Singing to St. Nicholas at Sea: Listening to the Medieval and Modern Voices of Sailors

Abstract

This article explores the voices of sailors across time, focusing on how song and prayer animate the nautical cult of St. Nicholas of Myra from the Middle Ages to the present. Drawing on hagiography, poetry, and music, it examines how medieval sources portray sailors’ cries to St. Nicholas during storms at sea, often depicting univocal, affective pleas that provoke divine response. These representations—especially in Latin sequences such as Congaudentes exultemus—highlight the cultural weight of the literal and metaphorical voice within miracle narratives. The article then bridges medieval and modern devotional soundscapes through nineteenth- and twentieth-century ethnographic collections from Apulia, Italy, particularly through the work of folklorists Saverio La Sorsa and Alfredo Giovine. Their records of Barese sailors’ songs and prayers to St. Nicholas—still sung today—provide embodied counterpoints to the mediated voices of medieval texts. Through this transhistorical lens, I argue that voice operates as connective tissue in the devotional lives of seafarers: an expression of fear, faith, and communal identity. By amplifying sailors’ voices in text, song, and performance, both medieval and modern traditions construct a vivid aural archive that affirms the enduring relationship between St. Nicholas and those who navigate the dangers of the sea.

•                          “O blessed Nicholas,
•                          draw us to the harbor of the sea
•                          from the distress of death.”
—Congaudentes exultemus, ca. 1087–92

Oceans are terrifying. Anyone who has been at sea understands its inherent dangers and sailors, most of all, know the stakes of traveling through deep waters for days, weeks, or months.1 Unsurprisingly, regardless of class affiliation or profession, sailors prove superstitious and devout in the face of oceanic threats, enacting rituals and casting prayers to holy figures including the Virgin Mary and Sts. Nicholas, Brendan, Christopher, Clement, Giles, Elmo, and others.2 For medieval Europe in particular, sources attest to the weighty devotional practices of sailors, exposing traces of fearful voices raised in prayer embedded in travel accounts, sermons, letters, biographies, poetry, song, and hagiographical narratives.3 These varied sources describe both formal and informal ways sailors called upon the Virgin and the saints—such as the example in the epigraph to this article, drawn from an eleventh-century Latin sequence for St. Nicholas.4 Sailors, whether laypeople, aristocrats, soldiers, pilgrims, clerics, or monks, learned from one another and from written sources; they sang and prayed for safety, and sometimes provoked a divine response.

I explore the voices of sailors, and at times saints, through the intertwined lenses of hagiography and song, exposing the currency of the voice within maritime devotional practices in medieval and modern Europe. I situate this exploration within the textual and musical hagiography produced for the cult of St. Nicholas of Myra, a fourth-century bishop-saint whose popularity among sailors is unmatched aside from the ubiquitous star of the sea, the Virgin Mary. A wealth of material surrounds St. Nicholas’s transhistorical cult that foregrounds sailors’ voices, transmitting their cries and prayers through hagiographical narrative, poetry, and song. This includes medieval song, especially chant, as well as contemporary folksongs in St. Nicholas’s name, the latter evidence of the distinctive musical longevity of his cult.5 I argue that the voice was a privileged mode of communication with the saint, a reality understood by sailors as well as those who inscribed their voices into textual, visual, and musical archives. The emphasis on voice stems in part from its immediacy and affective force: in medieval texts, sailors’ cries are cast as urgent and fearful, while in contemporary contexts the nuances shift toward expressions of religious devotion, civic pride, and communal belonging. Rather than a singular or distinctive voice, St. Nicholas’s medieval and modern archives of song also consistently elevate a collective and univocal voice, a shared cry through which sailors of every class and rank joined together to call upon the saint.6

Investigating how voice operates transhistorically within St. Nicholas’s musical hagiography underscores the tension of the voice as text—mediated and archived—and the voice as performance, with its implications of presence, agency, and embodiment (Zumthor [1983] 1990). This tension does not map neatly onto the chronological poles of medieval and modern but instead reveals how the voice within this expansive devotional tradition articulates something shared between past and present. For instance, in the medieval context, the literary and musical representation of the sailors’ unified voice in narrative and song draws upon “the medieval framing of voice as foundational for thinking about what it means to be human” (Golden and Kong 2021, p. 2). Medieval representations of the sailors’ voice attempt to tap into the human experience central to hagiography, potentially preserving traces of real voices and bodies that performers could temporarily embody.7 In the modern ethnographic context, the voice is more directly embodied, tied to the living bodies of nineteenth- and twentieth-century interlocutors and sustained through oral transmission. The songs I focus on come from Apulia, Italy, where Nicholas’s relics have rested in Bari’s Basilica di San Nicola since the late eleventh century, Collected by folklorists and ethnographers and still performed by Barese singers today, these canti underscore how sailors’ voices remain central to Nicholas’s patronage of mariners, albeit localized to a city that has long claimed him as its patron saint.

