This is the feast date, and the traditionally-ascribed execution date in 303, of St. George — legendary dragon-slayer and patron saint of half the world and darn near everything that the original apostles didn’t nail down.

Saint George is supposed to have been a well-favored officer in Diocletian‘s army who suicidally announced his Christian faith during the latter’s persecutions, and refused every sop and entreaty to renounce it. He was martyred at Nicomedia.

Pretty standard persecution fare — and there’s next to nothing that can be reliably verified about his life — but George did well by his future cult to get into the martyr’s game right before Christianity’s official triumph. Still, at the end of the day, it’s one of those unaccountable accidents of history that this particular fellow ended up as perhaps Christendom’s most widely venerated champion.

He’s most immediately recognizable for the story of having slain a dragon, a plain metaphor for paganism (and usable metaphor for anything and everything else) that’s been depicted in all its scaly corporeality by innumerable artists.

England has liked him jolly well ever since his suitability to the chivalric ethos positioned him to supplant Edmund the Martyr as that realm’s patron saint during the Middle Ages. The red cross on the English flag is a St. George’s cross.

And so there he is, too, in one of Shakespeare’s most rousing patriotic monologues:

I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips,
Straining upon the start. The game’s afoot:
Follow your spirit, and upon this charge
Cry ‘God for Harry, England, and Saint George!’

But George gets around, and England has to share him.

That St. George’s Cross also adorns the flag of Georgia (the country, that is: it’s so hard core that it’s named for the guy), and he’s claimed as a sponsor throughout Orthodox Christendom: Serbia (which celebrates a major holiday when April 23 hits on the Julian calendar); Bulgaria; Greece; Ethiopia; the city of Constantinople and its heir, the city of Moscow, and Russia generally. There were two George’s [Yuri’s] Days on Old Russia’s calendar, and the autumn one was marked as the one time in the year that serfs were permitted to change their landlords, at least until Boris Godunov canceled the privilege and left Russian with the idiom “so much for Yuri’s day!” to mark an expectation disappointed.

George is big in Spain, and even bigger in Portugal; through its Portuguese heritage, he’s also venerated in Brazil, where he’s the patron saint of the Corinthians football club. He’s the sponsor (via that dragon connection) of the snaky Hungarian military order that gave Vlad the Impaler the immortal sobriquet of Dracula.

There are other countries and any number of cities who also trust the dragon-slayer’s patronage; George accepts the further devotions of saddle-makers, lepers, animal husbandmen, shepherds, Crusader knights, butchers, the Maltese, gypsies, farmers, archers, syphilis-sufferers, cavalrymen and therefore also armored tankmen, Palestinian Christians, and the Boy Scouts of America. He’s generally got a stupendous worldwide collection of churches, art, legends, and devotional rites dedicated to his name.

On this day..

• 1935: Fred Blink, with hatred on his lips
• 1845: Sarah Freeman, Shapwick Murderess
• 1941: Harry Gleeson, posthumously exonerated
• 1943: The massacre of Janowa Dolina
• 1886: Robert Silas Fowler, lustful
• 1290: Alv Erlingsson, the Last Viking
• 1801: Angre Kethi, Polygar prey
• 1886: Joseph Jackson and James Wasson, at Fort Smith
• 1945: Massacres of Treuenbrietzen
• 1969: Sirhan Sirhan condemned
• 1992: Billy Wayne White, after 47 minutes
• 1945: Albrecht Haushofer, German Resistance intellectual