Is this the real St. Nick?

Broad face? Check.

White hair? Check.

White beard? Check.

Rosy cheeks? Not so much.

Broken nose? Uh . . . broken nose?

OK, so the computer-generated representation of Nicholas of Myra pictured here isn't exactly what Clement Moore described in his classic "Night Before Christmas." Stick "the stump of a pipe" in his mouth and add "a little round belly," and the resemblance is passable.

Especially when you consider, as religion reporter David Gibson points out in his story on the Politics Daily website, that "Nicholas of Myra — also known as Saint Nicholas, also known as Santa Claus — lived and died in the fourth century in what is now Turkey."

That might explain the olive complection and the twinkle-less eyes — evidently there wasn't a lot to twinkle about in fourth century Turkey. But what about the broken nose?

We'll get to that in a second. But first, Gibson describes Nicholas as "a devoted Christian (who) used what he had to help others (and to intervene on behalf of the falsely accused)."

"The most famous story to come down to us," Gibson continues, "is how Nicholas, hearing of the plight of a father who could not afford dowries for his three daughters, secretly left bags of gold coins at their home to provide a dowry and preserve the ladies from a likely fate as prostitutes. In one version of the story, the father lay in wait the third time the donor was to visit and thus discovered the identity of history's first secret Santa."

As a bishop, Nicholas also had a reputation for fighting — literally — for the purity of church doctrine during the Council of Nicaea, in which "the Battling Bishop" was a participant both theologically and pugilistically.

"The Council of Nicaea, which produced the Nicene Creed that believers still recite as the foundational expression of Christian belief, was hardly the somnolent discussion that one might expect of such angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin topics," Gibson explained in his Politics Daily story. "Instead, there were nasty arguments and periodic fisticuffs, and at one point Bishop Nicholas of Myra — who already had a reputation as a staunch defender of orthodox belief against the heresy of the Arians — popped Arias himself in the face."

Is that broken nose making a little more sense now?

According to Gibson, Nicholas was so revered by his people that his remains were carefully preserved after he died. Those remains were moved a couple of times, but still were intact enough that they were carefully measured and x-rayed by an anatomy professor in the 1950s. Technicians at Image Foundry in England have taken those measurements and used modern technology to create the computer-generated likenesses seen www.stnicholascenter.org/pages/real-face/ here.

EMAIL: jwalker@desnews.com