While text equally mediates the recording of medieval and modern songs, in both historical moments an implicit understanding persists of physical presence as a prerequisite for the voice and vocal production. Just as important, while voice is often linked to individual subjectivity, in the context of Nicholas’s hagiography it stands in for a plurality, allowing identities of sailing communities to coalesce in singular vocal expressions rhetorically and in performance. I claim that the collective, human, and emotive voice acts as connective tissue in a transhistorical web linking hagiographical, poetic, musical, ethnographic, and corporeal modes of venerating St. Nicholas, whether accessed through texts created by medieval composers and poets or collected by modern ethnographers. Importantly, I do not seek to collapse the temporal distance of sailors’ voices between medieval and modern nor posit historical links between two distinct repertoires. Rather, my aim is to foreground how, in medieval hagiography and modern ethnography, continuities emerge in devotional practices centered on the concept and reality of the sailor’s voice and its outward expression, even as each repertoire remains bound to its respective historical moment.8

1. “Nicholas Is Tearfully Implored to Hear”: Writing the Voices of Sailors in the Middle Ages

A miracle of sailors, the Praxis de nautis, circulates in the oldest layers of St. Nicholas’s Greek hagiography, growing in popularity in the West through John the Deacon’s ninth-century Latin vita of the saint.9 Although not the only miracle enacted by St. Nicholas at sea, it is one of the most impactful in his hagiographical tradition, inspiring countless representations across media (see Figure 1). John the Deacon’s Latin rendering follows the contours of the Greek closely, with a significant difference. The ninth-century Greek version, attributed to Michael the Archimandrite, describes the sailors calling out for St. Nicholas with the saint alone assigned direct speech. By contrast, John the Deacon describes the sailors invoking St. Nicholas at length:10

Now one day, when some sailors were in danger from a sudden storm at sea, to the point that everything threatened an immediate death for them, immediately, with their limbs weakened by the cold, they began to cry out: “O Nicholas, servant of God, if what we have heard about you is true, let us now experience it, as we are put to the utmost danger, so that, having been rescued from the raging waves of the sea, we may give thanks to God and for our deliverance by you.” O wonderful thing! To those offering up such things, there appeared something in the shape of a man, saying to them, “Well, you have called me. Behold! Here I am.” And he began to help them with the ropes and halyards and the other equipment of the ship. And not long after, all the crashing of the waves abated, and the whole storm ceased. Then the overjoyed sailors, ploughing the tranquil seas, arrived as quickly as possible at the desired port.11

The miracle narrative continues as the sailors seek St. Nicholas at his church and offer their thanks, at which point the saint modestly redirects it to God.12 The story is strikingly free of details; the sailors are unnamed, without origins or travel motivations. Yet it dwells on St. Nicholas’s manual assistance in the ship’s operations, confirming his intervention and presence, as well as the physical presence of the fearful sailors, through the spoken declaration “ecce adsum” (“here I am”).13

Voice is fundamental to the miracle: first, the sailors’ collective one, and then St. Nicholas’s singular one in answer. Medieval poets and composers exploit this overt vocality by enthusiastically translating the aural exchange into song and singing. Poetic and musical interest in the affective qualities of the sounding voice parallels the heightened emotional quality expressed in the Latin miracle text and cued by the dangerous situation. A sermon attributed variously to Peter Damian and Nicholas of Clairvaux for the Feast of St. Nicholas expresses this intensity by dramatically reiterating the stormy vocal climax, each time differently inflecting the emotive voice: “If a raging storm and the cruelty of the sea threaten death to sailors, St. Nicholas is tearfully implored to hear; he is humbly invoked to come; he is mercifully cried out to for deliverance.”14 Emotional descriptors are common across textual and musical sources for the sailors’ miracle, in each case conveying a sense of the voice in an extreme emotional state. The sermon especially illustrates how “[e]xtreme emotions lead characters to vocalize in extreme ways” (Mason 2024, pp. 86, 104), positioning the emotionally laden utterances of the sailors on a spectrum of vocal production that highlights the expressive and physically embodied voice above all.15

Even brief citations in song emphasize the sailors’ fear-driven vocal invocation of St. Nicholas, homing in on this moment as the most significant in the miraculous episode and highly suited to the medium.16 A chant from his proper Office, the responsory Quadam die tempestate saevissima (CAO 7453), for instance, focuses on the dialogue between sailors and St. Nicholas in retelling the miracle:

Quadam die tempestate saevissima quassati nautae coeperunt sanctum vocare Nicolaum et statim cessavit tempestas. V. Mox illis clamantibus apparuit quidam dicens eis ecce adsum quid vocastis me.

One day, sailors battered by a very fierce storm began to call upon St. Nicholas and immediately the storm ceased. V. Soon, as they were crying out, a certain figure appeared to them, saying: “Behold, I am here; why did you call me?”

The responsory is modeled on John the Deacon’s account, just as is an Office lection for St. Nicholas’s feast (Jones 1963, pp. 28–29). Although sailors overtly vocalize (“vocare” and “clamantibus,” to which Nicholas asks why they call, “vocastis”), they lack direct speech. Yet, the use of “clamantibus” following “vocare” intensifies their cries, suggesting a degree of urgency and distress in their supplication.

