In the third century AD, when Roman Emperor Diocletian issued an edict persecuting Christians in the ancient Greek city of Nicomedia, a high-ranking imperial official publicly tore it down in protest. The act of defiance led to his brutal execution, but as Christianity spread throughout the soon to be declining empire, similar stories of martyrdom echoed around its provinces.
The myth of St. George is one of the most celebrated of these stories. First emerging in the fifth century AD, George was said to have been a Roman soldier who was martyred two centuries prior for not recanting his Christianity. In the seventh century, he was depicted in a Church in Cappadocia as a figure on horseback slaying serpents. During the Crusades of the thirteenth century, when stories of George reached the West, he took on the contemporary imagery of a knight, wearing a red cross, slaying a dragon.
Without the anchor of contemporary sources, we can only speculate that George’s true identity was that of the man from Nicomedia. However, this has allowed the myth to ripen: for centuries different communities have carved out their own sensational versions of the tale. Undeterred by any doubts in authenticity, these stories borrowed from ancient traditions and even helped communities define themselves, with George being adopted as a patron saint by various nations, including England and Catalonia.
Looking for George is an investigation into how this myth has been etched into cultural memory in Catalonia. It traces the story’s origins here to the town of Montblanc, where the Catalan version of the tale is said to have taken place. Through photographing people, celebrations and architecture there, it documents the being of collective memory. Treading lightly between nostalgia for and amnesia of the past, it creates a labyrinth of fragmented stories and symbols imbued with a sense of history, where myth lingers just below the surface.