[Cronos]

he's a Turkish saint in the sense that he lived and died in what is now Turkey. Just as Russia was really Muscovy until the 1500s and south and western Italy was for long a part of the Byzantine Empire after the rest of Italy and Western Europe fell. The current lands on which a nation lies can state with pride that a great man or woman lived on those lands.

That doesn't give them the rights to the person, though.

[eleni121]

The saint a Turk? Senseless drivel. There are eternal truths and one of them is that one's ethnicity and identity is determined by customs and language and faith. Not the passage of time or a land being conquered. For Turks, making money off the saint is their only motivation. To claim otherwise is not to understand the horrors Turks have perpetrated on Christians and Christianity and continue to deny.

the Italian peninsula being Byzantine Greek...ho hum....that fact does not give the Roman Bishop the right to keep the relics that were stolen over the objections of the holy men who cared for them at the time and have been kept for so many years in Bari.