In the hymn Festum colentes annuum, only the sailors cry out, while St. Nicholas remains silent, placing the burden of speech entirely on their collective pleas. The fifth strophe summarizes the miracle’s longer exposition of the sailors’ prayer, retaining the qualification of their voices and distressed state while employing direct speech.

5. Nautis quassatis graviter Clamantibus suppliciter: O Nicolae inclite, Suffragium attribue.	5. To sailors gravely distressed, crying out in supplication: “O glorious Nicholas, grant us your aid!”
6. Vir tantum splendidissimus, Nicolao simillimus Apparet super aequora Referentibus talia.17	6. A most splendid man, very much like Nicholas, appears above the waters to those recounting such things.

In this example, “clamantibus” is qualified by “suppliciter” to indicate the nature of the cries and, as in John the Deacon’s rendering and all subsequent musical citations, the sailors are expressed themselves through the first person plural—“grant us your aid”—to signify their shared distress.

The vocal exchange between saint and sailors accrues additional nuance through poetic framing and a musical setting in a widely copied and sung work, the eleventh-century sequence Congaudentes exultemus.18 In the sequence, the dialogue between the sailors and St. Nicholas is melodically and poetically dramatized, underscoring the hagiographical weight of the voice within the miracle tradition and foregrounding its emotional and collective identity. Placing the nautical scene in a poetic and musical setting offers advantages over text-only expression by facilitating the use of rhetorical devices, melodic style and register, and performance to spotlight the vocal interaction.

Proceeding in twelve couplets of rhyming, accentual poetry, the sequence narrates St. Nicholas’s vita and several popular miracles, bracketed by praise for his feast day.19 Most episodes span a single line or couplet; the miracle of the sailors, however, occupies three full couplets (nos. 6–8), with one further alluding to the same themes (no. 10). This last couplet executes a rhetorical maneuver that extends the identity of the sailors to all humanity in the metaphorical shipwreck of life where St. Nicholas is the port of safety (Curtius [1953] 2013, pp. 128–30; Constable 2007, pp. 15–17; Oliver 2019, pp. 4–9; Cressy 2022, pp. 36–40).20 The metaphor belongs to a long tradition in which the ship stands for the church or society, the passengers for humanity, and the storm for sin and vice. The sailors, in turn, give voice to Christians across social class and vocation.

6a. Quidam naute navigantes Et contra fluctuum Sevitiam luctantes Navi pene dissoluta.	6a. Certain sailors, sailing and struggling against the fury of the waves, with the ship almost destroyed,
6b. Iam de vita desperantes In tanto positi Periculo clamantes Voce dicunt omnes una.	6b. already despairing of life, placed in such great danger, crying out, with one voice all say:
7a. O beate Nicholae Nos ad maris portum trahe De mortis angustia.	7a. “O blessed Nicholas, draw us to the harbor of the sea from the distress of death.
7b. Trahe nos ad portum maris Tu qui tot auxiliaris Pietatis gratia.	7b. Draw us to the harbor of the sea, you who help so many by the grace of your mercy.”
8a. Dum clamarent nec incassum Ecce quidam dicens Adsum Ad vestra presidia.	8a. While they cried out, and not in vain, behold, someone saying, “I am here for your protection.”
8b. Statim aura datur grata Et tempestas fit sedata Quievere maria.	8b. At once, a pleasant breeze is given, and the storm is calmed, the seas have become still.
…	…
10a. Nos qui sumus in hoc mundo Vitiorum in profundo Iam passi naufragia	10a. We who are in this world, in the depths of vices, having already suffered shipwreck,
10b. Gloriose Nicholae Ad salutis portum trahe Ubi pax et gloria.21	10b. Glorious Nicholas, guide us to the port of salvation, where there is peace and glory.

This explicit metaphorizing supports the poetic prolongation; by fully conveying the miracle with all its nautical details, the poet more readily transfers the voice providing the narrative key to the world at large.22

The poet creates tension within the miracle narrative first by describing the conditions at sea, the fury of the waves, the near destruction of the ship; the sailors in despair then cry out with one voice: “voce dicunt omnes una.” What they sing is a prayer to St. Nicholas to lead them to a safe harbor, which gains a vocal and environmental response as he assures them of his presence and calms the sea and winds. The Latin formulation of a unified voice is intentional and meaningful. Singing quasi una voce, as if with one voice, is integral to church doctrine and undergirds how chant and the performance of sacred texts more generally was understood by theologians as expressing the voice of the Church (Quasten [1973] 1983, pp. 66–72; Peraino 2006, pp. 41–43 and note 131; Crocker 2000, pp. 24–25; Caldwell 2022, pp. 107–09). Explicitly univocal song enables the church to divert the individual utterances of a community, whether of sailors or congregants, into a shared expressive voice, juxtaposed by St. Nicholas’s appropriately individualized voice. Following the cues of the textual tradition, the poem establishes a call-and-response that affirms the sailors’ belonging to the single voice of Christendom as well as the bodily presence of saint and sailors.

