Saint Mark's Second Grave: How Alexandria's Evangelist Became Venice's Patron

Mark's institutional legacy runs through two cities on opposite ends of the Mediterranean, joined by an act Venice remembers as a triumph. Tradition holds Mark the founder of the church of Alexandria, whose Coptic Orthodox Patriarchate still traces its episcopal line to him, and his body was venerated there for centuries. In 828, Venetian merchants removed Mark's relics from Alexandria and carried them to Venice, reportedly concealing the body beneath a layer of pork to deter Muslim customs inspectors from searching the cargo closely. Venice built a church to house the relics, consecrated by the 830s and rebuilt on a grander scale beginning in 1063 as the Basilica di San Marco, and adopted Mark in place of its earlier patron, Saint Theodore, as the city's own protector, with his symbol, the winged lion drawn from the four living creatures of Ezekiel and Revelation, becoming Venice's civic emblem as much as the church's. The theft itself acquired its own devotional status in Venetian memory as the Translation of Saint Mark, still marked on the church calendar, and the relationship was partly repaired in 1968, when the Vatican returned a portion of the relics to the church in Alexandria to mark nineteen centuries since Mark's traditional martyrdom there.