Machar of Aberdeen

Saint Machar of Aberdeen was an Irish bishop of the sixth century who laboured in Scotland and is regarded as the patron saint of the city of Aberdeen. He is commemorated on 12 November and is included in the Synaxis of the Saints of Britain and Ireland.

He is said to have been of noble birth, baptized by Saint Colman. He came to Iona with Saint Columba, the monastery founded by Columba in 563 as a base for the conversion of Scotland. With other missionaries from Iona, Machar went to Scotland and preached on the island of Mull, and later among the Picts of the eastern coast, around Aberdeen. For this reason he was described, anachronistically, as the first bishop of the see of Aberdeen.

According to the legend, he found on the bank of the river Don a place where the river bends in the shape of a bishop's crozier before reaching the sea, and there, around 580, he built a church; the settlement of Aberdeen grew up around it. Much of what is said about him comes from the Aberdeen Breviary, a work compiled in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, long after his time; it is therefore hard to judge how far it can be trusted. The same breviary makes him archbishop of Tours, appointed by Pope Gregory the Great for the last years of his life, a story to which our sources give no credence. A recent scholar has also proposed that Machar and Saint Mungo were the same person, on the basis of a possible link between their names.

The cathedral of Saint Machar in Aberdeen bears his name. Beside it stood Saint Machar's Well, from which water was taken for the cathedral font, and the font of today, by Hew Lorimer, shows him baptising converts. Since the Reformation the cathedral has belonged to the Church of Scotland. A few other churches in the region keep his name. The Russian source also calls him Machar of Iona.