The melodic treatment further highlights the collective voice of the sailors and their direct speech. The poetic transition to their cries provokes a registral shift, with the vocal outburst set to a higher ambitus compared with the remainder of the sequence (see Example 1).23

Example 1. I-BAsn 2 (87), fols. 347r-348r, Congaudentes exultemus, couplets 6–8 (Bari, thirteenth century).

Example 1. I-BAsn 2 (87), fols. 347r-348r, Congaudentes exultemus, couplets 6–8 (Bari, thirteenth century).

Couplet 6 traverses over an octave from C-d, cadencing on D. A leap up to a begins couplet 7 which, while only a pitch higher than couplet 6 to e, decisively stays in a higher register throughout from G-e. Consequently, although the upper limit is similar, the entirety of couplet 7 projects a higher register and sets the direct speech apart.24 Moreover, the repeated melody ensures the sailors’ voices sing the same higher-pitched music each time.25 Couplet 8 brings the range down to E-c, representing a midrange that might signify the calming of the storm initiated by St. Nicholas’s arrival.26 Notably, St. Nicholas’s voice is indistinguishable from the surrounding texture of couplet 8 in terms of range and style, affirming the hierarchy established in the broader tradition in which it is the sailors’ unified and distressed voice that deserves attention, poetic and musical.

The investment in sailors’ voice over St. Nicholas’s is further confirmed through the intersection of iconography and chant. In a fifteenth-century copy of Jean de Vignay’s French translation of Vincent of Beauvais’s Speculum historiale (F-Pnm Fr. 51) containing St. Nicholas’s life and miracles, a striking image illustrates his nautical miracles (see Figure 2).27 The illustration depicts the miracle of the oil, the grain, and the sailors caught in a storm. The last appears at the front of the image and includes a banderole streaming from the mouths of sailors reading: “O beate Nicholae nos ad maris portum trahe.” By quoting this line from Congaudentes exultemus, the speech scroll places the sailors’ plea directly in their mouths, explicitly giving voice to the image (Camille 1985; Flett 1991; Noel 1996; Syme 2007; Schmidt 2011; Stanbury 2023). The artist encourages viewers of the manuscript to audiate or even physically experience the univocal plea through their own familiarity with the chant and its elevated melody at the climactic moment in the sailors’ narrative.

Congaudentes exultemus transforms the vocality integral to St. Nicholas’s nautical miracle into song and upholds the import of a voice within the miraculous transaction that is both collective and driven by emotions of fear, distress, and supplication. In so doing, song facilitates the embodiment and expression of the sailors and their univocality by performers, even if temporarily. The prolongation of the miracle in the sequence further underscores the metaphor of the sailors as representing humanity, the voice marking their humanness and indexing the literal voices of sailors that spread St. Nicholas’s cult far and wide. While St. Nicholas plays his usual salvatory role, the sailors’ cries hold the rhetorical and expressive power in this hagiographical tradition. Finally, the narrative reveals something of the medieval perception of seafarers raising their voices in prayer. Although works such as Congaudentes exultemus, or miracle narratives more broadly, do not explicitly describe lived practices, they offer a tantalizing glimpse into the singing and praying of the anonymous men who lived, worked, and prayed on thousands of ships in the medieval world (Fröjmark 1994).

2. Voices Across Time: Singing to St. Nicholas in Modern Apulia

Traces of sailors’ voices and songs emerge after the Middle Ages in travel accounts, ships’ logs, collections of songs and shanties, and recorded rituals, all of which continue into the twenty-first century, especially in coastal towns.28 In contrast to the medieval hagiographical texts and songs narrating the cries of sailors from a literary distance, later textual sources claim an intimacy with the vocal production of sailors—the work of folklorists and ethnographers, in particular, affords a degree of access (albeit always mediated) to prayers and melodies circulating aurally. Paralleling broader interest in collecting folksongs and shanties, scholars in the late nineteenth century began collecting and transcribing poems, prayers, and songs from individuals living in coastal regions and port towns, revealing vocal practices within St. Nicholas’s cult that echo medieval hagiographical representations.29 Even accounting for the fraught lens of collection and preservation characterizing folksong revivals, contemporary sailors’ songs enable contact with the animated and embodied voices of sailors venerating a patron saint. While a comparative reading of sailors’ voices may let us overhear, however imperfectly, what those represented in medieval sources might have sung, more crucial is the way medieval and modern songs invoke the collective, expressive voice seeking St. Nicholas’s aid, with the meaning for singers and listeners differing between past and present iterations.

