Almost every old church in Western Europe belongs to someone: a saint, the Virgin, Christ or the Trinity. I sorted 279,212 church buildings in twelve countries by their patron to see what that geography looks like, and added Ireland's holy wells.
Walk into a village almost anywhere from Galway to Calabria and the church will usually carry a name: Saint Martin, Saint Peter, Notre-Dame, San Rocco, Sankt Nikolaus. These dedications were chosen over many centuries, for relics, for founders, for local bishops and for fashion, and once given they tended to stick. Put them on one map and you get a mosaic of Europe's saints: some everywhere, some almost nowhere outside one valley.
Wikidata, the open database behind Wikipedia, lists 279,212 church buildings with coordinates in the United Kingdom, Ireland, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Italy, Spain and Portugal. Only 47,902 of them record their dedication in a structured field. For the rest I read the saint from the church's name, in eight languages, and checked that reading against the structured field wherever both exist. They agree 96% of the time. In all, 208,005 churches (74%) have an identifiable dedication.
Shares are always within a country or region. Wikidata's coverage of churches differs a lot between countries (see section 09), so raw counts across borders would mostly measure the database.
Each hexagon is 20 km across the flats and holds every church in it. In the first view the colour is the saint with the most churches in that hexagon, once Mary, Christ, the Trinity, the Holy Cross, the Holy Spirit, the Holy Family and All Saints are set aside (they are not saints in the same sense, and Mary would otherwise colour almost everything). Paler hexagons are ties. Switch to All dedications to see how completely Mary dominates, pick one saint to see where that saint's share is highest, or show the holy wells. Tap a hexagon for its full list.
Hexagons with fewer than 10 identified churches are left pale. Basemap tiles © Esri. Church data: Wikidata (CC0).
Mary is the most common dedication in every one of the twelve countries and leads in 85% of the hexagons with enough data. Her share rises as you go south: 38% of identified churches in Portugal, 30% in Italy and 29% in Spain, against 15% in the United Kingdom, 14% in Germany and 9% in Luxembourg. I have counted every Marian title as one: Notre-Dame, Our Lady of Mount Carmel, the Assumption, Mariä Himmelfahrt, Nuestra Señora del Pilar and the rest.
Share of identified churches dedicated to Mary, and to Christ and the Trinity
Christ and the Trinity includes the Holy Cross, the Holy Spirit and the Holy Family. Hover or tap a bar.
The second band, dedications to Christ himself, to the Trinity or to the Cross, is largest in Austria (13%), Germany (12%) and Ireland (11%). In Germany part of that is Protestant: churches built after the Reformation are more often called Christuskirche or Erlöserkirche than after a saint, and many have no dedication in their name at all.
Set Mary aside and three names take most of the map. Peter leads in 30% of hexagons, John in 22% and Martin in 13%. ('John' here is the Baptist and the Evangelist together, because a name such as Johanniskirche or St John's rarely says which.) Peter is strong almost everywhere and peaks in Poitou-Charentes (13% of churches). John runs through northern England and western Germany, with the highest shares in Cheshire and Cumbria.
Martin of Tours, the soldier who cut his cloak in half for a beggar, is the saint of France. With 7.9% of French churches he is second only to Peter among the saints, and his heartland is the north: Picardie (15%), Nord-Pas de Calais (13%) and Centre - Val de Loire (13%). Across the Channel he falls to 1.1%.
Where the well-known saints are strongest
Share of each country's identified churches. Circle area shows the share; the largest in each row is gold. Hover or tap a circle.
Some saints are a map of one region's history. The early saints of Ireland, Wales, Scotland, Cornwall and Brittany (a group of 117 names, listed in the methods) account for 22% of Irish churches and 4.7% of British ones, peaking in Northern and Western (26%) and Northern Ireland (23%). In France they are 0.9% of churches overall but 10% in Brittany.
Nicholas, patron of sailors and merchants, is strongest along the North Sea and Baltic coasts: Groningen (11%), Friesland (NL) and Brandenburg. Lambert, the bishop of Maastricht killed at Liège, belongs to the Low Countries, peaking in Noord-Brabant (5.3%). Boniface, killed near Dokkum, has his highest share in Friesland (NL) (3.8%); Kilian, martyred at Würzburg, in Unterfranken (2.7%); Ambrose of Milan in Ticino (2.1%) and Lombardia (1.1%). These are small shares, but they are almost nowhere else.
