Because no information about him was available, a biography was written in the Middle Ages, which is based purely on legendary data and tells not so much the life of Saint Wendelinus, but rather how the medieval man of that time imagined the life of a holy hermit from earlier times.

The biographies state that Wendelin was the son of a Scottish king who led a pious life as a youth before leaving his home in secret to make a pilgrimage to Rome.

[3] Wendelin then established a company of hermits from which sprang the Benedictine Abbey of Tholey in Saarland.

Realizing that this was a miracle from God he granted Wendelin his greatest desire and built him his own hermit cell in the vicinity of the farm.

[4] Wendelin was buried in his cell, and a chapel was built over the grave and the small town of Sankt Wendel grew up nearby.

Baldwin's successor, Bohemond II, built the present beautiful Gothic church, dedicated in 1360, to which the saint's relics were transferred.

Wendelin is the patron saint of country people and herdsmen[5] and is still venerated in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and South Africa.

Before 1920, German was the dominant language in hundreds of villages in Hungary, although Zalavar appears to be not in the main Berman speaking areas.

A Zalavar monument listing people who died in both World Wars has two or three names of German origin.