Image of Edessa

According to a legend recorded by Eusebius of Caesarea, King Abgarus of Edessa wrote to Jesus, asking him to come cure him of an illness. Instead, the apostle Thaddaeus is said to have come, bearing a cloth with the image of Jesus, the Image of Edessa, or Mandylion, by the virtues of which the king was miraculously healed. Since Jesus was living, according to the legend, this image has no connection with his burial shroud.

The later vicissitudes of the Edessa image are not reported by Eusebius. After the king's death, the cloth might have been hidden in the city walls for protection as early as the reign of Manu VI, Abgar´s second son, who is thought to have reverted to paganism.

The image is said to have surfaced in 525, during a flood of the Daisan, a tributary stream of the Euphrates, flooding the city of Edessa. This flood is mentioned in the writings of Procopius of Caesarea. In the course of the reconstruction work at Edessa, a cloth was discovered which had been hidden above one of the gates of the town. It shows the face of a man. Evagrius Scholasticus mentioned in his Ecclesiastical History the image of Edessa, "created by God, and not produced by the hands of man". He dates this discovery at 544. The Persian King Chosrau I Anuschirwan (the large one) besieged the Roman Edessa. Other documents from the 6th century—it is said—are in the Vatican Library and the University of Leiden, Netherlands. These documents quote a man called Smera in Constantinople in 950: "King Abgar received a cloth on which one can see not only a face but the whole body" (Faciei figuram sed totius corporis figuram cernere poteris). The Mandylion disappeared again after the Persians conquered Edessa in 609 and the Arabs in 639. The Arab legend was related to historian Andrew Palmer when he visited Urfa (Edessa) in 1999: at the well of the Great Mosque "the assistant tells me that the well is known as that into which the towel (mendil) of the prophet Jesus was thrown. I ask him whether Jesus visited Urfa. No, he says, Jesus lived in a village near Jerusalem; but he sent the towel as a present to the king of Urfa" (the modern name of Edessa).

The Christian tradition is at variance: in 944—for the liberation of Muslim prisoners—it was taken from Edessa to Constantinople under the direction of the Byzantine emperor Romanus I, remaining there until the Crusaders sacked the city in 1204 and carried some of its treasures to western Europe, though the "Image of Edessa" is not mentioned in this context in any contemporary document.

External link

Andrew Palmer's essay on Edessa in Golden Horn: a Journal of Byzantium summer, 1998