If we only had the Acts of Saint George, we might even doubt the historical existence of the martyr. Even the ancient Decretum Gelasianum (Gelasian Decree), a 5th-century list of prohibited books, labels the Passio sancti Georgii as apocryphal. It hardly matters which of the many written accounts of his passion it refers to, as all of them are legendary. However, there is a good number of better testimonies to the extraordinary devotion that the «megalomartyr» already received in the 4th century.
His tomb in Lydda (Lod) was a popular pilgrimage site until Sultan Saladin destroyed the church during the time of the Crusaders. The Crusaders revived devotion to the saint in the West. It’s understandable that various nations adopted the supposed knight-saint as their patron: for example, Aragon, Catalonia, England, Portugal, and Lithuania. There is even a country—Georgia—that bears his name.
Toward the end of the Middle Ages, the image of the knight striking a dragon began to spread. This iconographic detail has been interpreted in various ways and is shared by about thirty other saints.
