The key to one of the mysteries of the unrecognized relic of Christendom is hidden in the sermon of the referendarium of the Church of St. Sophia Gregory
430 years ago, on September 14, 1578, the 1,500-year wanderings of the Savior's funeral covers stopped. They finally found peace in the Cathedral of Turin. However, the disputes over the Turin Shroud are not over yet. The three most famous relics of the Christian world - the shroud, the Grail and the spear of Longinus - are not recognized as such by any of the main Christian churches, but all of them are of great interest to both believers and scientists. A radiocarbon study of the fabric of the shroud, carried out at the initiative of the Roman curia in 1988, was supposed to reconcile everyone, since it finally became clear that the shroud was created no earlier than 1260 and no later than 1390. Since then, its official status in the Catholic world has been that of an icon, not a relic. But there are still many mysteries. Saying when does not mean answering the question "how?"Some tried to prove that the shroud could be painted with paint, while others argued that this requires a bright flash, as in a nuclear explosion. The story of this relic's wanderings is just as confusing.
Not just a shroud?
Despite the results of radiocarbon analysis and the official position of the church, according to many believers and a number of experts, the shroud kept in the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist in Turin is the same shroud, a rectangular burial shroud (in Greek "sindon"), in which the Savior was wrapped taking down from the cross at Calvary. Pontius Pilate himself gave permission for the funeral - in response to the intercession of the secret follower of Christ, Joseph of Arimathea, a wealthy Jew and a member of the Sanhedrin.
The length of the shroud is 4 m and 36 cm (it is often rounded up to 4 m and 40 cm), and the width is 1 m and 10 cm. The pattern of linen fabric is known among textile workers as herringbone twill - “herring bone”, or simple herringbone. This weaving is still used in weaving.
However, on the “herringbone” the commonness of the shroud ends, for there is a faint yellowish imprint of the male body on the fabric - a front view on the half that covered the body from above, and a rear view, on the half that touched the body from below. The person's hands are folded at the wrists and cover the loins. If both images are combined in an orthogonal (lateral) projection, a three-dimensional image of the deceased will be obtained. The peculiarity of the image is that it was obtained not as a result of using dyes, but as if the fabric itself was subjected to some kind of heat treatment.
The print - or image - reproduces the image of a tall (175–188 cm) man with a fairly developed musculature, who wore a mustache, a forked beard and shoulder-length hair, which he parted in the middle. There are also reddish-brown stains on the fabric - traces of blood. They correspond exactly to the wounds that, according to the testimony of the evangelists, Christ received during his passion.
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The forehead and scalp are marked with punctures from a crown of thorns (we will say right away that torture with a crown of thorns was not widespread, and outside of the history of Christ it does not occur), and the face was swollen as a result of beating, an impressive bruise was even visible on the right cheek. On the right side of the sternum, there is a mark from a spear with particles of blood and lymph - exactly according to the Gospel of John. On the back, traces of flogging with a Roman many-tailed lash - a flagroom are clearly visible. The right shoulder, on which the condemned to crucifixion had to carry the cross, is rubbed. On the right wrist there is a round nail mark with traces of blood. The left wrist was located under the right one and, accordingly, did not leave a trace of blood. The deceased's sternum is dilated, as if the victim was desperately trying to draw air into the lungs, which is typical when dying on the cross. It coincides with the biblical story that the victim's feet are intact. The fact is that to hasten the death of the crucified, the Romans inflicted a "blow of mercy" on them - they broke their legs. Hanging on the arms without support on the legs led to early pulmonary edema, and the sentenced died faster. Christ did not need a "blow of mercy": the Roman soldiers decided that Jesus was dead. Finally, both feet are pierced with a single pin.
It bears the shroud and other evidence of history. In particular, traces of the fire she experienced in 1532 - burnt areas where the cloth came into contact with the molten silver of the ark, and large water stains. The folds are also clearly visible on the fabric, the most noticeable of which is located directly under the chin of the crucified face.
Odyssey of the miraculous sindon: from the tomb to Constantinople
For the first time the shroud was mentioned in the Gospel of John (20: 4-9): “… Peter and another disciple went out and went to the sepulcher. […] And, bending down, saw the sheets lying; but did not enter [into the tomb]. After him comes Simon Peter, and enters the tomb, and sees only the sheets lying, and the cloth that was on His head, not lying with swaddling clothes, but specially coiled in another place. Then the other disciple, who had come to the tomb first, also entered, and he saw and believed. " Here the “other” is the Evangelist John himself.
And that's all, no more information, except for the apocryphal evidence that Joseph of Arimathea hid the shroud in Qumran. The fact remains - until the XIV century we are losing the sindon as an artifact, although references to the image of the face of Christ not made by hands pop up in sources all the time.
First of all, we are talking about reports concerning the so-called "Edessa mandilion" (from the Greek mandias - "scarf, towel, ubrus"). In the Catholic tradition, it is called "Veronica's Fee", and in the Orthodox - "The Savior Not Made by Hands." According to the descriptions, it was a rectangular piece of cloth on which the face of the Savior - the first icon - was imprinted.
