You go down to reach this church, not up, and that is the first thing worth noticing. Steps and sloping walkways drop you below the level of Demre's streets into an interior of banded arches and soft reflected light.
Three things are waiting for you down there: a floor of coloured marble worn hollow by pilgrims, walls where the saint's own face still shows through the plaster, and a stone chest with its lid smashed open. This is the church of Nicholas, bishop of Myra.
The building did not sink. The land rose around it. Demre sits on the delta of the Demre Çayı, the ancient Myros, a river that has spent thousands of years stripping sediment off the steep limestone catchments above and spreading it out here.
The plain keeps rising, the shoreline keeps moving seaward, and a church that once stood in a busy Byzantine harbour town now finds itself well inland with its floors beneath your feet. River floods eventually sealed the whole building under metres of silt, which is a large part of why so much of it survived. Nicholas served as bishop here in the fourth century.
A church stood over his tomb by the sixth, with tradition placing a great rebuilding around 520. Arab raiders wrecked the complex in 1034, and the Emperor Constantine the Ninth and the Empress Zoe renewed it in 1043, and that is most of the fabric standing around you now.
Now, look for four things as you move through the aisles. First, the floor. It is opus sectile, laid in cut pieces of coloured marble, geometric and quietly glowing, and in places it dips where feet that stopped walking here a very long time ago wore it down. Second, the frescoes.
Fragments only, on the walls and in the vaults, but they carry scenes from the life of the saint, painted for people who had travelled a long way to look at them. Third, in the south aisle, the broken sarcophagus, a heavy chest with its lid split open and nothing inside. Tradition names it the tomb of Nicholas. And fourth, look up.
The vaults and the belfry are the newest things here, added by a Russian-funded restoration in 1862, while Turkish excavation since 1989 has been steadily recovering the monastery buildings around you.
That broken lid has a date on it. In 1087, sailors out of the Italian city of Bari came ashore in this town, went to the tomb, opened it and carried the bones of Nicholas away to Apulia. Whether you call that a rescue or a robbery rather depends on which end of the Mediterranean you are standing at. Demre was left with an empty chest. What Demre was not left with was an empty church.
The pilgrimage simply carried on, because people wanted the place where he had actually lived and preached and been buried, and they want it still. Every December, for his feast, they fill these aisles again.
And the story that carried his name everywhere else. It is said that a poor man of the town had three daughters and nothing to dower them with, and that Nicholas came by night and dropped bags of gold through the window so the girls could marry, and told nobody it was him. A thousand years of retelling turned that one open window into every anonymous gift left under every Christmas tree. He is the patron of sailors, of children and of travellers, which makes him fair company for anyone walking a long coastal path.
Outside, the plain is citrus and pomegranate and greenhouse tomatoes, edged with plane and oleander, and swallows work the air above it all summer. You have come in along the coast from Üçağız and Andriake to reach him. Myra's rock tombs and its theatre lie a short walk on from here and make the natural second half of the morning. Go gently on those old floors, and remember that you have to climb to leave. Walk safe.
