Pharos Chapel

From the ninth century to 1204 the Pharos chapel functioned as the spiritual treasury of the Byzantine state, holding what was arguably the greatest concentration of Christian relics ever gathered in one room. Successive emperors added to it: by the mid-tenth century it held a portion of the True Cross and the Holy Lance; the Mandylion arrived in 944, the arm of John the Baptist in 945, the sandals of Christ and the Keramion in the 960s, the letter of Christ to Abgar in 1032.

By the late twelfth century visitors listed the Crown of Thorns, a Holy Nail, Christ's clothes and purple mantle, the reed and sponge of the Passion and a piece of the tombstone. Ambassadors and pilgrims who were admitted described the chapel as a foretaste of heaven, and the emperors staged elaborate ceremonies around the relics that bound the sacred history of Christ to the legitimacy of their rule. Because the relics were kept together and displayed as a set, the chapel became, in the words of modern scholarship, a "New Jerusalem", an attempt to relocate the holy places of the Passion to the imperial capital.

The most famous of the chapel's images was the Mandylion, a cloth bearing the face of Christ that Byzantine tradition held was not painted by any human hand, an acheiropoieton. Its legend told of King Abgar of Edessa, who wrote to Jesus asking for healing and received in return a cloth miraculously imprinted with his features.

Kept for centuries at Edessa in Mesopotamia, the image was ceremonially transferred to Constantinople in 944 amid great celebration and installed among the Passion relics in the Pharos chapel, together with the Keramion, a roof-tile said to bear the same face. The Mandylion shaped the standard Byzantine way of depicting the face of Christ and became a model for icons across the Orthodox world. It disappeared during or after the Latin sack of 1204 and was never securely traced again; various later objects, including a cloth once at the French royal chapel and lost in the Revolution, have been proposed as the same image, and some writers have even linked the Mandylion to the Shroud of Turin, though no such identification is established. In this atlas the Image of Edessa is recorded as a lost artifact last securely attested here, at Constantinople.

The Fourth Crusade's capture and sack of Constantinople in 1204 ended the chapel's role as guardian of the relics. In the chaos and the Latin occupation that followed, the treasures were dispersed. The Passion relics passed into the hands of the Latin emperors of Constantinople, who, desperate for money, pledged them to Venetian financiers; in 1239 King Louis IX of France redeemed the Crown of Thorns and, over the following years, a large group of associated relics, paying vast sums and building the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris expressly to enshrine them.

In this way the heart of the Pharos collection travelled from Constantinople to Paris, where the surviving Crown of Thorns is now kept at Notre-Dame. The chapel itself, part of the Great Palace, fell into ruin along with the rest of that complex over the later Byzantine and Ottoman centuries, and today nothing of it remains standing; its location within the palace precinct near the Sea of Marmara is known only approximately. The Pharos chapel therefore survives only in texts and in the relics that once passed through it.