“If the Shroud of Turin is the Image of Edessa and was stolen eons ago, why hasn’t the Orthodox Church demanded it back?”
“Why do you believe we haven’t? To ask and have your request honored are very different. You have to understand that after the city was sacked by Crusaders, Constantinople never recovered the power and greatness it once had. Eventually it fell to the Muslims. Only now, after nearly six centuries, has the Vatican agreed to return some of the treasures stolen by the Crusaders.
“In 2004, the pope in Rome finally returned to our patriarchate the bones of two saints stolen by the Crusaders in 1204. The sacred bones were taken first to the doge in Venice and then to the pope in Rome after the sack of the city. It took eight hundred years to get them back.”
He stared at me. “If it takes that long to get back the bones of saints, how many thousands of years do you think it would take to get back the most precious and holiest relic of all—the image of our martyred Savior on the Shroud?”
City of the Image
In 942, the Byzantine general Curcuas laid siege to Edessa. To avoid destruction, Archbishop Abramius of Samosata arranged for the town to hand over the Image of Edessa. In exchange the town received the release of 200 captives, perpetual immunity from attack and 12,000 silver crowns.
The Image of Edessa was then forcibly removed—despite violent protests from the local faithful—to Constantinople to join the Emperor’s huge collection of relics in the Pharos Chapel.
—LYNN PICKNETT AND CLIVE PRINCE, TURIN SHROUD—IN WHOSE IMAGE? THE SHOCKING TRUTH UNVEILED
The entry [of the Image] into Constantinople took the form of a triumphant reception, choreographed in grand style, with a fine sense of dramatic detail. On the evening of the sacred feast day of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, 15 August 944, the Mandylion arrived at the famous church of Our Lady at Blachernae, where the entire court, with the exception of Romanus [the Emperor] because of his illness, was able to admire the blessed relic. The two sons of the Emperor expressed their disappointment at the picture: they could hardly make out anything on it.
The following day a procession bore the image to the middle of the town where it was put on display on the throne of mercy in the inner sanctuary of the Hagia Sophia. Finally the Rex Regnatium, in the symbolic form of his presence in the Mandylion, was placed on the throne of the worldly ruler in the Blachernae Palace and crowned, until the time came for it to take up its final place in the Pharos chapel.
—HOLGER KERSTEN AND ELMAR R. GRUBER, THE JESUS CONSPIRACY—THE TURIN SHROUD AND THE TRUTH ABOUT THE RESURRECTION
33
After Father Dimitrios left, I sat at the table pushing bread crumbs with my finger, trying to make sense out of what he had told me.
The Image of Edessa wasn’t a painting—it was the actual linen shroud the body of Christ had been wrapped in after the crucifixion. The story of a painting was contrived to throw off those who would want to steal or destroy it.
The Image was the Shroud of Turin.
I had a thousand unanswered questions swirling in my head, but even if the priest had stayed, my mind was too blown to ask them and deal coherently with the answers.
One thing I did know was that I had been set up by Lipton from day one.
He didn’t need me to ferret out the relationship between the Edessa Image and the Shroud. Regardless of anything else he might be, or faults in his character, not knowing antiquities wasn’t one of them.
He was an expert’s expert … no question, Lipton would have known before he sent me out on the quest that the Image and the Shroud were the same thing.
When Father Dimitrios said the Image was the Shroud of Turin, it made perfect sense with what Lipton had originally told me about the relic I was to research.
The day he called me in Manhattan on my cell phone, I had insisted he tell me something about what I was going to be looking for. He had blurted out: “Let’s just say it’s a couple thousand years old and was buried with Christ.”
Not just a Christian icon, but something actually buried with Christ.
I had forgotten that.
It should have struck me when I started hearing about a painting of Jesus being done for a king that it wasn’t something that had been buried with Christ. It was supposed to have been painted by a court painter while Jesus was alive and taken back to the king.
But only the Shroud had been buried with Christ.
A Freudian slip. Lipton had blurted out the truth and I just hadn’t picked up on it. I had been too busy agonizing over the fact that I so desperately needed money, and fighting off a killer who wanted me to die in a bizarre way, that I hadn’t focused on the offer itself.
My worse sin as an antiquities expert was that I didn’t know enough about religious relics to realize immediately that there was a connection between the Image and the Shroud. And Lipton hadn’t left me with the time to find out. Deliberately.
I realized now that he had sent me on a wild-goose chase.
First to Edessa to pick up just part of the story. No doubt Ismet the Islamic scholar had been well paid to tell me only part of the story. And I thought he was such a sweet, old-fashioned gentleman.
I wondered who Lipton had lined me up with here in Istanbul and what that person would have fed me. Probably another sanitized version that failed to connect the Edessa Image with the Shroud—but pushing me like a pawn to the next move on the board.
Why didn’t Lipton want me to make the connection?
It had to be known by scholars. The fact that the Image and the Shroud were the same icon certainly wasn’t a matter left to conjecture—I hadn’t examined the historical documentation, but the eight-hundred-year-old sources Father Dimitrios cited appeared incontrovertible.
Lipton hadn’t kept me in the dark to avoid telling Nevsky, either.
