ИСТИНА

Alexei Lidov (Moscow State University) The Shroud of Christ and the Holy Mandylion in Byzantine Hierotopy Wuerzburg Oct.17-18, ‘The Image of Christ’ In the present paper I will argue that the major relics played a crucial role in Byzantine hierotopy, in other words - in creation of particular sacred spaces. This time the focus will be on two most famous relics with the image of Christ ‘not made by human hands’ – the Constantinopolitan Shroud (perhaps, world known as the Shroud of Turin) and the image miraculously appeared on the cloth, so called the Holy Mandylion in Greek, or ‘Svyatoi Ubrus’ (Spas Nerukotvornyi) in Church Slavonic. There is a wide spread opinion that the Shroud and the Mandylion were one and the same relic. According to this assumption, the four meters long Shroud was folded to a small piece of cloth with the Holy Face. Yet there are no proofs at all for this supposition, and a lot of arguments against this identification, which were recently articulated by Andrea Nicolotti and some other scholars. In our discussion today it seems important just to fix a fact that in Constantinople before the Fourth Crusade two absolutely different relics did exist simultaneously: the Syndon (the burial shroud) of Christ and the Holy Mandylion, which, according to a legend, was sent by Christ to Abgar of Edessa, and later translated to the Byzantine capital in 944. Both relics were kept in the imperial Pharos chapel of the Constantinopolitan Great Palace - the most significant church-reliquary of the Byzantine world, where all main relics of Christ’s Passion were collected by the emperors.