True Cross

• 1. Introduction

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  In February 2020, an archpriest in the Sevastopol district named Sergiy Khalyuta announced that a donor had bought a piece of the True Cross. It was meant for the chapel aboard the Russian missile cruiser Moskva. In April 2022 the ship sank during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and people speculated that the fragment had gone down with it.

  The True Cross is the wooden cross on which, in Christian tradition, Jesus of Nazareth was crucified. Today the Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox churches all claim to hold pieces of it, as do denominations of the Church of the East. Historians generally dispute that the relics are authentic, and Protestant and other churches do not hold them in high regard.

  So how does a first-century execution beam become a prize carried on a modern warship? Who first said it had been found, and why did the earliest writers say so little? How did one piece of wood travel from Jerusalem to Ethiopia, Norway and Ireland? And what would it mean if every surviving splinter were added together?

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• 2. Legends of the Wood

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  In 1260, Jacobus de Voragine, Bishop of Genoa, wrote down the history of the cross in his Golden Legend. By then, Latin-speaking Western Europe had known the story for a long time. Voragine did not settle on a single origin. He recorded several.

  In his Life of Adam, the cross springs from three trees. They grew from three seeds of the Tree of Mercy, which Seth gathered and planted in the mouth of Adam's corpse.

  A second chapter, Of the Invention of the Holy Cross, gives another route. Here the wood comes from a tree grown from part of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Seth planted it on Adam's grave, and it stood there until the time of Solomon. In one variant it passed through Moses, who used it as his staff, and then David, who planted it at Jerusalem. Solomon cut it down for a beam in his temple, but it never fitted.

  The Queen of Sheba then enters the tale. The tree was felled after many centuries and laid down as a bridge, and she crossed it on her way to meet Solomon. She was so struck by the portent in the timber that she fell to her knees and revered it. She told Solomon that a piece of wood from the bridge would replace God's covenant with the Jewish people with a new order. Fearing for his people, Solomon had the timber buried. After fourteen generations, the wood was shaped into the cross of Jesus Christ.

  In the Late Middle Ages and early Renaissance, this account won wide acceptance. Between 1452 and 1466, Piero della Francesca painted one of the most famous fresco cycles of the Renaissance on the chancel walls of the Church of San Francesco in Arezzo. His Legend of the True Cross follows the episodes of the Golden Legend faithfully.

  Eastern Christians had their own version. In Eastern Orthodox sacred tradition, the cross was made from three woods: cedar, pine and cypress. That list echoes a verse in Isaiah promising to make "the place of my feet" glorious. Interpreters read those words as the footrest, the suppedaneum, where Jesus's feet were nailed. It appears on the Orthodox cross.

  A further tradition says the three trees grew together in one spot. An Orthodox icon in the Monastery of the Cross shows Lot, the nephew of Abraham, watering them. Their wood went into the Temple in Jerusalem. When Herod rebuilt the Temple, the timber was removed and thrown away, and it ended up as the cross of the crucifixion.

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• 3. Silent Witnesses

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  Eusebius of Caesarea, who died in 339, wrote the earliest and main account of the rediscovery of the tomb of Jesus. His Life of Constantine describes the first church built on the site. It never mentions the True Cross.

  Eusebius says the site of the Holy Sepulchre had been venerated by the early Christian Church in Jerusalem. Later it was buried under earth, and a temple of Venus was built on top. He does not say who did it. The source suggests it probably happened when Hadrian rebuilt Jerusalem as the Roman city of Aelia Capitolina in 130. That rebuilding followed the city's destruction at the end of the Jewish Revolt in the year 70, and it connects with Bar Kokhba's revolt of 132-135.

  After his conversion to Christianity, Constantine ordered in about 325-326 that the site be uncovered. He told Macarius, Bishop of Jerusalem, to build a church there. Eusebius gives details of tearing down the pagan temple and raising the church, yet he never writes of a cross being found.

