Shroud of Turin: Can You See It

1. Where the Shroud Is Kept

The Shroud is kept in the Cathedral of St John the Baptist in Turin, the seat of the Archbishop of Turin, at the north end of the city's old centre beside the Palazzo Reale. The cathedral was built between 1491 and 1498 in the Renaissance style, and for most of its life it was a working parish and diocesan church that happened to hold an extraordinary object. Since the seventeenth century the object has defined it.

Behind and above the cathedral's sanctuary rises the Chapel of the Holy Shroud, the Cappella della Sacra Sindone, a black marble drum crowned with a lattice cone of interlocking arches. Work began under Amedeo di Castellamonte and was taken over in 1667 by the priest and mathematician Guarino Guarini, who designed the extraordinary layered dome and saw the chapel completed in 1694. The chapel was built to hold the Shroud and to connect the cathedral below with the royal palace beside it, so that the Dukes of Savoy could reach their relic without leaving their own building. That double door, one to the Church and one to the dynasty, is the whole political history of the Shroud in a single piece of architecture.

The 1997 Fire

On the night of 11 April 1997 a fire broke out in the chapel, which was then under restoration. The Shroud had been moved into the cathedral during those works and was inside a display case behind the high altar. A firefighter, Mario Trematore, broke through the protective glass and carried the cloth out. The chapel itself was gutted, and its restoration took two decades; it reopened in September 2018.

Since 2002 the Shroud has been stored flat rather than rolled, in a sealed conservation case with a controlled inert atmosphere, kept in the cathedral. The case is a conservation vessel and works nothing like a display case. It stays closed, and the cloth inside it stays out of sight.

The construction dates of the cathedral and of Guarini's chapel, the 1997 fire and the 2018 reopening of the chapel are recorded in the published histories of the Archdiocese of Turin and of the Musei Reali di Torino, which administer the chapel as part of the royal museums complex.

2. Why You Probably Cannot See It

Most people who travel to Turin hoping to see the Shroud do not see it. The cloth is displayed only at an exposition, called in Italian an ostensione, and expositions are occasional events rather than a fixture of the calendar. They are decided and announced by the Archbishop of Turin, who holds custody of the cloth on the Pope's behalf, and there is no published schedule of future showings to plan a trip around.

The reason is conservation. Linen degrades under light, handling, humidity and temperature swings. Every exposition means opening the case, moving a fragile textile, mounting it, and exposing it to weeks of illumination and to the vibration and body heat of large crowds. The custodians treat each showing as a cost paid out of the cloth's remaining life, so the showings are kept few.

The Recent Pattern

The rhythm of modern expositions gives a sense of how rare they are. There were showings in 1978, for the four hundredth anniversary of the Shroud's arrival in Turin; in 1998, for the centenary of the first photograph of it; in 2000, for the Jubilee; in 2010, when Pope Benedict XVI came to venerate it; and in 2015, when Pope Francis did the same. On Holy Saturday in 2020, with churches closed across Italy, the Archbishop of Turin prayed before the Shroud and the moment was broadcast, an unusual expedient for an unusual year.

Those gaps run to years and sometimes to more than a decade. Any page that tells you the Shroud can be seen on a given date is either repeating an announcement from the archdiocese or guessing, so check the archdiocese directly before travelling.

3. What the Cloth Physically Is

The Shroud is a single piece of linen roughly four and a half metres long and a little over a metre wide, woven in a three-to-one herringbone twill. A narrower strip of the same cloth runs along one long edge, joined by a seam. The weave is not a common one for cheap ancient cloth, and its rarity has been argued in both directions: as evidence of an expensive first-century burial cloth for a man buried by a wealthy sympathiser, and as evidence of medieval European loom technology. Neither argument is decisive on its own.

The dimensions, the herringbone twill structure and the side strip are described in the technical documentation published by the Archdiocese of Turin, which holds custody of the cloth, and in the conservation report of the 2002 intervention published by the textile conservator who directed it, Mechthild Flury-Lemberg.

