#stephanorhinus

Stephanorhinus kirchbergensis, Emiliano Troco, 2014

Before he became a saint, Stephen I was a man named Vajk, born twenty-five years before the year 1000, the son of chieftains of the Carpathian Basin. At the age of eleven, he and his father were baptized into the Christian faith, a decision that was less spiritual than strategical. His father knew that if they were Christians, it would be easier to make alliances with the powers around Rome. Vajk was renamed Stephen in honor of the first martyr—his mother claimed to have been visited by the saint in a dream. Ten years later, Stephen married Gisela of Bavaria and sealed his place in Europe’s political arena. He was the last Grand Prince of the Hungarians and crowned the first King of Hungary.

He was not a fierce king. It is said he often disguised himself as a beggar to more easily gift money to the homeless in his country. During one of these costumed walks, he was mugged, his beard pulled, his purse stolen. Trying to be like Christ, he did not retaliate, but let his assaulters go. Stephen’s grace extended even to pardoning an assassin who botched an attempt to kill him. When he died, it was of natural causes, in his sixties, on the Feast of the Assumption.

Fifty years after his death, Stephen’s tomb in Stuhlweissenburg was opened. His body, smelling of balsam, was lifted from a pool of rose-colored water, and, it is written, a wave of healing spread over the onlookers. The blind saw, the lame walked, the deaf heard. Because of these miracles, his body was moved to a basilica, but what happened next is unclear. Different chronicles give different stories, name different names, list different dates and places, but somehow the body was lost, forgotten, or stolen.

One hundred years later, a right hand was found and attributed to the long dead king. The rest of the body, wrote a bishop, had turned to dust, but the hand remained intact because it had worked so charitably in life. The Holy Dexter was deposited in Romania, and an abby erected around it, then was moved to Croatia to avoid desecration by the Mongols, then taken to the Hungarian city of Székesfehérvár, then to Bosnia, then back to Croatia, and then to Vienna. After all these destinations, Queen Maria Theresa, in 1771, requested the hand find its final home in the city of Budapest, where it remains today. On August 20th, the hand is paraded around the city to celebrate the saint.