As Christmas rolls around and Camino kids get excited at whether Santa Claus or the Reyes Magos will leave a pair of hiking boots in their stockings, a few might notice that the Christmas period also sees the feast of Santiago/St James. Some of you will have enjoyed the celebrations of the feast of Santiago in Santiago de Compostela and say, “Hang on, isn’t that 25th of July?”, and you’d be right. But he has another one, 30th of December.
Most saints’ feast days fall on the anniversary of their death, with a very few notable exceptions, such as John the Baptist, whose feast falls on the 24th of June. According to the Gospel of Luke, at the annunciation the archangel Gabriel told the Virgin Mary that her cousin Elizabeth (John’s mother) was already six months pregnant, and so the feast of John’s birthday falls six months before Christmas.[1] (His beheading is also remembered on the 29th of August). However, Santiago’s second feast day is that of his translatio or ‘translation’.
The translatio is the formal movement of a saint’s relics from one place to another (usually its final resting place/cult centre), frequently accompanied with elaborate religious rites. While often a formal process, sometimes it was just plain theft, as in the case of St Nicholas of Myra, whose relics were stolen by Italian merchants in the late eleventh century and brought to Bari in southern Italy. They used the classic relic-stealing excuse that if St Nicholas had wanted to stay, then they wouldn’t have been able to take him; his passivity was acquiescence.[2] In many respects, the translatio was a one-off mirror of pilgrimage, for just as the people travelled to the holy through pilgrimage, so the translatio was the holy travelling to the people; it was the movement of the saint’s relics to somewhere they would be more accessible to the populace.
Santiago’s translatio is celebrated on the 30th of December, and as such it commemorates the movement of his body from Jerusalem (where he was martyred) to his resting place in Santiago de Compostela. However, feast days of saints have been known to change over the centuries, and it appears that the movement from the Mozarabic Rite (the liturgical rite of the Christian Church of the Iberian peninsula) to the Roman Rite, during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, saw a change in the celebration of Santiago’s feast. The Mozarabic Rite had kept 30th of December as the feast of his martyrdom, but with the adoption of the Roman Rite under French influence in the cathedral of Santiago, his feast day was displaced to 25th of July and the 30th of December became a subsidiary feast.[3]
[1] Luke 1:26–38.
[2] Jonathan Sumption, The Age of Pilgrimage: the Medieval Journey to God (1975, rev. ed Mahwah, NJ, 2003), 38–9.
[3] Catherine Saucier, ‘Voices of Thunder: Sounding Nature and the Supernatural in the Legends and Liturgy of St James the Greater and St John the Evangelist’, Religions 16:11 (2025), 1–27: 5. Available at: https://doi.org/10.3390/rel16111385.
Denis Casey 