  The next witness is Cyril, Bishop of Jerusalem from about 350 to 386. In his fourth Catechetical Lecture, dated to around the year 350, he says that "the whole world has since been filled with pieces of the wood of the Cross." That proves pieces were already circulating as relics. It says nothing about how the cross itself was found. In a letter to Emperor Constantius, Cyril says only that it was found during the reign of Constantine.

  About forty years after Cyril, a full story of the discovery was in circulation.

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• 4. Helena's Discovery

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  Gelasius of Caesarea, a nephew of Cyril, set down that story in a Greek Ecclesiastical History. The work is now lost, and Gelasius died in 395. Around 402, Rufinus of Aquileia adapted it in his Latin additions to Eusebius's Church History.

  In this telling, Helena, the mother of Constantine, travelled to Jerusalem in the years 326-328 to look for the relic. A heavenly sign showed her where to dig. She had the temple of Aphrodite torn down, and beneath the rubble she found three crosses. They were believed to belong to Jesus and to the two thieves executed with him, Dismas and Gestas. One carried the titulus bearing the name of Jesus. According to Rufinus, Helena was still unsure of its legitimacy until a miracle settled the matter.

  The miracle involved a woman. Macarius had a mortally ill woman brought to touch each cross in turn. Nothing happened with the first two. When the third touched her, she recovered at once. A church was built on the spot, and the relic was divided. Part stayed in Jerusalem, and part went to Constantine along with the nails.

  Socrates Scholasticus, who died around 440, told almost the same tale in his own Ecclesiastical History. He adds what became of the nails. Helena sent them to Constantinople, where they were worked into the emperor's helmet and the bridle of his horse.

  Sozomen, who died around 450, repeats the story with a new detail. Some said the Sepulchre's location was disclosed by a Hebrew living in the East, who had learned it from documents inherited from his father. Sozomen himself doubts this. He also reports that a dead person was revived by the touch of the cross. Later popular versions name the helper Jude or Judas, who converted and took the name Kyriakos.

  Theodoret, who died around 457, gave the version that became standard. In his words, Macarius resolved the question "in the following manner," by having a lady of rank touched by each cross. Theodoret says Helena sent part of the cross to the palace. She enclosed the rest in silver and committed it to the city's bishop, urging him to keep it safe so that it passed on "uninjured to posterity."

  In Edessa, in the 430s, a rival story appeared in the Syriac tradition. It replaced Helena with a fictitious first-century empress named Protonike, said to be the wife of the emperor Claudius. The tale appears in the Doctrina Addai, which was believed to be the work of Thaddeus of Edessa, called Addai in Syriac texts. Protonike met Simon Peter in Rome and travelled to Jerusalem, where James, the brother of Jesus, showed her around. She found the cross after it healed her daughter, converted, and had a church built on Golgotha. Armenian sources cited this version too.

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• 5. Jerusalem's Treasure

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  In the 380s, a nun named Egeria made a pilgrimage and wrote a long letter home to her convent, now known as her Itinerary. In it she describes how the cross was shown at Jerusalem. The bishop sat in a chair at Golgotha behind the standing liturgical Cross. A silver-gilt casket was brought in and opened. Then the wood and the title were laid on a linen-covered table.

  Deacons stood guard around the table. Egeria explains why. Someone, she says, was reported to have bitten off and stolen a piece of the sacred wood. The faithful and the catechumens filed past one by one, touching the cross and the title with their foreheads and then their eyes before kissing the cross. But "none lays his hand upon it to touch it." Beyond the table a deacon held the ring of Solomon and the horn used to anoint kings, and pilgrims kissed the horn and gazed at the ring.

  In 614 the Sassanid emperor Khosrau II captured Jerusalem and carried off the part of the cross kept there as a trophy. In 628 the Byzantine emperor Heraclius defeated Khosrau and won the relic back from Shahrbaraz. He placed it first in Constantinople, then returned it to Jerusalem on the 21st of March 630.