The western and eastern legend of the Mandilion are not the same. In the Eastern (Byzantine) tradition, the appearance of the ubrus is associated with Abgar V (Abgarus V, first half of the 1st century) - the king of Edessa (now Urfa in Turkey). Abgar suffered from an incurable disease: according to one version, gout, according to the other - leprosy. When stories of Jesus' miracles reached his domain, the king sent a letter to the Nazarene asking him to come and deliver him from his suffering. Jesus did not go himself, in return he sent Abgar a plate, with which, after washing, he wiped his face - this is how the Savior's face was imprinted on the cloth for the first time. Abgar not only recovered, but also became the owner of a priceless miraculous relic.
The first written evidence of the shroud dates back to the 3rd century and belongs to the pen of Eusebius (260–339), Archbishop of Caesarea. The priest reports that he happened to work with documents from Abgar's office, and he was even able to establish that the ubrus was brought to Edessa by the Apostle Thaddeus. But no one knew where the boards were at that time.
According to chroniclers, the Mandillion "floated" itself in 525, when there was a strong flood of the Daisan (a tributary of the Euphrates). During the repair of the gates of Edessa, which had been damaged by the water, in the wall above the entrance they found a certain fabric bearing the image of a man's face. It could well have been the Savior Not Made by Hands - after all, it was after this discovery that Edessa became the center of Christian pilgrimage. Moreover, after 525, the iconography of Jesus of Nazareth also changed radically. A beardless antique youth with blond curls is replaced by a black-haired and black-bearded man of the Semitic phenotype, as it turns out later - corresponding to the image on the headdress. By the way, the Orthodox tradition of placing the image of the Savior Not Made by Hands over the gates of monasteries and fortresses comes from this very place.
In 944, the referendarium of the Temple of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, Gregory (in other words, the mediator between the temple priests and the emperor) transports the mandilion from Edessa to the capital of Byzantium: the scene of the transfer of the folded canvas by the priest to the emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus (Kōnstantinos VII Porphyrogennētos, 905–959) Stories of Byzantine Emperors”, kept in the Spanish National Library. The miniature clearly shows the bearded face depicted on the fabric. Not so long ago, a record of a sermon delivered by Gregory in honor of this significant event was found in the archives of the Vatican. Describing the shrine, he says about it: “The face was imprinted because of the perspiration of death on the face of the Savior - and by the will of God. And blood clots from His side adorned the imprint. It turns out that the Edessa mandillion was still a burial shroud,bearing the imprint of a full body. That is, it was a shroud! Most likely, for a long time it was perceived only as the face of Christ, simply because it was folded several times and framed (recall the deepest fold under the chin, visible on the fabric).
The Western legend of the Mandillion is different. In accordance with it, during the journey of the cross to Golgotha, a pious woman named Veronica gave Christ a handkerchief so that He could wipe his face, as a result of which the image of the Savior remained on the fabric. With the help of this Plata Veronica then healed the emperor Tiberius (Tiberius Claudius Nero, 42 BC - 37 AD). The main difference between Veronica's Plate and the Mandillion of Edessa is in the expression on the face of Jesus. If the Savior Not Made by Hands is tranquility itself, then Veronica's Plat is suffering (besides, Christ is depicted on it in a crown of thorns). However, the historicity of Plata is highly questioned: Veronica was Jewish, but her name was "constructed" from the Latin vera - "truth" and the Greek icon - "image." This means that this is a later, already "ideologized" character. By the way,Travels of the Veronica's Plate are practically not documented in any way, but it is now kept in the cathedral of the Italian city of Manoppello.
During the Fourth Crusade, when the army of Christ plundered Constantinople (1204), the Mandilion disappeared. After that, it will appear in written history only in 1357. Where the Edesian relic was all this time - no one knows for sure.
The Case of Jesus, the Grand Master and Baphomet
Some researchers believe that all this time the shroud was kept by the Knights of the Knights Templar: after all, they were the main financiers of the Fourth Crusade. There is a version that first the miraculous image ended up in their treasury in Akka, and after its fall in 1291 - to Sidon and then to Cyprus. Fifteen years later, the Grand Master of the Order Jacques de Molay (Jacques Bernard de Molay, 1243-1314) transported the relic to France. It was then that rumors spread that the Templars "worship a mysterious bearded head, an idol with a red beard (remember the brownish color of the shroud! - Author), who is called the Savior." The Templars allegedly called the same bearded head Baphomet, and all these sins together automatically turned them into heretics. It was so or otherwise - it is not known,but it was precisely the accusation of the templars of worshiping Baphomet that the French king Philip IV the Handsome (Philippe IV le Bel, 1268-1314) used to destroy the order and seize its considerable riches. In March 1314, Jacques de Molay was burned at the stake.
The involvement of the Templars in the adventures of the shroud is so similar to the truth that it has even been suggested that the person depicted on the sindon is none other than Jacques de Molay himself, because the sufferings he endured in dungeons were as terrible as the passions Christ's.
