Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast and it's a very special one for people who like me wish it were Christmas every day.

I'm at a church, the church of St Nicholas, but not just any old church of St Nicholas, the original Church of St Nicholas.

Over to the west is a huge wall of mountains.

I'm in southern Turkey, roughly halfway between the holiday airports of Dalaman and Antalya.

The town is called Demra, but in the fourth century it was known as Myra and the bishop was deeply revered.

His name was Nicholas.

He became a saint and within a couple of centuries his shrine, his relics, his remains became a place of pilgrimage.

And I'm looking at them now, a beautiful marble casket, wonderfully engraved and showing Nicholas

sleeping in some very flowing robes.

But, well, it's very clearly empty and that's because the relics were taken away

by Italian sailors during the Crusades in the 11th century, stepping into the body of the church

now and, well, by the 12th century, this had been completely submerged, a river changed course,

and it brought with it lots of alluvial mud which simply filled up the church.

It wasn't until the late 20th century that archaeologists decided to excavate and the result is just exquisite. There's a beautiful dome actually put on

quite recently I would judge, but the columns, the mosaics, even some frescoes remain and tell biblical stories.

What's particularly interesting, perhaps, if you come this far to celebrate the man who became

St Nicholas is that, well, he is a real celebrity.

There's quite an austere bronze statue of him looking very bishop-like.

But next to it, there's a lovely sculpture put up in 1998, showing Santa Claus with lots of adoring children around him and he's even got a sack of presents.

And this is dedicated to the hope of world peace one day, which of course would be the greatest

of gifts. Oh, I've just come into a side chapel which I hadn't seen before and goodness the marble mosaics are glorious.

I can hear some music. I'm just going to try and track that down because it may actually be some Christmas

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