Sacred Souvenirs

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I own a small fragment of fresco from a small Romanesque church in Lleida, Spain, which is among the oldest Catalonian municipalities. I picked it up from a pile of rubble at my feet as I sat on a church bench, enchanted by the melancholy beauty of the place and the musky smell of the warm summer air, plaster, stone, and incense that lingered in the air. Apparently dislodged from the painted ceiling, it is not even 2 inches long but always reminds me of my trip.

Acting as a relic, my innocent pilfering aids in reconstructing my journey, the churches visited, discussions with people, and meals shared.

The collection of similar tokens, however, is not unique to my experience. Christian pilgrims have been collecting relics since the fourth century with the first pilgrim, St. Helena (d. 330), the dowager empress and mother of Emperor Constantine I (d. 377). Whereas Helena discovered the True Cross and enshrined it in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, less auspicious pilgrims collected a variety of mementos 017during their visits to the Holy Land and later the shrines and churches along the pilgrimage routes in Western Europe that prominently included Rome, Santiago de Compostela, and Galicia. The fourth-century pilgrim to the Holy Land, Egeria thus reports of pilgrims taking twigs from a sycomore tree that they believed was instilled with healing powers. In his 1137 guide to the Holy Land (Liber de locis sanctis), the Benedictine monk Petrus Diaconus mentions that pilgrims would take stones from the altar near the Sea of Galilee that was the presumed site of the miracle of the feeding of the 5,000 (Mark 6:33-44).

In general, penitents would embark on an arduous journey, procuring blessings, indulgences, commonplace objects, and handmade relics. By the sixth century, these handmade relics, called brandea, had become somewhat standardized. The stones in the sixth-century box reliquary (pictured) from the papal Sancta Sanctorum collection are an example of the earliest forms of relic collecting.

This wooden reliquary, originally from Syria or Palestine, contains several stones and a wood fragment from the Holy Land, or loca sancta. Three of the stone fragments bear Greek inscriptions: “From [Mount] Zion,” “From the Place of Resurrection,” and “From the Mount of Olives”; the wooden sliver reads “From Bethlehem.” The sliding lid is painted on the exterior (not shown here) with the Golgotha Cross with the monogram of Christ inside a mandorla. Inside the lid are four isolated scenes arranged around a central scene. Each scene, painted on a field of gold, corresponds to the identifying sites from which these stones were presumably collected. The central scene is twice as big as the other four and illustrates Christ’s crucifixion. Below the central scene, from left to right, are the Nativity and Baptism; along the top register, from left to right, are the Women Arriving to the Tomb and the Ascension.

Each element of this reliquary was carefully constructed. For instance, the sliding door of the reliquary, when shut, covers the stones as if each narrative scene were being reenacted over the actual landscape from where the stone was collected. The rocks housed within the box are examples of brandea relics, collected from those important Christian locations inscribed on the stones.

Although the more commonly known type of relics represents body parts (the entire body or a piece of the body of a saint), the brandea relics were typically ordinary objects, such as pieces of a tomb, dirt, rock, water, or oil. They were made holy by their contact with the loca sancta and were common in the early centuries of Christendom. The advantage for pilgrims was that they could make their own brandea by rubbing a piece of cloth against a holy tomb or by filling a small flask with holy water or oil. These were popular substances, as water drew parallels with Christ’s baptism and oil with the anointment of his feet. Through affective communication, the flasks with these precious fluids often reflected the sacred events or places of origin, specifically the Passion and Life of Christ.

The Sancta Sanctorum relics and reliquary had an interdependent relationship. Without its relics, the reliquary is but a piece of manmade art, unable to fulfill its sacred purpose. Without the reliquary, the relics would then be but “indistinct matter.” The two objects function cooperatively in a state of symbiosis where the reliquary acts as a frame—not only to hold and protect the topographical or bodily relic but also to give context and continuity to it. By themselves, the stones of the Sancta Sanctorum reliquary box have little meaning. However, in tandem with text, image, and the reliquary box, this ensemble is embedded within a larger religious framework. With the identifying text inscribed onto the stone’s surface, a viewer could perceive it through visual validation as having gained holiness through contact with other holy matter. These objects did not come from holy sites merely to remind a collector of a pilgrimage. They operated as a bridge between the viewer and the object’s place of origin. Although the stones were directly extracted from holy sites and isolated into a decorative box, they maintained a meaningful relationship with the holy sites, mutually tethered and connected by a space of metaphoric significance.¹ The ancient relic, like my Romanesque fresco fragment, does not act only as a reminder of the site but also as a point in space connecting the object and its owner to its distant, special place of origin.

I own a small fragment of fresco from a small Romanesque church in Lleida, Spain, which is among the oldest Catalonian municipalities. I picked it up from a pile of rubble at my feet as I sat on a church bench, enchanted by the melancholy beauty of the place and the musky smell of the warm summer air, plaster, stone, and incense that lingered in the air. Apparently dislodged from the painted ceiling, it is not even 2 inches long but always reminds me of my trip. Acting as a relic, my innocent pilfering aids in reconstructing my journey, […]