A harmless enough comment, one might think, but not if the person at the receiving end of it is English. Even if they're too polite to tell me I'm talking rubbish, you can see them thinking it anyway. I mean, how could that possibly be the case when, as everybody knows, St. George is the patron saint of England, a fact confirmed by the sea of faces painted red and white in his honor whenever the England soccer team is playing away from home.The irony of it is that this much-adored saint may never even have existed at all. There's some evidence to suggest that he might have been a Palestinian martyred for his faith in the years before Christianity became the established religion of the Roman Empire, in which case his story was almost certainly brought to Britain by medieval crusaders returning from the Holy Land. On the other hand, in Cappadocia a story started to circulate about a George who was a Christian prince born somewhere near Kayseri (then Caesarea). One day when he was riding in the countryside, he came across a princess dressed up in bridal finery and shackled to a rock where she was being threatened by a fire-breathing dragon. At once, the heroic George set about the beast, tamed it and led it into the city, thereby persuading the local inhabitants to convert to his beliefs.
Some might detect in that story echoes of the Greek myth of Perseus and Andromeda, and certainly there's no record of it before the 12th century. However, by 1483 it had gained enough circulation to crop up in William Caxton's British printing of the compilation of fanciful saints' lives called “The Golden Legend,” and somehow the story became confused with that of the Palestinian George.
Just to add to the confusion, there is thought to have been a third George, an Arian bishop of Cappadocia so unpleasant that he was eventually murdered by his own congregation. Why England should have become so enamored of this hodge-podge of a saint is unclear, although it's not hard to see why the story of a Middle Eastern hard man would have found favor in Central Anatolia, where the forces of Christianity and Islam were often rubbing up against each other.
I was reminded of all this last week as I stood in Stockholm Cathedral and gazed in awe at an outsize 15th century statue of St. George fighting with a dragon that had been partially created out of moose antlers. Beside it stood a demure statue of the poor princess in her wedding gear, said here to be a representation of Sweden. Be that as it may, in 1969 the Vatican decided that there were enough doubts about St. George to place a question mark over his sainthood. But here in Cappadocia, George is still our boy, as he is to the fans in the English soccer stadiums. And, yes, before anyone reminds me, I know that St. George is the patron saint of Catalonia and Aragon, too.
Pat Yale lives in restored cave-house in Göreme in Cappadocia. 
