Today, the town of Demre lies on the Mediterranean coast of Turkey, where an alluvial plain spreads out from the feet of the Taurus Mountains in the distance to the warm sapphire sea close by. Also known as Kale, Demre was once the location of the ancient city of Myra, and it’s where you can still find the Church of St. Nicholas— a two-story stone-block building with a single bell tower.

The first church built here was destroyed by an earthquake shortly after Nicholas’s death in the fourth century, but some of the existing building’s walls date back as far as the fifth century. Reconstructed after Arab raids in the seventh and eighth centuries, and again by Byzantine Emperor Constantine XI in 1043, the building’s current appearance owes much to a renovation in the mid-1800s that gave it a flat-roofed second story and bell tower.

Among the historic elements are arched windows and side-by-side, semicircular chapels within the main building. Worn frescoes show painted medallions of saints, hinting at the deep colors that once decorated the church’s interior walls. On the floor, marble mosaics create starburst and knot-like effects. It’s quiet and cool inside, an escape from the heat of the sun, remaining a fitting resting place for what is said to be the saint’s sarcophagus, a stone casket carved with acanthus leaves.

While St. Nicholas is no longer laid to rest in this church, it remains a tangible link to the man who once preached in Myra and who remains such a well-loved figure around the world.