Who was the dog-headed saint?

St Christopher appears in many guises in early medieval sources: as a preacher to pagans, an African soldier who deserted his unit, a giant and — perhaps most bizarrely — as a dog-headed saint.

- Krisztina Ilko

The cult of this enigmatic figure emerged in the eastern Roman empire. An inscription in Haydarpaşa (in modern-day Istanbul) mentions a church dedicated to him by the mid-fifth century. But early devotion to St Christopher hardly resembled the image of him most familiar today: that of the chivalric giant who carried the Christ child on his shoulder over a river. It is this portrayal that explains why, as a patron saint of travellers, his pendants are widely hung in cars.

Instead, his earliest Greek hagiographies describe him as a