The Origins of Valentine’s Day

Flowers, chocolates, jewelry, or a heart-shaped DIY Valentine’s cards with love messages from your partner are all main symbols of celebration in Valentine’s Day or St Valentine’s day, which is celebrated on the 14th of February every year. That day means different things to different people, but whatever your personal beliefs towards that day are, you will always wonder about its origins from time to time, so let’s see the story of Valente’s day.

The day was named after a famous saint whose name was Valentine, however, there are different stories behind who he really was. The popular story of him is that St Valentine was a priest from Rome in the third century AD. When Emperor Claudius II banned marriage because he always believed that married men were terrible soldiers, Valentine felt that it was unfair, so he was arranging marriages secretly, which made him a proponent of love in some eyes. When Claudius discovered Valentine’s betrayal, he sent him to jail and he was sentenced to death. When Valentine was in prison, he fell in love with the jailer’s daughter, and when he was taken to be executed on 14 February, he sent a letter to the girl he fell in love with, and it was signed “from your Valentine”.

The first Valentine’s Day was in the year 496!  

Having a particular Valentine’s Day is a very old tradition, thought to have originated from a Roman festival. The Romans had a festival called Lupercalia in the middle of February, which is the official start of their springtime. It’s thought that as part of their celebrations, boys drew names of girls from a box, and they’d be boyfriend and girlfriend during the festival and sometimes they’d get married. Later on, the church wanted to turn this festival into a Christian celebration and decided to use it to remember St Valentine too. Gradually, St Valentine’s name started to be used by people to express their feelings to those they loved.