A distinct concentration of activity surrounding sailors and their musical practices emerges along the southeastern coast of Italy, largely due to the efforts of two Apulian scholars well-known for their investment in the folk culture of the region: Saverio La Sorsa (ca. 1877–1970) and Alfredo Giovine (1907–1995).30 Importantly for St. Nicholas’s cult, Bari is the location of his primary relics thanks to Norman-Barese sailors in 1087 who transported his bones from East to West and further solidified his cult in Europe (Nitti di Vito 1902a; Jones 1978, pp. 172–202; Corsi 1987; Chibnall 1979; Bellomo 2009). So integral are the sailors to St. Nicholas’s cult in and around Bari that their names are recorded in a document currently on display at the Museo Nicolaiano next to the Basilica di San Nicola (see Figure 3).31

Folklorists, linguists, and scholars from the region have been repeatedly drawn to the triangulation of saint, sailors, and song in Apulia, most especially La Sorsa and Giovine. Each separately recorded and transcribed dozens of sailors’ songs and prayers in the Barese dialect, many to St. Nicholas, in the early- to mid-twentieth century32—even when faced with apparently reluctant interlocutors.33 La Sorsa and Giovine produced articles and books recording what later scholars term “intangible heritage” for the Apulian region, including songs and poems dictated to him by Barese mariners and their families—Giovine specifies his mother, a housewife, and anonymous collaborators (Giovine 1963, p. 12). While La Sorsa collects songs and labels them as such, he never addresses the role of melody; Giovine, however, includes several melodic transcriptions in his 1963 volume, Canti popolari religiosi baresi.34

For both scholars, the collected songs reflect practices of earlier times. La Sorsa, for instance, draws comparisons with medieval devotional Italian songs, or laude: “These songs bear the character of medieval sacred laude and are undoubtedly creations of past centuries.”35 La Sorsa’s colorful descriptions exploit medievalisms familiar from turn-of-the-century scholarship—the songs are “simple, rough, and unadorned, yet sincere and expressive, springing from the depths of the people’s hearts.”36 Framed as products of oral tradition passed across generations, La Sorsa rhetorically gestures to the at-risk character of the songs, positioning his collecting activity as a way to stave off further fragmentation, while simultaneously bemoaning the reluctance of his interlocutors to share their voices for posterity (La Sorsa 1934, pp. 191–92). Giovine echoes many of La Sorsa’s sentiments, signaling both the authenticity and antiquity of the collected songs (Giovine 1963, pp. 12–13).

For us, La Sorsa’s most important efforts rest on an article detailing the “religious songs of Apulian mariners,” the majority dedicated to St. Nicholas and the Virgin Mary and, in La Sorsa’s words, deriving from the “religious sentiment that animates our good fishermen and brave sailors.”37 La Sorsa does not address directly the melodic content of these works, although he invariably refers to them as canti, while Giovine transcribes several in his pivotal 1963 collection (La Sorsa 1934).38 Two items shared between their collections stand out for different reasons. The first, Sanda Nicola, stands out due to its formal and poetic similarities to medieval song; and the second, Sanda Necòle va pe màre, stands out for its invocation of St. Nicholas through nautical metaphors and a relationship to civic and devotional rituals for the May 9 Feast of the Translation. Each song conveys, moreover, the unified voices of the maritime community of Bari, their direct speech implicitly and explicitly representing singers and sailors across generations, including those involved in the 1087 Translation of relics. In Sanda Nicola and Sanda Necòle va pe màre, continuities emerge not only in the emphasis on the sailors’ miracle and St. Nicholas’s patronage, but also between medieval depictions of sailors’ shared voice raised in prayer and the contemporary and embodied tradition of sailors and their families singing to the saint for protection.

La Sorsa describes the first, Sanda Nicola, as a “rough prayer, yet full of feeling and faith,” likely designating it a prayer in reference to its litany-like catalog of miracles:39

Sanda Nicola, tande sì granne, Ca rescùscete la Sanda Manne, Pe’ l’opre bbone ca sèmbe facieste, Cierche la grazie pe mè a Gése Criste. J’obbre bbone acchemenzaste, Tré Princepe libéraste, Tré donzèlle maretaste, ‘Na vidue chenzelaste, Tré fangiulle resuscetaste, Le tempeste sèmbre calmaste, Le marenare ajetaste, E tu stasère, Sanda Nicole, Nge à da fa la grazzie, E nge à da dà ‘na bbòna nove.40

Saint Nicholas, you’re so great, That you revive the Holy Manna for the good deeds you always did, ask grace for me from Jesus Christ. The good works you began, three princes you freed, three young women you married, a widow you comforted/cheered up, three children you resurrected, you always calmed the storms, helped the sailors, and tonight, Saint Nicholas, you must grant us your grace, and give us good news.

Giovine, by contrast, writes that “there is nothing borrowed from formal church hymns or sacred music” in these songs; for him they are “firsthand folk songs, sincere and authentic.”41 Interestingly, however, its litany-like structure mirrors hymns, sequences, and other devotional songs in which St. Nicholas’s varied miracles are recited in quick succession, such as in the medieval prosa Sospitati dedit egros (Hofmann-Brandt 1971–1973, pp. 126–28; Scotti 2006, pp. 100–1; Boudeau 2013, vol. 1, pp. 258–61).

