The Real St. Patrick Was Not Irish — And 12 Other Things You Didn't Know About the World's Most Celebrated Cultural Holiday

Somewhere today, a river is turning green. The Chicago River has been dyed emerald every St. Patrick's Day since 1962 — a tradition that began when a plumber used green dye to trace illegal sewage discharges and somebody had a better idea for the leftover dye. It is one of the more accidental origin stories in the history of cultural celebration — and it is perfectly appropriate for a holiday whose relationship with historical accuracy has always been creatively flexible. St. Patrick's Day is celebrated on March 17 in more countries than any other national cultural festival on the planet. It is a public holiday in Ireland, Northern Ireland, the island of Montserrat in the Caribbean, and the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador. It is celebrated by an estimated 70 million people of Irish descent worldwide — including approximately 32 million in the United States, 14 million in Australia, and millions more across Canada, the United Kingdom, Argentina, New Zealand, and beyond. And at the centre of all of it is a man who was not Irish, probably never saw a snake, and whose original symbolic colour was not green at all. Who Saint Patrick Actually Was Maewyn Succat — the man who would become Saint Patrick — was born around 385 AD in Roman Britain, in a location that historians have debated for centuries but generally place somewhere in what is now England, Scotland, or Wales. His family was Romano-British: his father Calpurnius was a deacon and minor Roman official, his grandfather Potitus a priest. At approximately 16, Maewyn was kidnapped by Irish raiders and taken to Ireland as a slave, where he worked as a shepherd for approximately six years in what is now County Antrim or County Mayo. His enslavement, by his own account in his autobiographical Confessio, deepened a religious faith that had been nominal in his comfortable Romano-British childhood. After escaping Ireland and returning to Britain — guided, he wrote, by a voice in a dream — Maewyn studied for the priesthood in Gaul (modern France), was ordained, took the name Patricius, and returned voluntarily to the island that had enslaved him as a missionary. He spent the rest of his life — roughly 30 more years — working to convert the Irish to Christianity, dying around 461 AD on March 17, the date that became his feast day. The Snakes, the Shamrock & the Colour Blue Three of the most persistent St. Patrick's Day traditions are either symbolic, metaphorical, or historically inverted. The legend that St. Patrick drove the snakes out of Ireland is almost certainly allegorical — Ireland has had no native snake population since the last Ice Age, which ended approximately 10,000 years before Patrick arrived. The snakes are generally interpreted by scholars as a metaphor for paganism: Patrick driving out the old religion. The shamrock is the tradition with the strongest historical basis. Patrick is said to have used the three-leaved clover to explain the Christian concept of the Holy Trinity — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — to pagan Irish audiences, with the three leaves of a single plant representing three distinct entities sharing one nature. Whether this actually happened is unverifiable, but the shamrock's association with both Patrick and Ireland predates the modern holiday by centuries. The colour question is the most counterintuitive. The original colour associated with Saint Patrick in art and heraldry was Patrician blue — a shade still visible in the Irish Presidential Standard and the ancient Order of St. Patrick insignia. Green became the dominant colour through a combination of Ireland's association with the Emerald Isle, the green harp flag used by Irish rebels in the 1798 rebellion against British rule, and the simple fact that Ireland is, by any measure, a very green island. How a Feast Day Became the World's Most Exported Holiday St. Patrick's Day began as a solemn Catholic feast day — a day of religious observance marking the death of Ireland's patron saint, falling in the middle of Lent and traditionally providing a brief relaxation of Lenten dietary restrictions. It was celebrated quietly in Irish homes and churches for centuries before the Irish diaspora — driven out by centuries of colonisation, famine, and economic deprivation — carried it around the world. The Great Famine of 1845-1852, which killed approximately one million Irish people and drove another million to emigrate, created the Irish-American community whose size, cultural cohesion, and political influence transformed St. Patrick's Day from a religious observance into the global cultural event it is today. The first St. Patrick's Day parade in the United States is recorded as early as 1601 in what is now St. Augustine, Florida — organised by the Irish vicar Ricardo Artur. New York City's parade, now the largest in the world, has been running continuously since 1762 — fourteen years before American independence. Today St. Patrick's Day is celebrated with parades, music, food, and the wearing of green in cities from Dublin to Sydney, from New York to Tokyo, from Buenos Aires to Nairobi. The Chicago River runs green. The Sydney Opera House is illuminated in emerald. Guinness sells an estimated 13 million pints worldwide today alone — more than five times its average daily global sales. For a man born in Roman Britain who spent six years as a slave before returning voluntarily to his captors' homeland to spend his life in service, the scale of what March 17 has become is, by any measure, extraordinary. Happy St. Patrick's Day from digital8hub.com.