Oxford college ditches St George’s Day dinner and will celebrate Eid instead

One of the foremost colleges at the University of Oxford cancelled its annual St George’s Day celebration for 2023 – and will celebrate the end of Eid instead.

Magdalen College, which was founded almost one hundred years before the English Reformation and was named after St Mary Magdalen, has a long tradition of celebrating the April 23 feast of England’s patron saint.

The event customarily featured a banquet in which all academics, staff, dons, and students were invited to dine together from a “special English menu”.

College members in the past were invited to “a formal hall and high table at 7.30pm” in order to “celebrate St George’s Day”.

But this year the event has been scrapped and replaced with a celebration of the end of the Islamic season of Eid, which closes on April 21.

On April 23, the college’s first day of “Trinity” term, students will be offered a meal which will “follow Muslim customs”. They have been told that “the meat dish will be halal and no alcohol will be served”.

The decision has caused contention. Dons at Magdalen College and staff at Oxford University denounced the move.

One academic at the college told the Daily Telegraph: “The cancelling of St George’s Day is yet another example of the deep antipathy that the leaders of so many of Britain’s academic institutions seem to feel towards the country that built and maintains them.”

As the row unfolded, the college administration initially attempted to deny it had a tradition of celebrating St George’s Day.

This was disproven by a plethora of contradictory evidence which surfaced including former invitations, emails, and pictures alongside witnesses testifying otherwise.

President of the college Dinah Rose, 57, has previously attended criticism over her “left wing politics” and her championing of “woke” causes.

Some critics have questioned the necessity of the move.

Although the saint is often associated with the Crusades, St George, a Palestinian, is also venerated in Islam – particularly among Sufis – where he is remembered as a holy and prophetic figure and uncontroversial among Muslim students.

There is a lack of historical evidence to offer an authentic portrait of the saint though it is generally acknowledged by scholars that he was a genuine martyr who suffered and died for his faith at Lydda (now Lod in modern day Israel) in the early 4th century during the severe persecution of the Roman Emperor Diocletian.

The famous story of how he slew a dragon that was about to eat a king’s daughter dates from around the 12^th century.

It has been widely speculated that this story derives from an image in Constantinople of Constantine killing a dragon, representing the Devil, which was misinterpreted by the Crusaders and later popularised by the Golden Legend of James de Voragine that was written in about 1260 and was later translated and published by William Caxton.

The early Acts of St George refer to him as an officer in the Roman army, however, and this may explain why he was later invoked as protector of the Christian armies of Byzantium.

The cult in his honour was flourishing in the Middle East in the 7^th and 8^th centuries and stories of his protecting role spread to England even before the Norman Conquest.

Devotion of the English to St George became hugely popular with the onset on the Crusades after he and St Demetrius, a fellow “martyr knight”, reputedly appeared to help the Christian armies at the siege of Antioch in 1098.

King Richard I, the “Lion Heart”, a century later put his own armies under the protection of St George and the battle cry “St George for England!” was shouted by English soldiers from the 14^th century.

In 1348 King Edward III founded the Order of the Garter with St George as the patron and in 1415 – after victory over France at Agincourt – the saint’s April 23rd feast was made into a national festival.

During the 17^th and 18^th centuries his feast was also a Holy Day of Obligation for English Catholics. The saint was recognised as Protector of England by Pope Benedict XIV in the mid-18^th century.

In art, St George is usually depicted as a young man. He is sometimes paired with St Michael the Archangel, another patron of England.

(Getty Images)

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