The Sudarium of Oviedo

The cloth from Christ’s tomb, carbon-dated to around 700

In the Cámara Santa of Oviedo Cathedral, a chapel King Alfonso II of Asturias built around 840 to hold it, is a bloodstained linen cloth about 84 by 53 centimetres, kept as the cloth that covered the head of Christ in the tomb. Unlike the Shroud of Turin it carries no image, only reddish-brown stains. Its legend has it carried out of Jerusalem ahead of the Persians in 614, through Alexandria and North Africa to Spain, from Seville to Toledo, and then hidden in a cave in the Asturian mountains ahead of the Moors. That account was written by a medieval bishop, Pelagius, whose office produced so many forgeries that he is known as the Prince of Falsifiers. The first document to name the relic records King Alfonso VI and El Cid opening its chest after days of fasting, on 14 March 1075. Radiocarbon tests in Arizona in 1990, Toronto in 1992 and Spain in 2007 all put the linen around 700. The cathedral shows it three days a year: Good Friday, 14 September and 21 September.