To find each region's own saint, I looked for the saint with at least eight churches in a region whose share there most exceeds its share in the rest of the same country. The result is a roll-call of local bishops, hermits and founders, many with every one of their country's churches in that one region:
Regions are NUTS 2016 level 2. 'Of the country's' counts churches with that dedication in the same country.
By tradition the apostle James is buried at Santiago de Compostela, the goal of one of medieval Europe's great pilgrimages. In Spain, his share of churches does fall away with distance from the cathedral: 6.6% of churches within 150 km (mostly Galicia), 3.1% at 300 to 500 km and 2.1% at 500 to 750 km. Galicia as a whole has 6.6%, against 3.8% for Spain. Beyond Spain the gradient is faint: France's share drifts from 1.6% in the south-west to 1.2% beyond 1,000 km, and Britain, at 2.8%, has more of him than France. Pilgrim roads may have spread his cult, but they do not leave a clear trail in church names.
Share of churches dedicated to James, by distance from Santiago de Compostela
Distance bands with at least 150 identified churches. Hover or tap a point.
Michael the archangel is often said to favour high places: Mont-Saint-Michel, St Michael's Mount, the tower on Glastonbury Tor. I tested this where I have terrain data, in Britain and Ireland. Churches of St Michael do stand on higher ground overall (median 70 m above sea level against 57 m for other dedications), but they are not more often on a local high point. 6.7% of Michael's 1,143 churches stand higher than at least 90% of the ground within 1 km, against 6.2% of other churches, and Michael ranks 14 of 32 dedications on that measure. The famous hilltop Michaels are real, but they are a small part of a large, mostly lowland cult.
Share of each dedication's churches on local high ground
Britain and Ireland, dedications with 150 or more churches. 'Local high ground': higher than at least 90% of 24 points 500 m and 1 km away.
A way to measure variety that is fair to regions of different size is to ask how many different dedications you would meet among 100 churches picked at random. The answer ranges from 66 in Cornwall and Isles of Scilly to 23 in Algarve. The Celtic west is the most varied place in Western Europe: West Wales and The Valleys (55) and Bretagne (53) follow Cornwall, where many parishes keep the name of their own early saint. The least varied are scattered, from Algarve and Extremadura to East Anglia and Basilicata, and mostly they are places where Mary or a few great saints take a large share. Across the 176 regions with enough churches, variety and Mary's share have a correlation of -0.52.
Different dedications per 100 churches: most and least varied regions
Expected number of distinct dedications in a random 100 identified churches (rarefaction). Regions with at least 100 identified churches.
Wikidata holds 1,178 holy wells in the study countries, 1,021 of them in Ireland, so this is really an Irish story (the British, French and Italian lists are short). Of the Irish wells, 515 have a name I can read as a saint, and the top of that list looks quite unlike Ireland's churches. Brigid holds 23% of the named wells but only 3.3% of the churches; Mary 17% of wells against 21% of churches. The early Irish saints together hold 39% of named wells against 22% of churches. Wells are older, smaller, more local places of devotion, and Brigid is at home there.
Ireland: holy wells and churches, by dedication
Share of named wells (gold) and of identified churches (ink). Hover or tap a bar.
Wikidata is uneven. It has 220 church buildings per 1,000 km² for Italy but 41 for Portugal and 42 for Spain. The share I can assign to a saint ranges from 95% in Italy to 50% in Switzerland and 51% in Germany, where many Protestant churches carry only a village name. Belgium records 83% of dedications in the structured field; Germany 3%. That is why every figure on this page is a share within a country or region.
Churches, coverage and leading saints by country
How well the name reader agrees with Wikidata's own dedications
Churches that have both a structured dedication (P825) and a saint in their name: share where the name gives the same saint. Name rules plus aliases learned from the other half of the churches.
This is a map of Wikidata, not a census of churches: coverage and the use of P825 differ by country, region and even by editor. Reading saints from names is right about 96% of the time where it can be checked, and probably less well for rare local saints. A dedication can change over the centuries, and a modern name may not be the medieval one. Ties between saints in small hexagons are broken by the saint's overall frequency. The Celtic saints group is my own list of early medieval saints of Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Cornwall and Brittany (117 names); continental missionaries of Irish birth such as Columbanus, Gall, Fiacre and Kilian are not in it.
Celtic group: .