Saint Martin and his geese

If you happen to drive toward the Austrian border—or even cross it—on November 11th, Saint Martin’s Day, and head on into Bavaria or Czechia, the restaurants along the road tempt you with signs for their Martinmas goose dinners, usually accompanied by mouthwatering photos. Six or seven years ago, as I was preparing for the 1700th anniversary of Saint Martin’s birth, I retraced his path from his birthplace in Szombathely to his tomb in Tours. I ate goose, too, and even cooked one myself. The photos, alas, are gone, and the book I planned for the occasion never happened. So if anyone sends me an especially tempting picture of a Martinmas goose dinner tonight, I’ll post it here instead.

The link between Saint Martin and the goose is usually traced back to the well-known story that the monk Martin, hiding from the crowds who wanted to make him bishop of Tours, concealed himself in a goose pen—but the honking of the geese gave him away. In revenge for their betrayal, his late followers took to roasting them. It’s a fine feeling, after all, to know that while enjoying a gourmet meal, we’re also taking part in a little act of saintly justice—our souls perhaps whiter than the feathers of the unfortunate birds.

But to a collector of folktales, that honking sounds familiar—echoing from many centuries earlier. According to Livy, during the Gallic siege of Rome in 390 BC, it was the sacred geese of Juno’s temple on the Capitoline Hill who raised the alarm when the Gauls tried to sneak up a hidden path toward the last Roman stronghold. The defenders were saved, and from that time on a goose served as part of the Roman night watch, while the sleeping dogs were tried and, in one case—the main offender—hanged.

English Bestiary, 1230-40. MS Harley 4751 © British Library

The goose, a valiant creature was also a symbol of Mars, Juno’s son. So it’s hardly surprising that Martin—whose very name Martinus means “of Mars,” and who was himself the son of a Roman officer—was linked with the bird as well.

There’s a visual source, though, that hasn’t yet been noticed in this context. In Piero della Francesca’s Legend of the True Cross fresco cycle in the church of San Francesco in Arezzo (ca. 1452–1466), both battle scenes—where Christian rulers defeat their pagan foes, the rebel co-emperor Maxentius (312, above) and the Persian king Khosrow (612, below)—show the pagans fleeing under hateful banners (dragons, Moorish heads), while the Christians fight beneath Roman military emblems: the eagle, the lion, the cross—and the goose.

But can such a deeply rooted custom really be explained by a clearly later folk tale and an ancient wandering legend?

Perhaps it wasn’t the geese who joined Martin’s story, but the other way around—Martin who, for the sake of his growing popularity, adopted the geese, who would have been eaten on that day anyway.

Goose keeping is a labor-intensive business. Geese must be herded, guarded, and fed. Unlike hens or pigeons, who can scratch out a living even in winter, geese need green fodder. So, like pigs, which also require feed, the surplus geese that aren’t needed for breeding in spring must be slaughtered when winter sets in. The latest practical date for that? November 11, Saint Martin’s Day. Why?

Until the Second Vatican Council (1962–65), Catholic Europe observed a forty-day fast before Christmas, just as before Easter. That’s why even today many Catholic families eat fish on the evening of December 24th, which was still a fasting day—unlike Protestants, who serve turkey. And that forty-day fast began right after November 11. So Saint Martin’s Day became the last great feast before abstinence—much like Mardi Gras before Lent.

Pieter Baltens: Saint Martin’s Kermis, late 16th century, Rijksmuseum

In much of Protestant Europe, including Britain and Germany, Martinmas (or Martinmesse) remained the occasion for candlelit or lantern processions—symbols of the approaching Advent, when humanity waited in darkness for Christ’s birth.

This little light of mine. Martinmas lantern walk

So November 11 is already set as the last great feast of geese and lighting before Advent. But why is Saint Martin’s feast celebrated on this very day as well?

A saint’s feast day usually marks the date of death—his heavenly birthday. Martin, however, died on November 8. So why celebrate on the 11th?

As bishop of Tours, Martin introduced the visitatio canonica—the annual visitation of his parishes. In 397, during one such visit, he died in a village on the Loire now known as Candes-Saint-Martin. The locals naturally wanted to keep his body as a holy relic, but the citizens of Tours claimed it as their own. Eventually, sailors from Tours came and spirited the body away. (If I still had my photos, I could show you how this sorrowful event is depicted in the Gothic stained-glass window of the Candes-Saint-Martin parish church.) They carried him up the Loire to Tours, where a great crowd awaited and laid him to rest in his prepared tomb.

All this happened on November 11. Contrary to custom, the saint’s feast was fixed not on the day of his death, but on the day of his burial.

It’s hard to resist the thought that this happened because November 11 was already an important date—the traditional pre-fast feast day—just waiting for a Christian name to be given to it. And the name chosen was Martin’s.

Saint Martin lived life to the fullest. He had been a soldier who, invoking Christ’s command to lay down the sword, refused to fight. A monk who founded Europe’s first monastery. A bishop who created one of the earliest organized dioceses. But his greatness also lay in his timing: he even managed to die at just the right moment—or almost the right, but he had friends. The geese were probably not among them. Still, if one must go, it’s surely better to die in Saint Martin’s name. Just as a pig might prefer Saint Anthony’s.

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Epilogue. Jews, of course, do not celebrate Saint Martin’s Day. Yet the Martinmas goose still has a place in Hungarian Jewish tradition.

Until 1840, Jews in Hungary were not permitted to settle in royal free cities—a restriction upheld by their Christian burghers, who feared competition. There was, however, one exception: Pozsony (now Bratislava). The Habsburg kings personally granted settlement rights to the Jews there—directly across from Saint Martin’s Cathedral. In gratitude, the Jewish community of Pozsony each year on Saint Martin’s Day sent a fattened, ritually slaughtered, and expertly roasted goose to the imperial court in Vienna, carried on foot, lest a carriage jostle the precious bird. The custom is recorded by Sándor Bálint in his Festive Calendar, and by Norbert Glässer of Szeged in his excellent Kötődések blog, which reproduces the 1942 newspaper montage below.

This tradition persisted as long as there were Habsburgs in Vienna to receive the goose. How well known it was can be seen from the satirical magazine Borsszem Jankó issue of November 13, 1918. This edition appeared just after the general armistice was declared at 11 a.m. on November 11—Martinmas Day—by which time the thrones of the defeated powers had already been replaced by republics. The magazine, without any commentary and assuming its readers’ broad knowledge of the context, could pose the question:

“I wonder where the Jews of Pozsony took their Martinmas geese this year?”

The Hungarian caption paraphrasing the biblical “mene tekel upharsin” (Dan 5, original meaning: “God has numbered, weighed and divided the king”) means: “bugger off”