Some churches are born of a devotion and some are born of an operation. The basilica of San Nicola in Bari belongs unambiguously to the second kind, and the remarkable thing is that the people of Bari have never denied it: the story of the theft is told inside the basilica itself, on the ceiling, painted in gold.
Three things follow from that raid. The church you see today, which is the prototype of Apulian Romanesque and the parent of the cathedrals of Trani, Ruvo, Bitonto and half the region. The fact that Bari is still one of the few Catholic cities where the Orthodox liturgy is regularly celebrated. And the reason a queen of Poland is buried in an Apulian apse.
This is a guide to what you see on the way in, in the order it is worth looking at.
Sixty-two sailors, and a theft that became a city
In 1087 the relics of Saint Nicholas lay at Myra, in Lycia, on the coast of what is now Turkey, in a city the Seljuk Turks had just occupied. Venice wanted them, and made no secret of it. Bari got there first.
Sixty-two Bari sailors entered the basilica at Myra, restrained the monks who guarded it, broke the floor above the tomb and carried the bones away. The ships were back in harbour in the first days of May 1087, and the feast of the Translation is still celebrated from 7 to 9 May, with the statue of the saint carried out to sea.
Why would sixty-two sailors risk prison for a set of bones? It was neither an isolated nor an inexplicable act. Bari had just passed from the Byzantines to the Normans, had lost its role as capital of the catapanate, and was looking for something to put it back on the map of Europe. A first-rank relic was, in the eleventh century, exactly that: an economic engine, a flow of pilgrims, a reason why popes and emperors had to come to you.
It worked. Within two years the city had a crypt consecrated by a pope.
A site that lasted a hundred and ten years, and a church that does not line up
Work began in July 1087 under the Benedictine abbot Elia, and not on just any ground: on the site of the Corte del Catapano, the residence of the Byzantine governor. Building the saint’s church on top of the palace of the power that had just left was a message, and the Normans were very good at that kind of message.
On 1 October 1089 Pope Urban II came in person to lay the relics under the crypt altar, and on the same occasion consecrated Elia archbishop of Bari. Elia died in 1105 without seeing the church finished; the abbot Eustazio succeeded him and died in 1123. Consecration came only on 22 June 1197, celebrated on Pope Celestine III’s commission by Conrad, bishop of Hildesheim and imperial chancellor to Henry VI.
A hundred and ten years of building show, and it helps to know beforehand what you are looking at. The two towers of the façade are of different heights and the two flanks are of different lengths: this is not a deliberate effect but the consequence of a very long site fed with reused material taken from several churches. The twelve interior columns come from other buildings too.
Take your eye upwards, to the apse, where the window is carried on brackets carved as elephants. They are the thing I remember best about this church, and nobody looks at them, because they are eight metres up on the side facing the sea.
The Porta dei Leoni, on the flank almost nobody walks round
The main portal on the façade is sober: two columns carried on stylophore oxen and a sphinx above the lintel. The portal worth the detour is on the north flank, and it is the one the locals call the Porta dei Leoni, for the two stone lions that carry its jambs.
It is carved to the point of saturation: vegetal scrolls, fantastic animals, and on either side of the archivolt two panels with the harvest and the grape harvest, that is, the calendar of farm labour set on the door of a church of the sea. The quality is high and the hand is recognisable: the sources attribute it to a magister Basilio, and the dating runs from the twelfth to the thirteenth century depending on the study.
It is worth walking there along the flank, because it is also the point from which the structure makes most sense: the blind arcading, the gallery, the sheer mass of wall that looks more like a military building than a church. That impression is not wrong: in the eleventh century a pilgrimage basilica with a treasury inside was also a strongroom to be defended.
The carved battle, and the caution it deserves
Along the edge of the lunette of the Porta dei Leoni runs a frieze with a battle scene: mounted knights, a castle, armed men assaulting it. Part of the scholarship reads it as an episode from the Arthurian cycle, and from that a small local industry of stories about Bari, Arthur and the Grail has grown.
It is worth saying precisely what is documented and what is not. Documented: there is a relief with knights and a siege, of high quality, on the portal of an Apulian basilica of the Norman period. Interpretation: that those knights are Arthur and his. If the reading holds, the relief would stand alongside the archivolt of the Porta della Pescheria at Modena cathedral among the earliest figured witnesses of the matter of Britain in Italy, at a moment when those stories still circulated almost entirely by word of mouth. If it does not hold, it remains a generic chivalric scene, which in Norman sculpture is not rare at all.
