Saint Christopher

The earliest hard trace is a shrine near Chalcedon in 452, but the stories that grew around Christopher scatter his life across Egypt, the Middle East, or Barbaria and his death under Decius, Diocletian, or Maximinus Daza. The Eastern tradition gave him a dog's head and a ferocious nature before conversion; the West preferred a giant, ugly and unrefined, but human. Both agree the name came only after he turned Christian - Christóphoros, Christ-bearer. By the 13th century the Golden Legend locked in the image still worn on key chains: the convert who ferried travelers across a river, asked one night to carry a child, and found the boy growing impossibly heavy as the water rose, because the child was Christ. He became patron saint of travelers not for where he went but for what he bore.