Sospitati dedit egros olei perfusio. Nicholaus naufragantum affuit presidio. Revelavit a defunctis defunctum in bivio. Baptizatur auri viso Judeus indicio. Vas in mari mersum patri reditur cum filio. O quam probat sanctum Dei farris augmentatio. Ergo laudes42 Nicholao concinat hec contio. Nam qui corde poscit illum pro pusalto vitio Sospes regreditur.43

The flowing oil restores the sick to health. Nicholas offered protection for those shipwrecked. He raised a man from the dead at a crossroad. A Jew is baptized upon seeing the sign of the gold. A vessel sunk into the sea is returned to a father along with his son. O, how the increase of grain manifests the saint of God. Therefore, let this assembly sing praises to Nicholas, For he who, his sins repelled, asks him with his heart, Returns to health.

The shared litany of miracles includes, respectively, St. Nicholas’s aid at sea as he guides sailors and calms storms (Sanda Nicola) or protects against shipwreck and drowning (Sospitati dedit egros). Deliberately or not, Sanda Nicola participates in poetic strategies long employed in the construction of hagiographical song, and especially in works for St. Nicholas whose extensive catalog of miracles provides ample material.44

Leaving aside admittedly compelling formal similarities, noteworthy is how La Sorsa and Giovine highlight the song’s character—it is “sincere and authentic,” and “full of feeling and faith.” In other words, they describe the perceived quality of the voices of those who dictated Sanda Nicola to them. As heard by these scholars, the performances were full of devotional affect—not exactly the fearful, frantic voices depicted in medieval examples, but emotive voices nonetheless. La Sorsa in particular observes that the sailor “in moments of danger or storm…turns his thoughts to the Eternal and to the protecting Saints, murmurs words of faith and devotion, and entrusts himself to their mercy,”45 identifying the motivation for some of the vocal works he records, including Sanda Nicola. At the same time, both La Sorsa and Giovine merge the identities of their interlocutors. They write as if speaking of Barese sailors and their families jointly, even though their evidence derives from specific individuals who agreed to sing for them. This ethnographic move produces the impression of a collective voice: the few singers who performed for the scholars ventriloquize the entire maritime community, just as the sailors in medieval hagiography serve as stand ins for all Christians.

Although this totalizing gesture is partly an imposition of the ethnographic process, the notion of a unified seafaring voice is reinforced by the songs themselves. The Barese repertoire, including Sanda Nicola, not only signals its folkloric identity and the community’s reliance on oral transmission, but also illustrates how, in devotional dialogues with St. Nicholas, sailors perpetually communicate with a united voice. The poetic structure of Sanda Nicola reaffirms this with its shift from the first person singular in the fourth line (“ask grace for me from Jesus Christ”) to the plural in the final two lines (“you must grant us your grace, | and give us good news”). This shift notably occurs with the introduction of sailors in the tenth line and the direct address to St. Nicholas (“you always calmed the storms, | helped the sailors”), which occupies two lines instead of the single line dedicated to each of the previous five miracles. The pivot to, and emphasis on, the nautical miracle triggers the use of the plural “us” (“nge”), since the call to sailors reflects the local community, and no longer only the previously singular singer. Evidence from both the song itself and its ethnographic framing positions Sanda Nicola as a vocal expression binding the performer to the wider maritime community and to a long history of devotion to St. Nicholas in Bari stretching back to the Middle Ages. While no claim can be made for the song’s medieval origins—and its precise antiquity is beside the point—what matters is how the song, its singers, and its collectors articulate and embody the sailors’ transhistorical voice, reaffirming its role within the saint’s cult, the sailors’ miracle, and the medium of song.

Sanda Necòle va pe màre differently develops the hagiographical terrain of sailors and song, associating them more specifically with Bari and its historical ties to St. Nicholas as patron saint of mariners. The entire poem concerns the sea, describing the saint going to sea “dressed as a sailor” in a manner that recalls John the Deacon’s description of the saint working with the rigging of the ship. The context is the Translation of St. Nicholas’s relics from Myra to Bari by sailors, the celebration of which provides the performance setting for Sanda Necòle va pe màre historically and into the twenty-first century; May 9 remains a major civic holiday in Bari (La Sorsa 1934, p. 193; Giovine 1963, p. 15). By contrast to Sanda Nicola, which suggests sailors in an intimate and prayerful dialogue with St. Nicholas, Sanda Necòle va pe màre turns outward. If the former gathers the voices of individual singers into a collective seafaring plea for protection, the latter embeds its call within the text itself, summoning the maritime community to join in, achieved in part through grammar and the presence of a refrain. While the two songs chart complementary dimensions of the same hagiographical and vocal terrain, Sanda Necòle va pe màre amplifies the voice central to the nautical miracle and transforms St. Nicholas’s patronage of sailors into a civic chorus, vocally rallying sailors, pilgrims, and the city of Bari.