I would look at it knowing both. It is the piece of Bari about which the most nonsense is written, and also one of the finest.
Inside: the three great arches that break the space, and why they are there
You go in and your first reaction is that something is not working. The three aisles run towards the apse as you would expect, but they are cut across by three enormous transverse arches that slice the space horizontally and break the perspective.
What are three great arches doing across the nave of a Romanesque basilica? They were not planned. They were added in the fifteenth century, after an earthquake had left the whole structure unsafe, and they are pure internal buttressing: they are what holds the church up. A twentieth-century restoration considered removing them and decided to leave them, which is probably right and does not make them any less intrusive.
Above the side aisles run the galleries, opened by triple windows, and from there the real plan becomes clear: a three-aisled basilica with a false transept, that is, a transept that projects in height but not in plan. It is the scheme the whole of Romanesque Puglia would copy.
The ciborium, the oldest in Puglia
Over the high altar stands a stone canopy carried on four ancient marble columns: the ciborium, of the twelfth century, and the handbooks give it as the oldest surviving in Puglia.
Its form is the one that would become canonical in the south: above the capitals runs a cornice of small arches, and above that rises a stepped octagonal pyramid. The columns, like those in the nave, are reused, and it is not hard to imagine them in a Roman or Byzantine building before they ended up here.
Below, the silver altar is another age entirely: Neapolitan goldsmiths made it in 1684, and the coexistence of Romanesque canopy and Baroque repoussé is one of the shifts of register that make this church so unharmonious and so interesting.
The cathedra of abbot Elia, and the three men holding it up
Between the altar and the apse stands the most argued-over piece of sculpture in the Norman south, and it is an object you can walk around.
The cathedra of abbot Elia is a bishop’s throne cut from a single block of marble, datable to the second half of the eleventh century, with an inscription that points to a span between 1098 and the first years of the following century. Seat and back carry decoration in the Byzantine tradition, the repertoire of Puglia at the time.
What nobody forgets is the base. The throne rests on three telamones, three crouching human figures carrying it on their shoulders, and the sculptors worked their faces tight with effort: you can see the veins in the necks, the open mouths, the staring eyes. On the back, two lionesses are biting human victims.
Who are the three men holding up an abbot’s throne? The meaning has been argued over for a century. Some read the conquered supporting the power of the Church, some pilgrims, some a representation of subject peoples. What everyone agrees on is that around 1090, in Puglia, someone could carve physical effort better than almost anyone else in Europe.
Carlo Rosa’s ceiling, which clashes on purpose
Look up and you jump five hundred years at once. The flat ceiling is a gilded coffered structure with large canvases painted between 1661 and 1662 by Carlo Rosa, a painter from Bitonto, who set there the stories of Saint Nicholas and a Paradise.
It clashes, and that is exactly the right word: a Baroque intervention dropped inside a Romanesque architecture, and the contrast is violent. But it is also the record of how the basilica was lived in during the seventeenth century, when the visual poverty of Romanesque was not a virtue to be recovered but a fault to be corrected.
Among the scenes is the theft of the relics, painted without embarrassment: the ships, the sailors, the bones. It is the only church I know where the founding crime is on the ceiling, in gold.
The crypt, and the column nobody touches
The crypt is the oldest part and the reason people come. Twenty-six reused columns, all different, with Byzantine and Lombard capitals remounted so that the best pieces sit near the entrance and the altar. The floor keeps stretches of Cosmatesque mosaic. The lunettes with scenes from the saint’s life were painted by Nicola Gliri in 1660.
Under the altar is the tomb. From the bones, according to a tradition documented for centuries, a clear liquid forms that is called manna, and it is drawn once a year, on 9 May, during a celebration led by the archbishop. It is then diluted in holy water and distributed in small phials: you will find them in the treasury room, and pilgrims carry them away by the dozen.
In one corner, behind an iron grille, is a column of pale marble that seems to have no reason to be there. It is the miraculous column. The legend says Nicholas found it in the Tiber, had it carried to Myra for his church, and that it reappeared at Bari in 1098 just as the site was one column short. The grille is not ornamental: it was there to stop pilgrims chipping pieces off, and you can still see in the marble the places where they managed it.
The Orthodox altar and the uniflamma lamp
In the side apse of the crypt, since 1966, there has been an Eastern chapel with an iconostasis and a second altar, granted so that the Orthodox may celebrate the Divine Liturgy. In 1981 a second one was added, dedicated to Cyril, Methodius and Benedict, the three co-patrons of Europe.
