The Relics of St. Luke The Evangelist
Despot George of Serbia bought the relics from the Ottoman sultan Murad II for 30.000 gold coins. After the Ottoman conquest of Bosnia, the kingdom's last queen, George's granddaughter Mary, who had brought the relics with her from Serbia as her dowry, sold them to the Venetian Republic.
In 1992, the then Greek Orthodox Metropolitan Ieronymos of Thebes and Levathia (the current Archbishop of Athens and All Greece) requested from Bishop Antonio Mattiazzo of Padua the return of a a significant fragment of the relics of St. Luke to be placed on the site where the holy tomb of the Evangelist is located and venerated today. This prompted a scientific investigation of the relics in Padua, and by numerous lines of empirical evidence (archeological analyses of the Tomb in Thebes and the Reliquary of Padua, anatomical analyses of the remains, Carbon-14 dating, comparison with the purported skull of the Evangelist located in Prague) confirmed that these were the remains of an individual of Syrian descent who died between 72 and 416 A.D. The Bishop of Padua then delivered to Metropolitan Ieronymos the rib of St. Luke that was closest to his heart to be kept at his tomb in Thebes, Greece.
Thus, nowadays, the relics of St. Luke are so divided:
- the body, in the Abbey of Santa Giustina in Padua;
- the head, in the St. Vitus Cathedral in Prague;
- a rib, at his tomb in Thebes.
Read more about this topic: Luke The Evangelist
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“What’s to do?
Shall we go see the relics of this town?”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“Doctor, cure yourself!”
—Bible: New Testament, Luke 4:23.
“Parisians are so besotted, so silly and so naturally inept that a street player, a seller of indulgences, a mule with its cymbals, a fiddler in the middle of a crossroads, will draw more people than would a good Evangelist preacher.”
—François Rabelais (1494–1553)