The Cathedral Treasury

The Amazon of Holy Relics
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The stuff you can get to see is in the Cathedral Treasury. Like most relics, the provenance is pretty dubious. There are contemporary references to a thriving fake relic trade in the Near East. No pilgrim to the Holy Land was allowed to go home empty handed. Europe is littered with hair, teeth and umbilical cords of everyone mentioned in the Bible. There were at least half a dozen rival claims to Jesus's foreskin.


It's all bunkum but it's interesting bunkum. These are bits and pieces of ancient history, preserved in gold and silver pickle jars. Men killed for these. Empires rose and fell over the control of the places they came from. These are powerful objects, powerful in that people will do ridiculous things to possess them, preserve them or even destroy them. A piece of a thorn bush snapped off in Antioch and stuffed in a glass tube by some Byzantine chancer became a magic wand because someone decided it was a magic wand. These things were wished into reality.


The Treasury contains some of the most beautiful Dark Ages art that you will find anywhere. The more modern stuff is typically ugly church bling that you will find all over Europe. But the older stuff, the objects from the 10th century and earlier, are amazing and this has to be one of the finest collections of art from late antiquity that you'll find anywhere.

The Holy Robe

Amongst the, ahem, actual relics that Helena brought back is the robe said to have been worn by Jesus prior to the crucifixion. That seems legit. A Roman, part of the execution detail that day, preserved a tunic that he won at a dice game. He didn't sell it for wine or a fumble with a Judaean hooker that night. He didn't put it down and forget what he did with it. His wife didn't find it years later hanging up in a wardrobe and scream "get rid of that horrible thing, you never wear it" and march him straight down to whatever the Roman version of Oxfam was.

Nope, none of that. It was kept safe for three hundred and fifty years until the Emperor's mother came looking for it. If the richest and most powerful woman in the known world came knocking on your door, looking for actual relics, what's the betting you'd just "find" something you've been keeping safe for years?

You don't get near the robe. It's kept behind these gates other than for ten days a year when the chapel is opened. It's also been dipped in latex so the chances of anyone ever getting a decent look at it seems remote.

The St Andrew Altar

In a biblical recreation of the Cinderella story, Saint Andrew left behind his sandal somewhere and it was saved by some forward thinking bystander. Presumably this happened at his execution as why else would you leave a perfectly good sandal behind? Whatever. I don't know what his sandal looked like. It'd be fair to say that it's going to be some skanky old bit of leather that some old geezer sweated into daily for a few years. But the box? The box is beautiful. As a piece of Carolingian era artwork, it is stunning. The detail is incredible as is the technical skill it was carried out with. This has to be one of the masterpieces of the Dark Ages and I don't know why it rarely makes it on to any list of great works of art.

The Nail

Another of Helena's lucky finds three hundred years after the crucifixion of Christ is one of the nails that was used in his execution. The jury is out, it's dismissed as being too short to have fixed his feet to the shaft but could have been used on the wrists or hands. I would have thought that it turning up 300 years after the fact might be a bigger giveaway.

Again, it's veracity doesn't really matter. As a work of Dark Ages art, it's case is maybe even more beautiful than the Altar of St Andrew. If nobody believed in it then no-one would have made a piece of art as good to hold it.

I think we also forget the world that the people who made this lived in. They inhabited a place where ritual and magic was real. If you didn't have science then you believed in the power of stuff like this. 1500 years ago this connected you to the gods like some kind of supernatural USB socket.

An Actual Piece of St Peter's Chains

Yep, a couple of the links of the actual, authentic chain used to secure Saint Peter before being executed in Rome. Why not? Again, I know how easy it is to shit on these things. But I'm an atheist yet here I am gawping at this. I've even paid money to look at it. As much as you and I know it's bunkum, people 1500 years ago had absolute faith in it.

It's not all that hard to imagine. In a world where I can have an image automatically made on a slate that I carry in my pocket and have that image come out instantly on the other side of the world; where I cannot even begin to explain to you how that works, haven't we just evolved a whole new priesthood of jokers and system of magic? Are we any better? Are these ancient objects just what people invent when they don't have the fucking Kardashians?

Magic Hats

You know that many a mediaeval bishop sat with one of these titfers on. Saturday night, a bit too much communion wine and you're headed out to one of those dirty convents you'd heard about? Slip on your magic hat of Saint Simeon and the night is yours.

Acme Cure Alls

Here I was lucky enough to glimpse the manufacture of the least effective medicines known to man. Trier Cathedral has its own little holy unction manufacturing plant. A proper little Glaxo going on there. This and a bit of prayer and you can grow an amputated limb back.

Relics Everywhere

You name it, they've got it. Nails, thorns, pieces of the cross, all sorts. I might take the piss but stuff like this really fascinates me. I would love to have been there when the deals were made. I can't buy a car for a couple of grand without a panic attack over what the fuck I am getting. Can you imagine what it was like when your position, every bit of power you held depended on whether or not the relics you had spent a fortune actually did their job? For some, the outcome of wars or the safety of a city from plague came down to the quality of your relics. Get this wrong and thousands could die, you probably being the last one in a very long line.

Constantine cemented his position by sending his mother out to collect blockbuster grade relics. If people had started saying now wait just a minute, son... Where would that have left him? It's also easy to believe people were far more ignorant then than we were. But were they? Just how gullible and dumb were ancient people? Personally, I think we write them off too easily. We get seduced by shit like a new set of emojis on a phone or a microphone you can hang on your wall that lets Jeff Bezos listen in on the dark secrets of your miserable little life but also opens your fucking curtains, too. They are no different to us, we just found another pile of utter horseshit to hang our salvation on and divert us from the fact that the people selling it are fucking us up the arse.

Wow, that went a lot more cynical than I was expecting...

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