By Maureen O’Hare, CNN
(CNN) — For many around the world, St. Patrick’s Day is a celebration of green beer, fiddle music, and the best holiday after Halloween for wearing a silly hat and throwing up in the street.
For me, though, as a child growing up in the Northern Irish town of Downpatrick, the saint’s traditional burial place, it was a pious affair of Mass in the morning, wearing an Aran-knit jumper and a wilting badge of shamrock, then a day off school.
So who then was the real St. Patrick, whose legacy contains such multitudes?
In the 1,600 years since this Christian missionary and bishop made his mark in Ireland, the cult and mythology surrounding him has overtaken the man himself.
To mark St. Patrick’s Day on March 17, here are a few surprising things you might not know about him.
1. He wasn’t Irish
Patrick was born into a Christian family in Britain in the late fourth century, when the Roman Empire was in decline and had become vulnerable to raids from beyond its borders.
His comfortable life as a deacon’s son was disrupted at the age of 16 when he was captured and enslaved by Irish raiders, spending the next years as a shepherd on a remote, often freezing hillside.
Remarkably for the fifth century, he left two written accounts from his life, but “he’s not very great with specifics,” says historian Fin Dwyer, host of The Irish History Podcast and Transatlantic: An Irish American History Podcast. “He does mention place names, but obviously they’ve changed.”
Some argue he was a slave on Slemish Mountain in the northern county of Antrim, others say Killala Bay in the western county of Mayo.
“These things are important to historians,” says Dwyer, but “no one’s ever going to definitely prove this.”
2. He escaped slavery, then came back
In his early 20s, Patrick fled his captors and made it back to his family in Britain, but soon he was hankering to get back to Ireland and spread the Christian message.
“For some unknown reason, he decided to punish himself all over again and come back,” says Duane Fitzsimons, a tour guide in my home town of Downpatrick, on the Lecale peninsula. The area has many sites closely associated with Patrick’s life and is home to the Saint Patrick Centre, the world’s only permanent exhibition to Ireland’s patron saint.
He is also, we discover at the end of our interview, my second-cousin-once-removed, because sometimes the cliché about all Irish people knowing each other turns out to be true.
“He lands somewhere on the northern shore of Lecale” and is discovered by Dichu, the brother of one of the local kings, says Fitzsimons.
“It’s an odd thing, because they seem to put a lot of trust into Patrick, and back then, these kings would have been the figurehead of their society” and they took a big risk by backing him.
“If anything failed within their societies, say if the crops failed for a year or a sudden illness took the livestock, their heads were the ultimate price for this,” he adds.
Patrick was given a barn for shelter in the village of Saul outside Downpatrick. That became the site of his first church and still attracts pilgrims today.
3. He didn’t convert Ireland to Christianity single-handedly
“It’s not a story of ‘one man comes and converts an island that was then divided into dozens of kingdoms.’ It would have been physically impossible,” says Dwyer.
While Patrick wasn’t the first Christian missionary in Ireland (that was Palladius in the early fifth century), he was the most successful.
The Dál Riata, in Irel