[Kolokotronis]

“I dispute the very statement that he was Greek ethnically — he would have considered himself a citizen of the Roman Empire (our narrow ethnic terms would be meaningless to him).”

Absolute nonsense. The Eastern Romans were very proud that they were part of an Hellenic culture and Myra was a Lycian city populated virtually 100% with ethnic Greeks in +Nicholas’ time, as it remained until the 1920s.

“Why should the Bishop of Rome “humbly” discuss something he had nothing to do with? —> your pride does not go well with orthodoxy.”

Because by retaining the relics in one of his churches he is an accomplice.

[eleni121]

The R Catholics finally saw the a bit of light and changed the error - changed it from “Turkish” saint to “born in Lycia in Asia Minor” - when I called to thank them the silence on the other end was deafening. So “saintly”

http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/new.php?n=17896

[Pyro7480]

As a devotee of the pre-1969 Latin Catholic liturgy, you won’t get me to defend the tinkering with the calendar (which also got eliminated feast days for the Holy Machabees and St. Barbara, among others). However, the whole “optional memorial” issue for St. Nicholas glosses over one detail- what priest in his right mind ISN’T going to remember St. Nicholas on December 6? The only reason why he wouldn’t is if it fell on a Sunday, as it did this year.

[Cronos]

Absolute nonsense. The Eastern Romans were very proud that they were part of an Hellenic culture and Myra was a Lycian city populated virtually 100% with ethnic Greeks in +Nicholas’ time, as it remained until the 1920s.

Lycia was founded by the Hittites. It became Hellenic when it was conquered by Alexander the Great in 324 BC, and then Roman when made a province in 46 AD. It had Hellenic culture, but a mix of Hellenic and Roman Culture. They did not call themselves Greeks but Romans -- even the Byzantines called themselves Romaoi -- even the Turks when they conquered Anatolia called it the Sultanate of the Rum (Rome).

They would not have been 100% Ethnic Greeks for the simple reason that a cosmopolitan city in the East would naturally have a large component of people from Syria, from Armenia and the Caucasus, from Italia, from Egypt and North Africa.

Furthermore, while you can argue that these were largely CULTURALLY Hellenic, there were definitely not ETHNICALLY 100% Hellene.