For certain, the Russian patriarch had to know more about the Edessa Image and the Shroud than even Lipton did. This wasn’t just a great religious relic, the greatest of all in fact, but one that was associated with the Orthodox Church.
It all came down to a very simple question: What low-down, stinking, dirty rotten trick was Lipton playing that was putting my very life at risk?
I boiled with anger—not just at that bastard Lipton, but for permitting myself to get dragged into whatever murderous intrigue he and that Russian czar-to-be were cooking.
I should have known from the very beginning that Lipton would be manipulating me.
In fact, I did know—I just ignored it. Even after nearly being killed in Urfa, I still couldn’t see the light at the end of the tunnel.
Why had he involved me?
What was his next move?
How did Nevsky and his stone-cold daughter fit into the scheme?
The information I learned from the patriarchate priest about the Shroud of Turin had only clouded things more.
“Now what?”
I asked the question aloud as I walked.
For sure, I still wasn’t free to return home and not worry about being murdered, by the mafia, Nevsky’s religious fanatics, or whomever.
Lipton had drawn me into something. I hadn’t broken loose from him; I was just on the run. Whatever he had started was still moving forward, I was sure of that.
I was also still part of it, whether I wanted to be or not. Lipton was too crafty to create an intrigue that I could just walk away from.
I had left tracks in Dubai, Urfa, and now Istanbul.
He had hooked me, but now I had to figure out a way to keep him from reeling me in.
One thing was obvious to me—where the next stage of Lipton’s machinations would play out.
The Image had gone from Jerusalem to Edessa, then to Constantinople. After the sack, it had been transported to Venice, along with the other holy relics stolen from the city.
That made Venice the next stop.
I suddenly wished I were home in bed with the covers pulled over my head. If I could just go home, I’d promi
se to watch my mouth, get an honest job, pay my bills, find a good man. Maybe even go to church.
If …
No, my bad karma wasn’t going to let me off that easy. My sins and omissions were too great.
I had to keep going.
My carry-on was still back at the bed-and-breakfast, but I had thrown my cosmetics bag into my handbag when I left this morning. The few cosmetics I could take in a carry-on bag were the only things that were hard for me to replace. I usually had no problems finding size five to seven clothes and size eight shoes.
I decided not to go back to the bed-and-breakfast.
I was tired of unpleasant surprises. There was too much risk that someone I didn’t want to see—and that included Yuri—would be waiting for me.
Fortunately, I still had a sufficient supply of the money Lipton had given me for expenses to buy what I needed.
I had a taxi drop me off at a department store, where I bought a carry-on and some necessities, then took another taxi to the airport.
I checked around until I found the next flight to Venice.
It turned out to be Turkish Airlines and I barely made the flight.
But I did make it and that didn’t make me feel lucky.
My karma seemed to be working overtime, getting me deeper into danger.
Venice
What, wouldst thou have a serpent sting thee twice?
—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, THE MERCHANT OF VENICE
34
Trying to be clever, when I arrived at the Marco Polo Airport on the mainland across the bay from Venice, instead of taking the shuttle boat that would have deposited me near Piazza San Marco, I decided to take a taxi to a location where I was able to cross over to the city in a small gondola called a gondoletta.
I didn’t hire the gondola because it was romantic … in my paranoid feverish brain, I decided to get to Venice in the least likely manner.
A gondola, expensive and slow and for lovers and tourists, struck me as the last place anyone would look for me.
Maybe I had too much imagination—and a lack of common sense.
I’d probably find Yuri waiting on the dock to give me a hand up from the gondola. Or Karina sneering at me as she knocked me into Venice’s murky waters.
I must have looked lonely and sexually frustrated because the gondolier kept giving me the eye. When he started singing a love song with the sun still shining, I told him I had come to Venice to meet my lover.
I’d been to Venice three times in the past, which wasn’t enough, because it’s my favorite city on Planet Earth.
I know it has problems—it sinks a little more each year; during the winter months you sometimes wonder if you’ll need fishermen’s hip boots to get from your hotel to a café; in the summer the murky canals stink; it can be so crowded it’s suffocating; and so outrageously expensive.
But Venice is more than a grand dame of the old school, a faded dowager queen. Decadent, with a history of promiscuousness, she’s an elegant courtesan with a tainted, sometimes even obscene, past.
Whatever you want to call the old gal, Venice is not a place you can forget once you’ve seen it.
I’ve always thought of Paris along the Seine as a Grecian urn full of objets d’art, but Venice is a floating museum; not just because of the magnificent palaces and cathedrals, not even because of the stunning statues and monuments from antiquity and medieval times, but the city itself is a priceless artifact. It’s a feast for my eyes—no freeways, no suburbs, no concrete and glass skyscrapers blocking the sky.
It stands proudly although its feet are in the mud and many of its buildings, as an Ugly American I had a drink with at Harry’s Bar put it, need a paint job.
The Ugly American was a good-looking guy, but after saying something so stupid, I found a reason to get away from him.
It was like saying the Mona Lisa needed collagen injections to make her thin lips fatter.