However, this assumption does not hold water. The man who was imprinted on the shroud was about thirty years old, and Jacques de Molay was seventy. And yet, the version about the involvement of the Knights of the Temple in the shroud is supported by one more fact. In 1944, the Germans bombed, among other targets, the small southern English town of Templecombe. After one of the raids, several medieval buildings were partially destroyed. While dismantling the rubble, under the roof of one of them, they found the lid of a casket with a portrait of a bearded man, the exact same face depicted on Byzantine copies of the Mandillion. And this is no coincidence - Templecom was once a stronghold of the English templars, a "training center" where all the most valiant "professional crusaders" were gathered before being sent to the Middle East.
Uncle, wife and other relatives
The shroud was again revealed to the world only in 1357, when the widow of Count Geoffroi de Charny (Geoffroi de Charny, 1300-1356), who died in the Battle of Poitiers, exhibited it in the champagne town of Lirey. According to documents, Charney received a shroud from King Philip VI de Valois (1293-1350) for valor. But here, too, there is one interesting circumstance. De Charney had an almost complete namesake - Count Geoffrey de Charney (d. 1314) - one of the closest associates of de Molay, commander of the order in Normandy, who was burned along with the Grand Master. The conclusion suggests itself that these two characters were related. Some historians directly claim that they were uncle and nephew. And then it turns out that de Charny actually received the relic not from the king at all, but from the Templars.
There is another version of the history of the appearance of the Sindon in Europe, also associated with the Sharni clan. According to this hypothesis, in the first half of the 13th century, the shroud was located in Latin Romania. The so-called state arose after the plundering of Constantinople by the crusaders, on part of the Byzantine territory (east of the Balkan Peninsula and west of Asia Minor) and existed until 1261. The settlers who settled in these lands and did not return to their homeland are called Franco-Greeks. So, a number of historians suggest that the ubrus was with the Franco-Greek Sharpigny family from Morea (modern Peloponnese). But how did he get to them?
Supporters of this version argue that after the sack of Constantinople by the crusaders, Sindon fell into the hands of the Burgundian knight Othon de la Roche (d. 1234), who probably led the attack on the Pharos church, where the ubrus was kept. In 1204, Otto was granted the title of Duke of Athens. The Duchy of Athens was part of Latin Romagna and was in the immediate vicinity of Morea. There is indirect evidence that de la Roche and Charpigny were in a family relationship, so that the shroud could well have been transferred from one to another. At the beginning of the XIV century, Charpigny became related to Charny: Agnes de Charpigny married Dre de Charny, the older brother of Geoffroy de Charny. This means that the young wife could well have brought the relic with her.
All that the king has left
Be that as it may, in 1357 the shroud was already in Champagne and was exhibited in the Lyraean Church of St. Mary. Even then, violent disputes flared up around the cover. For example, Bishop Pierre d'Arcis of Trois (Pierre d'Arcis), whose diocese Lirey was a member of, declared that Sindon was a forgery, because the Gospel says nothing about his fate. Then the Pope personally stood up for the relic (or rather, the antipope, it was the time of the church schism in Europe) Clement VII (Clement VII, 1342-1394), in January 1390 he recognized the demonstration of the veil as legal with a bull, though with the specification that the sindon should be shown to pilgrims as an "image or copy" from the original.
By the middle of the 15th century, the Sharni family fell into decay. Then the granddaughter of Geoffroy de Charny Marguerite in 1443 took the ubrus from the Lyraean church (for which the local canons later anathematized her) and set off on a journey across Europe, hoping to exchange the shrine for shelter and a house at some court. Her adventures lasted ten years and ended thanks to Ludovico I di Savoia (1413-1465). Since then, the Savoy dynasty remained the guardian of the shroud for more than five hundred years.
In 1464, Pope Sixtus IV (Sixtus IV, 1414-1484) confirmed the authenticity of the shroud, and a chapel was built for it in Chambéry. In 1532, a fire broke out there, and the relic was saved by a miracle, but since then traces of fire and water have remained on Sindon. In 1578, the shroud was transported to Turin, the new capital of the Savoy dynasty. It was kept there in the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist and, until World War II, was exhibited every May 4 for the approach of parishioners.
When in 1946 the last Italian king from the Savoy dynasty, Umberto II (Umberto Nicola Tommaso Govanni di Savoia, 1904-1983), abdicated and prepared to go into exile, all his property was confiscated by the state. With the exception of the shroud, which was not listed in any document as an object of his property and, accordingly, could not be confiscated. On March 27, 1981, Umberto, already preparing to depart to another world, bequeathed the relic to the Holy See, that is, to the Pope, who at that time was John Paul II (1920-2005).
Now the shroud is in the Cathedral of Turin. It is stored in an inert gas-filled ark made of bulletproof glass. It is protected from light and the required temperature is maintained in the room. The relic is taken out to the believers once every quarter of a century. The last time it happened was in 2000, when more than a million people saw the priceless relic.
Dubrovskaya Dina, Kotov Pavel