  The scholar Constantin Zuckerman rejects that account. He suggests the Persians had actually lost the True Cross, and that the wood in the sealed reliquary Heraclius brought to Jerusalem in 629 was a fake. In his analysis, the hoax served both Heraclius and Shahrbaraz, a former enemy who had become an ally and father-in-law.

  After the first Muslim conquest of Jerusalem in 638, Heraclius retrieved the cross but made no attempt to retake the city. Around 1009, the caliph Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah ordered the Church of the Holy Sepulchre destroyed. Christians in Jerusalem hid part of the cross, and it stayed hidden until soldiers of the First Crusade took the city. Arnulf Malecorne, the first Latin patriarch of Jerusalem, had Greek Orthodox priests tortured to make them reveal where it lay.

  What he recovered was a small fragment of wood set in a golden cross. It became the most sacred relic of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, free of the controversy that surrounded the Holy Lance found at Antioch. It sat in a jewel-encrusted housing of gold and silver in a northern chapel of the Holy Sepulchre, watched over by canons and guarded by knights. Beside it, a second chapel held a reliquary with the Syrian Orthodox fragment. The Latin fragment was repeatedly carried into battle against Muslim armies.

  On each Good Friday, the barefoot patriarch, the canons and the pilgrims venerated the Latin relic at the chapel of Calvary. On Holy Saturday, four pilgrims carried it to the edicule of the Holy Sepulchre while the congregation waited with unlit candles. A New Fire would "spontaneously" light inside the tomb. The crossbearer lit his candle from it, then the patriarch's, and the flame passed from candle to candle until the whole church glowed.

  In 1110, after the Norwegian Crusade, King Baldwin I of Jerusalem gave King Sigurd I of Norway a splinter of the True Cross.

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• 6. Lost at Hattin

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  At the Battle of Hattin in 1187, Saladin captured the cross. Richard the Lionheart of England, the Byzantine emperor Isaac II and King Tamar of Georgia all tried to ransom it. None succeeded.

  In 1219, Al-Kamil offered the cross to the Knights Templar in exchange for lifting the siege of Damietta. It was never delivered, because Al-Kamil did not actually have it. After that the cross vanishes from the historical record. Its last recorded sighting was in Damascus, following Hattin.

  The surviving claims today are small and scattered. The Greek Orthodox church shows a small relic in the Greek Treasury inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, at the foot of Golgotha. The Syriac Orthodox Church claims one in the Monastery of Saint Mark in Jerusalem, and the Armenian Apostolic Church claims another in Armenia.

  The Ethiopian story runs by a different road. According to the 15th-century Book of Teff Grains, the emperor Dawit I received four fragments around the year 1400 from Coptic Christians, in thanks for his protection. The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church says these are still held at Egziabher Ab or Tekle Maryam, two monasteries near the former imperial cemetery on Amba Geshen.

  The church also claims the right wing of the cross, buried in the monastery of Gishen Mariam. The Venetian Republic is said to have gifted it to the Ethiopian Empire in the medieval period. It stayed in the emperor's personal possession into the 18th century and was even lost in battle before being buried on Amba Geshen.

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• 7. The Scattered Wood

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  John Chrysostom wrote that fragments of the True Cross were kept in golden reliquaries "which men reverently wear upon their persons." Even earlier, an inscription of 359 from Tixter, near Sétif in what is now Algeria, was said to list a fragment of the True Cross among its relics. Two Latin inscriptions from Algeria, from around 350, also testify to small particles being kept and admired.

  Around 455, Juvenal, Patriarch of Jerusalem, sent Pope Leo I a fragment of the "precious wood." Pope Sergius I, who was of Byzantine origin, brought a portion to Rome in the seventh century. At the Felix Basilica in Nola, built by bishop Paulinus at the beginning of the fifth century, a particle was set into the altar. An inscription there reads, "In the small part is power of the whole cross."

  The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says King Alfred received a fragment from Pope Marinus in the year 883. The Old English poem Dream of the Rood mentions the finding of the cross and the start of its veneration. The poem need not refer to Alfred's relic. Still, a later source records a bequest to the Holy Cross at Shaftesbury Abbey in Dorset, which Alfred founded and placed in his daughter's charge.