Sanda Necòle va pe màre survives in several recorded versions, evidence of its vibrant aural transmission over decades if not centuries; the four-stanza version published by La Sorsa in 1934 reads as follows:

Allègre, marenare, Sanda Necole va pe mmare, Allègre, pellegrine, Sanda Necole av’a menì.   Sanda Necole meracheluse, Japre la porte a ci le tène achiuse, E li japre a la vergenèlle, Sanda Necole iè tanda bbèlle.   Sanda Necole va pe mmare, Va vestute da marenare, Gesù Criste a lu temone, Tutte l’àngeue ‘m brecessione.   Alle vinde d’abbrile Sanda Necole partì da Mire, Allègre, marenare, Sanda Necole mo’ vène pe mmare. (La Sorsa 1934, p. 193)

Quickly, sailors, St. Nicholas sails the sea, quickly, pilgrims, St. Nicholas will come.   St. Nicholas, miraculous, Opens the doors that are closed, And opens them to the little Virgin, St. Nicholas, so beautiful.   St. Nicholas goes to sea, Dressed as a sailor, Jesus Christ at the helm, All the angels in procession.   On the 20th of April, St. Nicholas departed from Myra, quickly, sailors, St. Nicholas now comes by sea.

The song continues to be sung in different versions across southeastern Italy, labeled by the Basilica Pontificia San Nicola in Bari in 2020 as “perhaps the most popular Barese song in honor of St. Nicholas.”46 Giovine (1963, 1968) records and edits two slightly different renditions, one in his Canti popolari religiosi baresi and another in his slightly later collection of local lullabies, Ninna Nanne de Sanda Nicole.

Giovine (1963), Canti popolari religiosi baresi
Sanda Necòle va pe màre, va vestùte a marenàre, e ca vole la mendagnòle, Sanda Necòle [iè] tutte d’ore.   Allègre pellegrine,   Sanda Necòle av’a partì.   Allègre marenàre,   Sanda Necòle va pe màre.   Sanda Necòle iè d’argìinde: va pe màre a ammène u vìinde; va pe tèrre chìine de sòle, Sanda Necòle iè tutte d’ore.   Allègre pellegrine…   E stasère u-am’annùsce, (chi) li torce a (chi) li lusce, e miràdele quànd’è bèlle, e ca iè Sanda Necòle.   Allègre pellegrine…	St. Nicholas sails the sea, he is dressed as a sailor, he favors the pilgrims from the mountains, St. Nicholas, all of gold.   Quickly, oh pilgrims,   St. Nicholas will depart.   Quickly, oh sailors,   St. Nicholas sails the sea.   St. Nicholas is of silver: he is on the sea and the wind blows; he is on the land, full of sunlight, St. Nicholas is all of gold.   Quickly, oh pilgrims…   And tonight, we shall carry him in procession, with torches and lights, and behold how beautiful he is, our St. Nicholas.   Quickly, oh pilgrims…
Giovine (1968), Ninna Nanne de Sanda Nicole
Sanda Necòle va pe mmare, va vestùte a marenàre: nu ca sime vergenèdde, lu velìme acchembaggnà.   Allègre pellegrine…   Sanda Necòle va pe m mare, la Madonna iìnd’a la nache, Gesù Criste a lu temòne, tutte l’angiue a marenare.   Allègre, pellegrìne…   Sanda Necòle iè d’argiìnde, va pe mmare e ammen’u vìinde, e u-ammène a le mendaggnòle: Sanda Necòle iè ttutte d’ore.   Allègre, pellegrìne…   A li 20 d’Abbrìle Sanda Necòle partì da Mire: Allègre, marenàre, Sanda Necòle vène pe mmare.   Allègre, pellegrine…   E stasèra u-am’annusce che le torce e che le lusce. E meràdue quand’è bbèdde, e ca iè Sanda Necòle!47	St. Nicholas sails the sea, he is dressed as a sailor, we the young virgins want to follow him [in procession].   Quickly, oh pilgrims…   St. Nicholas sails the sea, the Virgin in the cradle Jesus Christ at the helm, all the angels (dressed) as sailors   Quickly, oh pilgrims…   St. Nicholas is of silver, he sails the sea and the wind blows and he blows it on the mountain pilgrims; St. Nicholas is all of silver.   Quickly, oh pilgrims…   On the 20th of April St. Nicholas left Myra: Quickly, sailors, St. Nicholas comes by sea.   Quickly, oh pilgrims…   And tonight, we shall carry him [in procession,] with torches and lights, and behold how beautiful he is, our St. Nicholas.

The key difference between La Sorsa’s and Giovine’s versions lies in form: Giovine’s includes an explicit refrain, suggesting that the similar opening stanza of La Sorsa’s may have also functioned as a recurring chorus. This hypothesis would resolve an issue with the incipit, which appears as Sanda Necòle va pe màre in Giovine and as Allègre, marenare in La Sorsa. Beyond this structural variation, both of Giovine’s published versions conclude with the same stanza describing the ritual procession of St. Nicholas’s statue. Here, for the first time, the singers themselves step into view—the inhabitants of Bari, who tenderly carry “our St. Nicholas” (a statue otherwise in the Basilica) while calling on sailors and pilgrims to join them. Just as sailors stood in for the whole of Christianity in the medieval miracle, so too do these singers become the voice of the maritime city itself and its inhabitants in praise of its patron saint.

