Andy Myles: Symbol born in spin is a fitting cross to bear

Published on 05/07/2012 00:00

ST Andrew is popular in many nations, not because they like Scots but because he and his saltire are talismans for political gain, says Andy Myles

Visiting Corfu last year, I noted that reproduction icons were a common sight in the Greek souvenir shops, and this year on Euboea, on closer inspection, I was slightly surprised to find St Andrew to be such a very popular saint among the copies of Byzantine and Greek Orthodox icons in the souvenir shops in Eretria – the village I was closest to. He leapt out because he’s easily recognisable with his X-shaped cross. He calls up, also, a strong sense of identification and a little bit of national pride. And there he was – two or three versions in every shop. But why?

Why was Saint Andrew such a saleable asset? It couldn’t be because there were so many Scots tourists to sell him to. There are, frankly, very few Scots who end up in Euboea. They would have constituted a very small market indeed to justify the relatively high numbers of “Saint Andrew and his saltire” icons on sale. So who were they all aimed at?

It couldn’t be that there were many tourists from Romania, Russia, Georgia, the Ukraine or any of the other loads of places with St Andrew as a patron saint, because they don’t really holiday on Euboea either. There certainly wasn’t any evidence I could see of many visitors from the saltire-obsessed bits of the southern states in the US either. And then I remembered. Duh! Andrew is also the patron saint of Greece – where he is reputed to have proselytized, founded bishoprics (including, rather tellingly, in Byzantium), and, indeed, was martyred there.

Eretria itself is sort of the “holiday resort of choice” for fairly well-off, professional, academic, managerial Athenians (that’s where the beach house for the summer is likely to be). I had been told it was a popular holiday spot for Athens, only an hour and a half away, and, sure enough, at a hotel beach bar that I stopped in one day for a beer on my hike along the beach to the village, all of the early season tourists were locals. So the icons are very probably good sellers with the Greeks themselves. Mystery solved, so it seemed.

Working this out also helped solve a second, similar mystery. Funnily enough, in at No 2 (possibly even No 1 if the truth be told) in this week’s chart of the Byzantine reproduction icons that jumped out at me from among the usual suspects (Jesus, Mother and Child, writers of the four gospels, Christ and the 12 disciples), was St George killing the dragon. This wasn’t on sale, I suspected, because of the barely discernible number of English tourists either. The only UK tourists I came across at all on the island were a couple of amateur classicists and a dozen or so visitors in a nearby hotel on a Saga holiday. But, of course, Saint George was an Anatolian Greek and killing dragons is soooooo macho – and he too continues to be a hit in the modern Greek world.

Anyway, with my childhood interest in and curiosity about our patron saint re-ignited, I’ve done a bit of Googling, and it turns out that our national flag is, shall we say, a bit dodgy really. Saint Andrew’s distinctive X-shaped cross doesn’t appear in any religious imagery before the middle ages. Earlier images all have an ordinary cross, and the point being made was to associate strongly the “First Called Apostle” with crosses and crucifixion, full stop. But intriguingly, church politics played a part in the emergence of the familiar X-shaped image.

Andrew was quite popular as a patron if you wanted to mark out your autonomy from the centre of the faith. He was Jesus’ first apostle, but he always got overshadowed by his brother, Saint Peter, in the seniority stakes. But, in terms of apostolic succession, he was still a big player in the “closeness to the Messiah” business. If your church had a strong connection to him, it undoubtedly provided a bit of kudos. Diplomatically worded messages could tell the Pope or the patriarch that you were inspired by your patron who was, of course, the first follower of Christ, and indeed such a clear message is to be found in the text of the Declaration of Arbroath. The Russians and Georgians used the argument for similar authoritative point scoring inside the politics of the Orthodox Church.

In addition, Saint Andrew is often shown in identifiably monastic garb. The point of this imagery was to underline the idea that the patrimony of big brother Saint Peter was not supposed to be utterly dominant in the Church and that there were other centres of power and authority, lesser though they may be.

It appears, therefore, that the Saltire came into being as a result of some medieval equivalent of ecclesiastical “spin” doctoring. It is quite possible that the image needed a bit of strengthening – an added visual edge – and an apocryphal story was conveniently “remembered”. After all, if St Peter had asked to be martyred upside down to mark his not being fit to be killed the same way as Jesus, it was rather convenient that Saint Andrew asked for a different shape of cross for the same reason. And thus our distinctive national flag emerged.

This sense of mildly aggrieved assertion, with a slight edge of jiggery-pokery, seems to be a very fitting origin for this potent national symbol. Somehow it makes sense that the saltire, so often manipulated today for political gain, was, in all probability, invented for precisely that purpose.