[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.

[Cronos]

The saint lived and died in the land that is now part of the country of Turkey. In that sense, the Turks claim him as their own — he was not a Turk ethnically, that’s certain, but he was also most likely not a Greek ethnically, maybe with some Greek blood, but not A Greek. He would have considered himself Roman. Ethnically he may have been any one of, or a mixture of Ionian Greek, Lydian, Armenian, Syrian, Roman, Galatian, Persian etc. etc. Linguistically, he was pretty definitely Latin, with a knowledge of Greek. Religion-wise he was Christian of the orthodox (with a small ‘o’) faith.