The World's Most Mysterious Objects. Lionel and Patricia Fanthorpe
same thing; their seemingly different origin stories have simply been mythologized, diversified, and embroidered over the centuries. This adds to the importance of the original mystery rather than reducing it. When something is considered important enough to have stories woven around it as the years pass, it’s a safe bet to suggest that the historical original was something really significant.
To start with, there is a touching legend to the effect that a humane and pious woman named Veronica was moved with pity for Christ as the Roman executioners took him to Calvary to be crucified. She showed her sympathy in a practical and merciful way by moving through the crowd, defying the Roman soldiers, and wiping his face for him. According to legend, she was rewarded with a perfect picture of the divine countenance on the cloth she had used. Consequently, this became known as Saint Veronica’s Hankerchief. However, the name Veronica, it has been suggested, actually came from Icon Veritas — meaning the true, real, or accurate picture. Moving away from the legend of the saint’s kindness, was it possible that a Christian artist among the early disciples had painted a picture of his beloved master on cloth, a picture that later became known as the true or authentic likeness of Christ and around which the Veronica legend grew?
The best known — and the most controversial — image is undoubtedly the Turin Shroud. Saint Luke and Saint John both record that grave wrappings were seen in the empty tomb after the Resurrection of Jesus. There is an early Christian tradition that Thaddaeus, who was one of the seventy disciples mentioned in the Gospel of Saint Luke, chapter 10, verse 1, took the shroud with him for safekeeping. Thaddaeus was said to have gone as a missionary to Edessa, which is now known as Urfa and is situated in eastern Turkey.
Mannu the Sixth persecuted the Edessan Christians, and the precious shroud was carefully concealed in a secret hiding place among the stones above the west gate. Hermetically sealed there for two or three hundred years, it came to light again in the early sixth century. A disastrous flood had made it necessary to rebuild much of the Edessan city walls, including the critical area containing the west gate. Contemporary witnesses declared without hesitation that they believed it to be the Holy Cloth, or Holy Image, that Thaddaeus had brought to the city. (Might it not have been one and the same thing as Saint Veronica’s Hankerchief — the Icon Veritas?) The Emperor Justinian also accepted its authenticity and promptly arranged for the Hagia Sophia Cathedral to be built to house it in Constantinople (later re-named Istanbul).
The mysterious image-bearing cloth (Veronica’s or Thaddaeus’s?) was from then on referred to as the Mandylion — and so the third version of the same legend was born. The Arabic term mandylion refers simply to a veil, a small cloth, or even a handkerchief — but the Shroud of Turin is well over three metres long. How is the apparent paradox resolved? Researchers have suggested that it was folded very carefully and framed in such a way that only the face was visible.
One reason for this folding may well have been the Jewish laws relating to what was considered to be ritually clean or unclean. A shroud was technically unclean, and was therefore an object to be scrupulously avoided by any law-abiding Jew.
Religious art historians have noticed that after the recovery of the Mandylion from its niche in the wall above the West Gate, all representations of Christ seem to have been based on it. Byzantine mosaics, frescoes, and paintings dating from the sixth century have shown more than a dozen significant points of similarity with the image on the shroud.
Beginning in the middle of the tenth century, the Mandylion was taken on a series of religious journeys. Art historians and icon experts again provided valuable supporting evidence for the apparent influence the Mandylion had had on religious art at this time. It would seem that during its tenth-century journeys, and right up until the start of the thirteenth century, the Mandylion, or Holy Shroud (originally called the Image of Edessa) was exhibited in its full, unfolded form. Earlier pictures of the dead Christ being laid reverently in the tomb had shown grave wrappings swathed around His body in the traditional funerary style. Pictures from the second half of the tenth century onwards, however, show the dead Christ lying in a position that would correspond to the image on the shroud.
The cataclysmic tragedy of 1204, when the misdirected Fourth Crusade destroyed Constantinople, led to the disappearance of the Mandylion for a century and a half. It seems probable that the mysterious sacred cloth was rediscovered by the valiant and indomitable Knights Templar, who had been founded in 1119, only eighty-five years before the overthrow of Constantinople. One of the central mysteries of this noble order of warrior-priests was a secret ceremony in which a sacred face, or head, was venerated. Prior to the malicious negative propaganda that Philip IV, ironically known as Philip le Bel, circulated about the Templars before his treacherous attack on them in 1307, the Templars had always enjoyed a reputation as men of total honesty and integrity. They were exactly the type of people to whom the Mandylion could have been safely entrusted.
Approximately half a century after Philip’s attack, Geoffrey de Charny seems to have had possession of the Mandylion. When he died, his widow exhibited it, charging pilgrims a small entrance fee because Geoffrey’s death had left her almost penniless. The querulous local bishop interfered and the widow’s fundraising exhibition of the Mandylion ceased. It seems ironic that the great Templar Order (which at the height of its power had ignored petty local bishops and jealous parish clergies with the contempt they deserved) should have had the exhibition of their most sacred relic inhibited by the whim of an unimportant rural bishop.
Although this discreditable episode apparently occurred in Lirey, a little French village over a hundred miles from Paris, it nevertheless brought the Mandylion back into the limelight. Research into accounts of this 1357 exhibition seems to suggest that the Mandylion was already a very old relic when Madame de Charny put it on exhibition. After her death, her son, also called Geoffrey, took charge of the Holy Shroud. This second Geoffrey of Charny also died impoverished, and his widow gave the shroud to Louis of Savoy.
In 1464, Pope Sixtus IV gave his support to the authenticity of the shroud, but it was over a century before it was sent to Turin. Borromeo saw it there in 1578, and Francis de Sales, who was then an assistant bishop, was one of those who were privileged to hold it during an exhibition in 1639.
Controversy continues to rage fiercely around the Mandylion as one piece of data continually seems to contradict another. In 1973, for example, threads from the Mandylion were scientifically examined at the Belgian Institute of Textile Technology in Ghent. Professor Gilbert Raes was in charge at the time. Rather surprisingly, traces of cotton were identified among the linen from which the shroud was largely woven, and this suggested to Raes and his colleagues that the linen had been made on a loom that was also used for weaving cotton. Cotton was apparently grown and used in Egypt and most of the Middle East in those days, but not in Europe. Raes also discerned herringbone patterns in the weave. These were characteristic of work done in Egypt and the Middle East two thousand years ago. The Associate Professor of Egyptology at Turin University in the 1970s was Silvio Curto, and it was his considered professional opinion that the cloth could indeed be two thousand years old.
Additional supporting evidence comes from Max Frei, a Swiss forensic scientist. Frei had had considerable botanical experience and was intrigued by the tiny pollen grains adhering to the shroud. In 1973, he categorized almost fifty different varieties of pollen clinging to the fibres of the Mandylion. More than thirty of the varieties he identified were found only in Palestine, the Turkish Steppes, and the area around Constantinople. Fifteen or sixteen varieties of pollen were identified as European, and some researchers argued that these grains could have become embedded in the Mandylion while it was being exhibited between 944 and 1204. As far as can be ascertained, it is highly unlikely that the shroud left European Christendom after being shown at Lirey by Geoffrey Senior’s widow in 1357.
Members of an organization known as “The Shroud of Turin Research Project” were allowed to make a close and detailed examination of it in 1978. Their report included comments about the precise size and structure