Valentine's Day
- Jaana Merasvuo
- 5 days ago
- 3 min read
Updated: 4 days ago
Valentine's Day on February 14th has different names across countries, but its meaning remains that of love or friendship, celebrating life and union. Some love it for its romance, while others criticise it for its consumerism. The custom of exchanging romantic messages, called "Valentines," has deep roots but has undergone modern proliferation and has been superseded by gift-giving, ranging from flowers to jewellery.
Behind the chocolates and red hearts lies a thousand-year-old fascinating story that begins in ancient Rome.
The protagonist is Valentine, bishop of Terni. Stories recount his courageous testimony of faith and a miraculous healing that prompted conversions. Valentine gave flowers from his garden to young lovers, and the most famous legend tells of him celebrating the marriage between the pagan legionary Sabinus and the young Christian Serapia, defying the emperor's ban on celibate soldiers to better serve in war.
Valentine was martyred on February 14th, in 347 AD, at the second mile of the Via Flaminia. After a brief initial burial at the site of his martyrdom, Valentine's body was taken to Terni and buried just outside the city near an ancient early Christian necropolis.
At that time, wild and unrestrained fertility rites were celebrated between February 13th and 15th in honour of the god Lupercus. These purification festivals of archaic origin were linked to the natural cycle of death and rebirth and associated with the primordial sphere of human sexuality. They were deemed deplorable already in the late Roman Empire, and in 496 AD, Pope Gelasius I decided to put an end to these pagan rites. Unable to suppress the celebration, he "christianised" it by moving the feast to February 14th and dedicating it to the martyr Valentine, who became a symbol of chaste and faithful love. With the decree, Gelasius I also canonised Valentine.
A church was built over the martyr's tomb. The Goths destroyed the church, and the management of the new church, rebuilt in the following century, was entrusted to Benedictine monks who spread the cult of Saint Valentine in their monasteries in France and England, giving rise to his patronage of engaged couples.
In the 4th century, Julius Caesar's Julian calendar was in use. In 1582, when Pope Gregory XIII reformed the calendar to the Gregorian calendar, removing 10 days (jumping from October 4th to 15th), the date of Valentine's martyrdom remained fixed on February 14th. This "leap" realigned it with the actual astronomical beginning of spring. In the Middle Ages, it was believed, particularly in France and England, that mating began on that date. So Valentine became the saint who heralded the imminent arrival of spring, and the date was symbolically regarded as a celebration of lovers.
However, when we think of Valentine's Day as a day of lovers, we owe it more to popular culture and poets than to theologians. In 1382, the pivotal English poet Geoffrey Chaucer, who had stayed in Italy between 1372 and 1378, wrote in his poem "The Parliament of Foules" that every bird chooses its mate on February 14th, linking the saint to the romantic idea for the first time.
Two centuries later, William Shakespeare cites Valentine's Day in Hamlet, where Ophelia, losing her mind, sings: "Tomorrow is Valentine's Day, and early in the morning I, a maiden, will knock at thy window, and be thy Valentine."
In A Midsummer Night's Dream, Theseus, finding the lovers sleeping in the woods, exclaims: "Doubtless they are early awake to keep the May rites... Is Valentine's Day already past? Do these woodland birds only now begin to mate?"
In 1605, after centuries of neglect, the Discalced Carmelite Friars rediscovered Valentine's remains. It was they who transformed the ancient, crumbling medieval church structure into the splendid Baroque Basilica we admire today in Terni, enshrining the saint's body beneath an altar built directly over the martyr's tomb.
Today, Terni is a town of 106,000 inhabitants in the Umbria Region, 100 km from Rome.
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