ROMSO Cyprus Knowledge Base

--- CONTENT ---
The True Cross, also known as the Holy Cross, would be the cross on which Jesus Christ was crucified.

According to a Christian tradition dating back to the end of the 19th century, it was the mother of Emperor Constantine, Empress Helen, who discovered the Cross of Jesus and those of the two larrons, during a pilgrimage to Palestine undertaken in 326. This central account of the Constantine legend launches the cult of the "True Cross", which becomes one of the main relics of Christianity, the subject of particular veneration. Reliquaries bearing the name of staurotheques are specially made to house fragments.

For Christianity, the Cross of Christ is indeed regarded as the instrument of the salvation of humanity since, according to this religion, Christ, through his death, redeemed men from their sins, and especially from original sin. Until 1960, two feasts marked, in the Catholic liturgical calendar, the importance of this relic: the Recovery of the Cross (the), abolished in 1960, and the Exaltation of the Holy Cross (the ).

Text data

The Gospels are the only canonical documents to know the circumstances of the death of Jesus of Nazareth. According to Mark's Gospel, written in Greek, Jesus died just outside the walls of Jerusalem, in a place called Golgotha. There, he was nailed to a stauros ("Cross" in Greek) and hanged on a xylon ("wood" in Greek) between two criminals whom the Christian popular tradition calls good and bad larrons. According to the text, an inscription bearing the reason for his conviction accompanied his torture.

According to archaeology and ancient texts, the techniques of crucification have varied according to times and regions. One of them is to nail or tie the condemned to a wooden cross-section (stauros in Greek, patibulum in Latin). Then this cross was placed in a vertical pile (in Greek xylon, i.e. "wood"; in Latin crux or furca) lower than is generally imagined, with the feet of the supplication touching almost the ground. The whole formed what the Romans called a crux (term at the origin of the French "cross"). The condemned died in asphyxiation, after several hours of terrible suffering. Particularly painful and humiliating, this kind of death was, in the Roman world, reserved for slaves and non-citizens.

After the Roman Empire became a Christian, this torture was abandoned, for it was no longer suitable for a state officially claiming a man who had been executed in this way. The real circumstances of Christ's death were thus forgotten, and the image of the "cross" was changed to become this object in four directions commonly represented in the "crosses" and "crucifixes" of Christian churches. In addition, the Latin translation of the Bible (the Vulgate) was made after the disappearance of c