  Most of the very small relics in Europe came from Constantinople. In 1204 the Fourth Crusade captured and sacked the city. The Chronica Regia Coloniensis says the conquerors found immense wealth there, including a part of the cross that Helena had brought from Jerusalem, decorated with gold and jewels. The bishops with the army carved it up and shared it among the knights. Back home, the pieces were donated to churches and monasteries.

  The French knight Robert de Clari saw one of the chapels in the city. He wrote that it held "two pieces of the True Cross, as thick as a man's leg and a fathom in length."

  Forgery and misattribution of relics were a recurring problem in the Middle Ages. They were often used to attract pilgrims, or to feed the lucrative practice of simony.

  The scholar Smyrnakis has measured the biggest surviving portions. The largest, at 870,760 cubic millimetres, is at the Monastery of Koutloumousiou on Mount Athos. Rome holds 537,587, Brussels 516,090, Venice 445,582, Ghent 436,450 and Paris 237,731. Santo Toribio de Liébana in Spain is also said to hold the largest piece and is one of the most visited Roman Catholic pilgrimage sites. In Asia, the Monasterio de Tarlac at San Jose, Tarlac, in the Philippines holds the other part.

  In 2016, Oxford University radiocarbon-dated a relic held by Waterford Cathedral in Ireland to the 11th century.

  By the end of the Middle Ages, so many churches claimed a piece that John Calvin is famously said to have remarked there was enough to fill a ship. He wrote of the relics at the Holy Chapel in Paris, at Poitiers and at Rome. Collected together, he said, "they would make a big ship-load. Yet the Gospel testifies that a single man was able to carry it."

  In 1870, Charles Rohault de Fleury answered critics like Calvin and Erasmus in his Mémoire sur les instruments de la Passion. He catalogued every known relic. He assumed a cross 3 or 4 metres high, with a crossbeam 2 metres wide, made of pine weighing about seventy-five kilograms. That gives an original volume of 0.178 cubic metres. His catalogue of relics came to only about 0.004 cubic metres, or 3,942,000 cubic millimetres. That leaves almost 98 percent lost, destroyed or otherwise unaccounted for.

  Microscopic examination of four particles from European churches, including Santa Croce in Rome, Caravaca de la Cruz, Notre Dame in Paris, Pisa Cathedral and Florence Cathedral, produced a surprise. "The pieces came all together from olive."

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• 8. Feast Days

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  John Chrysostom preached homilies on the three crosses. In one he pictures kings taking off their diadems to take up the cross, and he concludes, "The cross shines brighter than the sun."

  The Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, Anglican and some Protestant churches celebrate the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross on the 14th of September, the anniversary of the dedication of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. In later centuries the day also commemorated the rescue of the True Cross from the Persians in 628. In the West it is often called Holy Cross Day, and in 1963 the Vatican adopted the official name "Triumph of the Cross" for it.

  In Galicia, from about the seventh century, the Feast of the Cross fell on the 3rd of May. When the Galician and Roman practices merged, the May date kept the name "Invention of the True Cross" to mark the finding. It was dropped from the Catholic calendar in 1960, when Pope John XXIII reformed the Roman Breviary.

  The Orthodox still mark both events on the 14th of September, one of the Twelve Great Feasts of the year. On the 1st of August they hold the Procession of the Venerable Wood of the Cross. In Constantinople the relics were carried through the streets on that day, since people believed they brought health and cleansed the air and houses of sickness. The 10th-century Synaxarion of Constantinople adds that on the 30th of June the cross was moved from the Great Palace to the Hagia Sophia. It was placed beside the baptistery, where the bishops worshipped it.

  Other days move with the calendar. The Catholic Church holds a formal Adoration of the Cross in its Good Friday services. In Eastern Orthodox churches everywhere, a replica of the cross is carried in procession during Matins of Great and Holy Friday. The Orthodox also keep a further Veneration of the Cross on the third Sunday of Great Lent.

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