It is not a symbolic gesture left on paper. Byzantine-Greek, Byzantine-Slav, Coptic, Armenian and Chaldean rites are all celebrated in this crypt, and the flow of pilgrims from Eastern Europe has never stopped, not even in the decades of the Soviet bloc.
Beside the saint’s altar burns a lamp called the uniflamma: a single flame fed by oil from the East and oil from the West together. On 26 February 1984 John Paul II came here as a pilgrim and relit it together with Chrysostomos Konstantinidis, Orthodox metropolitan of Myra, that is, with the bishop of the city from which the bones had been taken nine hundred years earlier. Knowing that, you look at the lamp differently.
Bona Sforza, queen of Poland, buried in an Apulian apse
Behind the cathedra of Elia, set against the apse vault, is a marble funerary monument that looks as though it arrived from another church. A woman kneels in prayer, with Saint Stanislaus, patron of Poland, on one side and Saint Nicholas on the other.
She is Bona Sforza, born at Vigevano in 1494, duchess of Bari by maternal inheritance and queen of Poland by marriage to Sigismund I. She governed Poland for decades, then returned to Bari, and died here on 19 November 1557: according to the traditional account, since generally accepted, poisoned by her trusted officer Gian Lorenzo Pappacoda, who had an interest in a will different from the real one.
Her daughter Anna Jagiellon commissioned the monument between 1589 and 1593, and the sculptors Andrea Sarti and Francesco Zaccarella executed it in Naples for 1840 ducats. It is reckoned among the most important sixteenth-century sculptures in the south, and it explains why you hear Polish spoken in this basilica all year round.
The Museo Nicolaiano and the treasury
Beside the basilica, in the Pilgrims’ Portico, is the Museo Nicolaiano, and anyone with another half hour does well to go in, because that is where you measure what those bones meant to Bari.
The treasury is made of diplomatic gifts. There is the group offered by Charles II of Anjou in 1304, and there is the icon given by the rulers of Serbia in the early fourteenth century, gold and enamel, with the donors kneeling at the saint’s feet. There are Russian lamps, vestments, the phials of manna, and paintings from the fourteenth to the twentieth century, among them a triptych by Rico da Candia of 1451 and a panel by Bartolomeo Vivarini of 1476.
Vivarini is worth returning to the next day: at the Pinacoteca Corrado Giaquinto there are more of them, together with Giovanni Bellini’s San Pietro Martire, and it is the same story seen from the other side, that of the Venetian merchants who in the fifteenth century supplied altarpieces to every church along the Adriatic coast.
Practical information
Checked on 2 September 2026 on the basilica’s official website. As this is a working church, hours can change for services.
Entry. The basilica and the crypt are free, like any church. The Museo Nicolaiano has a separate ticket.
Opening hours. The basilica opens Monday to Saturday from 6.30 am to 8.30 pm and on Sunday from 6.30 am to 10 pm. Weekday masses are at 7.30, 9.30 and 6.30 pm; on feast days at 7.30, 9, 10.30, 12, 1 pm, 6.30 pm and 8.30 pm, with the 1 pm mass suspended from July to September. The offerings room is open every day from 9.15 am to 7.15 pm.
When the crypt is harder to visit. During Eastern liturgies and masses in the crypt, visitor circulation is restricted, and rightly so. If you want to walk round it calmly, early on a weekday morning is the best time.
The two feasts. 6 December is the saint’s liturgical feast. The great city festival, though, is the Translation, from 7 to 9 May, with the historical procession, the statue carried out to sea on a boat and, on the 9th, the drawing of the manna. For those three days the basilica is magnificent and impossible to visit.
Where it is. In piazza San Nicola, inside the old town, five minutes on foot from the cathedral of San Sabino and ten from piazza del Ferrarese. No transport needed.
How long it takes. The basilica with the crypt takes an hour. With the Museo Nicolaiano, an hour and a half.
If you are building an itinerary, the basilica is the first stop in What to see in Bari in 2 days, where I work out how to fit it round the Monday closures.
Photo credits: west front, nave with the transverse arches, ciborium, Carlo Rosa ceiling, miraculous column and Serbian icon by Sailko (CC BY 3.0); apse elephants, battle frieze and iconostasis by Sailko, northern flank by Luangiphoto, Porta dei Leoni by Enric (CC BY-SA 4.0); monument of Bona Sforza by Marek Postawka (CC BY 3.0); cathedra of abbot Elia by Fabrizio Garrisi (CC0). All from Wikimedia Commons.
