The Sudarium of Oviedo

A relic linked to Christ’s tomb, carbon-dated to around 700

In the Cámara Santa of the Cathedral of San Salvador in Oviedo, a chapel King Alfonso II of Asturias built for it around 840, a piece of plain-woven linen about 84 by 53 centimetres is kept, stained reddish-brown. The devout link it to the cloth that, in the Gospel of John, lay in the empty tomb after having been around the head of Jesus. Unlike the Shroud of Turin it carries no image of a body or a face, only dark flecks arranged symmetrically that form no picture.

Its story comes mostly from Pelagius, a medieval bishop of Oviedo whose office produced so many forgeries that he is known as the Prince of Falsifiers, and historians consider the medieval narratives around the cloth to be his creation. In his account it left the Holy Land in 614, ahead of the Persian king Khosrau II, went to Alexandria with the presbyter Philip, crossed northern Africa when Alexandria fell in 616, and entered Spain at Cartagena with refugees. From Seville it went to Toledo in 657 and, in 718, north ahead of the Moors into the mountains of Asturias, to a cave called Montesacro, until Alfonso II built its chapel. An anonymous pilgrim from Piacenza wrote around 570 of a cave by the Jordan rumoured to hold the face cloth, a possible earlier reference.

The first document to name the relic records that on 14 March 1075 King Alfonso VI of León, his sister and Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, El Cid, opened its chest after days of fasting, and the king had the oak chest covered in silver with an inscription naming the Sacred Sudarium of Our Lord. It is kept with other relics in the Arca Santa, a reliquary chest with a Romanesque metal front.

Radiocarbon tests at the University of Arizona in 1990, the University of Toronto in 1992 and the National Museum of Archaeology in 2007 all dated the linen to around 700, and historical and textile analysis place its weaving in the eighth century. Serological tests have typed the blood on it as AB, a result often said to match the Shroud of Turin. In 2025 Kelly P. Kearse pointed out that A and B antigens are also made by bacteria, so an old, contaminated cloth can test AB with no blood present; on the Sudarium, reactivity turned up even in unstained areas, and none of the typing work has been published in a peer-reviewed journal. He called for human-specific DNA testing instead.

The cathedral shows the cloth to the public three days a year: Good Friday, the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross on 14 September, and its octave on 21 September.