims to have the relics of St. Matthew.

Geoffrey Chaucer in The Canterbury Tales makes fun of fake relics.

[mass55th]

"Geoffrey Chaucer in The Canterbury Tales makes fun of fake relics."

There were plenty of them floating around in the Medieval period.

"They would need to get some DNA from the bones and then find a relative to compare it to, which might not be easy."

It would be nice if they could do that. I wish King Charles and Westminster Abbey would allow DNA testing on the bones that are allegedly the Princes in the Tower, especially now that they have the DNA of their uncle Richard III.

They extracted DNA from Cheddar Man, Cheddar Man, a 10,000‑year‑old Mesolithic skeleton found in a cave in Somerset, England. They even found a modern descendant via his DNA, a history teacher living a half-mile away:

10,000-Year-Old Skeleton Found in Britain Has a Modern-Day Descendant Living Close By