I left the little gondola at the dock and took a quick walk around the piazza just to get the feel again of the city’s main square. The square is is dominated by the Basilica, the bell tower, and the Doge’s Palace.
When Venice was a great commercial and sea power, the head of state was the doge. Although the doge was elected, only a tiny percentage of the population—the rich and powerful—were allowed to vote.
The piazza has two of the most magnificent pieces of artwork in existence—both looted from Constantinople.
The Horses of San Marco mounted at the front of San Marco Basilica in the square were taken from the Hippodrome in Constantinople during the rape of the city by the Crusaders. The doge of Venice who had instigated the attack on Constantinople had them brought back to Venice. But the journey of the horses didn’t stop there.
Napoleon seized Venice during his Italian conquests and decided the horses would look better in Paris—so he had them shipped there. I suppose his theory was that to the conqueror go the spoils of war. Besides, the Venetians had stolen them from someone else.
After Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, the horses made their way back to Venice. Poor guys probably wondered why they were being moved from here to there.
Today, the horses on display suffering the environmental elements are actually bronze replicas. The originals are inside the Basilica’s museum.
The statuary, called the Four Tetrarchs, was another stunning piece of looted antiquity in the square.
It shows four Roman emperors embracing and represents the co-emperors of the Roman Empire who ruled jointly for a while. Rule by four occurred during a time of political instability—as anyone familiar with the work of government and corporate committees would appreciate, four men trying to rule the same kingdom was a game plan doomed for failure.
The purple marble statuary was also stolen during that sack of Constantinople by the Crusaders. Those Crusaders had been busy little beavers. And the Venetians had obviously gotten well paid for instigating and financing the looting.
At the moment, the mysteries of ancient and medieval times were not the main attraction in the city.
It was carnival time in a city whose celebration was conducted as if the city were a theatrical stage for a Shakespearean play, bringing onto the streets people in colorful costumes that reflected the plots and intrigues of the Renaissance and other eras of kings and wars.
It was daylight, but people were already appearing in costumes. Masks alone could run into thousands of dollars.
I got off the plaza to find a hotel where I had the view I wanted. While it’s true that everyone who comes to Venice goes to San Marco Piazza, if you weren’t a tourist on your first visit, the square was not for lingering but crossing to get from here to there.
In my opinion, the main promenade of Venice—the Champs-Élysées of Paris—is the Riva degli Schiavoni, which translates to River of the Schiavoni. However, it’s a waterfront street, not a river. It was named after the Slavic merchants—Schiavoni, in Italian—that delivered meat and fish to the wharves in medieval times.
The street begins near the piazza at the corner of the adjoining piazzetta and the Doge’s Palace and extends along the waterfront. Along the way are hotels, kiosks, bars, and cafés, with canopies in front of the small stores and cafés that extend out into the middle of the street.
I took a hotel room overlooking the Riva because my best guess was that if Lipton was in Venice, at some point I would spot him on the waterfront street, moving along with eager tourists lugging camera bags.
Making contact with Lipton wasn’t really my plan. I just hoped that I could get behind Lipton after I spotted him walking down the Schiavoni and learn what he was up to by following him.
Not exactly the best-laid plan of mice and men, but it was the only one I had at the moment. It wasn’t entirely naïve, because I was sure he would turn up in Venice.
It couldn’t be an accident that Lipton had set me on the exact trail that the Shroud had taken. Venice was the next stop of the Shroud after it left Constantinopl
e—as all the looted artifacts indicate—and would naturally be the trail he would have sent me on and taken himself.
I just wished I knew why he was going through all the trouble of having me follow the path of the Shroud across the Middle East to Europe during ancient times and the Middle Ages.
It was like waiting for the other shoe to drop. I knew it was coming, I just didn’t know what it was. Or how bad it would hurt when it hit me.
After two days of waiting at the window, no Lipton, Karina, Nevsky, Yuri, or any of the other usual suspects, showed up.
That caged-animal feeling came over me and I began to imagine the walls inching closer. I’d always been antsy, always on the move. Sitting in a room, staring out the window, and wondering what the rest of the world was doing was pure hell for me.
I finally had it with room service meals and taking towels from the maid and telling her to go away so she wouldn’t see that I was holed up in the room day and night. Besides, the room frig was empty and the snacks were gone.
I needed fresh air and to walk off nervous energy.
I spoke a little Italian, a language besides my own I could actually employ for more than ordering dinner, asking for the bathroom, arguing the fee with a gondola driver—and in this case, dropping by the Doge’s Palace, Palazzo Ducale di Venezia, now a museum, to see if I could dig up anything about the Shroud, Image, or whatever they were calling it in Venice back then.
I wasn’t looking for the type of documents that would be on display at the museum. More likely, I’d find them in a dusty archive of historical writings.
Getting permission to review historical documents would require I oil that slippery tongue of mine so the lies slipped off easily.
Like so many of the other treasures of Constantinople that came to Venice, from bronze horses to the bones of saints, the Shroud would also have arrived by ship. What I wanted to research at the archives were records like the manifests of ships that arrived in Venice within a few months after the Crusader looting of Constantinople; records such as palace inventories and letters that might also give a clue as to where the Image traveled.
The Shroud Page 20
