Whatever happened to Sebastian?

Foreign visitors, seeing things with fresh eyes and holiday-sharpened curiosity, are inclined to ask difficult questions. There is plenty of material here for difficult questions, just in the capital San Sebastián itself. For example:

What's that big tower thing in the park?
The first serious footprint of the Spanish Conquistadores - a military fort built around 1450 as a refuge against attacks by the island's native population, the guanches. (This turned out to be a sensible precaution.)

Who is Cristóbal Colón, and why is there so much fuss about him here?
The adventurer we know as Christopher Columbus, for whom La Gomera was the last port of call before sailing on to discover the Americas. Mind you, he discovered them many thousands of years later than the people already living there. And local tittle-tattle claims that while staying in La Gomera he launched a torrid affair with a certain Beatriz de Bobadilla, who at that time ruled the island in a style much like Margaret Thatcher's.

We now have trained tour guides able to cope with all this stuff, but it's the off-the-cuff questions for the rest of us that cause problems. A foreign visitor who really stirred things up many years ago was my mother, who had spread her winter wings to join us for a couple of weeks. On a visit to view the effigy of San Sebastián (Saint Sebastian) in his little chapel, she spotted the one thing that's really strange about him and that nobody here ever mentions. (Actually there are two strangenesses, but I'll come to the second one later.)

We couldn't answer her question ourselves so later that day, while chatting to our neighbour Isabel in the evening sunshine, we asked her what she knew about Saint Sebastian.

'He's the santo patrón, the patron saint of the town.' Well yes, but what we really wanted to know - what my mother wanted to know - was why he'd got little arrows stuck all over him.

Isabel was a genuine dyed-in-the-wool Gomeran, born in the village and lived here all her life, but this was something she'd never thought about. Couldn't explain it. No idea.

She called up reinforcements in the shape of her husband Víctor who was sitting in the shade cutting seed potatoes into single-eyed pieces. He too could shed no light on Saint Sebastian's arrows, and didn't seem too bothered about it. But the fact is that no Spaniard, and still less a Canarian, finds it easy to admit they don't know something then just let it go. At the very least they will have an opinion, inventing one on the spot if necessary.

'Has to be something to do with South America,' Víctor decided. 'The Indians. He was a missionary in South America and got killed by natives with bows and arrows. Obviously. No?'

He looked at us for approval of this scenario. A very likely one: many Catholic missionaries came to grief one way or another in the Americas. Many others made vast fortunes one way or another in the Americas, but that's a different issue.

'Venezuela,' Víctor added, fleshing out the theory.

'They don't have Indians in Venezuela,' objected his wife. Many Gomerans still have relatives in Caracas, descendants of those who fled there during the long, terrible years of the Franco regime, and none of them have ever ended up pierced with arrows.

Víctor waved a seed potato dismissively. 'Well, wherever. Colombia. Peru. Ask the priest.'

In those days there was a weekly service in our village's chapel, an evening Mass, and my mother had already decided she would like to take part. She couldn't speak a word of Spanish but was very good at smiling, which is really all you need in order to make friends. Neither had she been to a Catholic Mass before, but the local ladies took charge of her and presumably (I wasn't there) prompted her to stand, sit or kneel as necessary. Judging by the photo I took of them all afterwards, she had a great time.

The priest was able to speak to her in English, which must have greatly impressed his little flock, but it was a big mistake because this evident rapport emboldened Isabel to ask the question: 'This lady wants to know why Saint Sebastian has got arrows stuck all over him.'

I suspect that the priest wasn't altogether sure of his ground about this. He reportedly fielded the question to the other ladies and was duly shocked when it turned out that none of them had the faintest idea. They tried a few guesses, the consensus favouring Víctor's South American theory. Sebastian had achieved his martyrdom as a missionary in the dark, dangerous rainforests of the Americas.

No. This would not do, the priest scolded. This would not do at all! Saint Sebastian was the patron saint of the island's capital yet nobody in this village knew what had happened to him? He promised to give them a sermon about it the following week. (Which - I'm being unkind! - would give him chance to refresh his memory about the details. I recall this ploy from my early incarnation as a teacher.)

By the time he gave his sermon my Mum had already flown back to the British winter, and when we asked our neighbours about it they had forgotten much of what the priest had told them. But in brief, it had nothing to do with South America. It was all the fault of the Romans and was actually a little less romantic than the arrows suggest. For those with a thirst for knowledge I have appended a summary below.

But equally interesting is the other strangeness about Saint Sebastian. We got this from a volunteer guide in a church in Vitoria-Gasteiz, in the north of Spain, which houses effigies not only of Sebastian but of many others of his saintly companions.

Here it is: San Sebastián is the only Catholic saint to be depicted near-naked, apart from Jesus Christ himself. He wears a modest loincloth, a bit of drapery, but nothing else. Some versions have him handsome and virile in Michelangelo style, while in others he appears more vulnerable and approachable. Our local version is - well, almost cuddly, and the arrows don't seem to hurt at all. Perfectly suited to the island he lives on, and what can be wrong with that?


The legend of Saint Sebastian
A slightly mysterious figure, Saint Sebastian. Nobody seems to know much about his early years except that he may have been born in southern France but was educated in Milan. He joined the Roman army in 283 AD (I've no idea how we know this so precisely) and did so well at soldiering that he was promoted to the Praetorian Guard of Emperor Diocletian.

Unfortunately, Sebastian was also a clandestine evangelist who converted many of his comrades and local dignitaries to Christianity. Emperor Diocletian was notoriously intolerant of Christians and when he found out, he sentenced Sebastian to an exemplary punishment: he was roped to a stake and used for target practice by the archers.

Astonishingly, although riddled with arrows he survived and was rescued by a fellow Christian, a woman called Irene, who nursed him back to health. So far so good, but at this point the story turns even uglier. Once recovered, Sebastian boldly but foolishly confronted Diocletian in public, haranguing him for his persecution of Christians. The emperor had him clubbed to death, this time successfully, and his body was thrown into the Roman sewers.

Another Christian woman, Lucina, recovered the corpse and he ended up decently buried in the catacombs beneath Rome, from where, some time later, the remains were distributed as relics to various Catholic sites around Europe.

Sebastian is now the patron saint of soldiers, athletes and - bizarrely - archers. He is also credited with protective powers against the plague, which derives from ancient beliefs that this disease was hurled down as arrows from the sky by angry gods. Sometimes these things get a bit muddled.