Unlike for Sanda Nicola, this famed Barese song survives both with notation and in modern recordings. Giovine includes a notated transcription of Sanda Necòle va pe màre in his Canti popolari religiosi baresi, sung to him by Barese housewife Caterina Milella (see Figure 4). Giovine writes that it is “an ancient song still widely sung today by the people and pilgrims who chant it while following the procession of the Saint.”48 What Giovine means by “antico” here is unclear, although his description resonates with La Sorsa’s comparison of such devotional songs to medieval laude.

The melody itself offers no clues to its relative antiquity: it is simple and repetitive, with minimal leaps, primarily stepwise motion, and frequent pitch repetition. As transcribed, the diatonic tune follows an AAAA‘BB’ structure, with the B lines functioning as a refrain. The song could easily be performed by a soloist, large group, or in alternation, as suggested by an undated recording in which Barese actor and composer Gianni Ciardo (b. 1949) sings the stanzas while a chorus joins on the refrain.49 The contrast between the more melodic stanzas and the highly repetitive refrain supports such a performance practice, readily evoking the sound of a crowd chanting the refrain in procession through the narrow streets of Bari Vecchia, the old city. This responsorial format not only reflects common devotional practice but also reinforces a sense of embodied togetherness expressed by singing—a performative detail central to the long tradition linking St. Nicholas with the sailors who venerate him.

The melody in Figure 4 continues to be sung in Bari on the Feast of the Translation; as recently as 7 May 2025, the Facebook page for the Biblioteca De Gemmis—Città metropolitana di Bari posted a short audio clip of youth singing Sanda Necòle va pe màre shortly before the feast day, including in the short post the first stanza as found in Giovine’s Canti popolari religiosi baresi (see Figure 5). Attesting to its significance within Barese popular and devotional culture, the song extends beyond religious contexts and into popular concert programming and the recording industry in Bari. To offer one example among many, the dance and electronic music group Quadraccio&BariBanda, headlined by Barese musician Tony Quadrello, included a reworking of the song on their 2021 album. The official music video for Sanda Necòle va pe màre begins with a leather-clad biker walking out of the sea beside Bari and concludes at the Basilica di San Nicola where he is transformed into none other than a modern-day rendering of St. Nicholas.50 Striking in this music video is the relative absence of the many sailors and pilgrims invoked in the song’s earlier forms, resulting in the singer’s face and voice (Tony Quadrello) becoming a singular invocation of the saint and thereby ventriloquizing the Barese community.

Civic and popular permutations of Sanda Necòle va pe màre speak to the relevance of the saint and singing for a coastal city with historical and hagiographical ties to the saint. In the performances of Barese singers and actors, echoes of sailors’ voices emotionally and emphatically inscribed into St. Nicholas’s medieval hagiography resonate, albeit with expressive contours shaped by the religious and cultural concerns of modern Apulia. Contemporary song collections show how the centrality of sailors’ voice as collective and affective persists from medieval hagiography into modern devotional practices, shifting from literary representation to ethnographically mediated sound. In Bari, where relic, ritual, and sea converge, Sanda Nicola and Sanda Necòle va pe màre crystallize this continuity: the first gathers individual prayer into a communal plea, the second projects that communal voice into public procession and civic spectacle. Read together, they show how the “voce una” of medieval song and the chorus of contemporary devotees are less historical opposites than alternating registers of the same practice of call and response with a patron saint. Alongside the writings of La Sorsa and Giovine, as well as more recent recordings and reworkings, the songs reveal a responsorial ecology in which singers, sailors, and city answer one another across time. What endures is not a fixed form or text but a shared, affective voice that repeatedly summons Nicholas’s aid and, in doing so, reaffirms Bari’s maritime identity and the saint’s patronage.

3. Conclusions

Few vocations boast musical repertoires closely linking voice, song, and hagiography over such a long durée. Sailors are exceptional in this, as is the outsized representation of their voices in St. Nicholas’s medieval and modern cult. Amplified in poetry and music, medieval creators afforded this socially variegated group of men both a literary and literal voice within St. Nicholas’s musical hagiography, refracting the lived vocal practices of sailors on medieval waters. Modern collections and recordings of sailors’ songs situated within the sacred geography of St. Nicholas’s resting place in Apulia testify to a continuity grounded in the voice as a collective and expressive force. The terrifying sea that compelled medieval sailors to cry out in unison to St. Nicholas still animates a shared, affective voice, captured not solely in hagiographic narrative but in ethnographic inscription and civic performance. The seas may still inspire fear, but sailors and coastal communities continue to seek refuge through the intercession of their patron saint.