The Scars of Fire and Water

The cloth carries visible damage from a fire at Chambery in 1532. Molten silver from the reliquary burned through the folded linen, leaving a repeating pattern of scorches and holes down both sides of the image, and the water used to quench the fire left large diamond-shaped stains. Poor Clare nuns sewed patches over the worst holes in 1534 and stitched a backing cloth, the Holland cloth, to the reverse. An earlier and separate set of burns, four small holes in an L-shaped group repeated across the folds, predates 1532 and is usually called the poker holes. Nobody knows what made them.

In 2002 a conservation campaign removed the 1534 patches and the Holland backing, cleaned the reverse for the first time in centuries, and remounted the cloth flat on a new support. The intervention was thorough and it was also controversial. Some researchers objected that it destroyed archaeological context and material that future methods might have read; the custodians replied that the patches were themselves damaging the linen and that stabilisation could not wait. That disagreement matters for later sections, because it changed what is available to test.

4. The Image and What Is Visible on It

Laid out flat, the Shroud shows two faint full-length human figures head to head, as though a body had been laid on one half of a long cloth and the other half folded over the top of the head and down the front. The left-hand figure is the back of the body, the right-hand figure the front. Both are a pale straw or sepia colour on an ivory ground, and both are extremely faint. Visitors at expositions consistently report that the image is far harder to see in person than in photographs.

The figure is of an adult man, bearded, with long hair falling to the shoulders and apparently gathered at the back, arms crossed over the pelvis. Across the whole of the back and much of the front there is a dense scatter of small dumbbell-shaped marks, consistent with the tips of a Roman flagrum. There are dark stains at the wrists and at the feet, a broad stain in the side of the chest with a separated clear component, marks around the top of the head, and a heavy area of injury across the shoulders. The nose appears swollen and one cheek distorted.

The Properties That Made It a Puzzle

Several features of the image are agreed on by researchers who disagree about everything else. The colouring is confined to the topmost fibrils of the threads and does not soak through the cloth. There are no brush strokes, no directionality, no outline, no capillary flow of a liquid medium along the threads, and no binder of the kind a painter uses to fix pigment. The image works as a shading, with density varying smoothly across the figure.

The bloodstains behave differently from the image. They soak through the cloth, they have clear borders, and where they sit the body image is absent underneath them, which suggests the stains were on the linen before the image was.

5. The 1898 Photograph

The modern history of the Shroud begins with a camera. In May 1898, during an exposition in Turin, an amateur photographer and lawyer named Secondo Pia was permitted to photograph the cloth. Working in his darkroom afterwards, he found that his glass negative showed a coherent, lifelike positive image of a man's face and body, with the light and dark values in a natural relation to one another. The image on the cloth, in other words, behaves as a photographic negative.

That single fact turned a devotional object into a scientific problem overnight. A painter working before the invention of photography had no reason to conceive of tonal inversion and no way to check the result. Pia was accused of retouching his plates until a second photographer, Giuseppe Enrie, repeated the work in 1931 with better equipment and confirmed what Pia had seen.

The date of Secondo Pia's photographs, 28 May 1898, and the 1931 photographic campaign of Giuseppe Enrie are documented in the archive of the Confraternity of the Holy Shroud in Turin, which holds Pia's original plates and camera and displays them in the Museum of the Holy Shroud.

A further step came in 1976, when Eric Jumper and John Jackson ran a photograph of the Shroud through a VP-8 Image Analyzer, an instrument built to convert image brightness into elevation for interpreting spacecraft imagery. Ordinary photographs of faces produce distorted lumps under that treatment; the Shroud image produced a plausible three-dimensional relief, suggesting that image density varies with the distance between cloth and body. The finding is one of the strongest cards in the authenticity argument, and it has been contested on the grounds that the effect can be reproduced by other means and that the instrument's output depends heavily on operator settings.

6. The Wounds and the Gospel Burial Accounts

All four Gospels record that the body of Jesus was taken down from the cross by Joseph of Arimathea and wrapped in linen before burial. Matthew, Mark and Luke use the Greek word sindon, a single linen sheet, which is the word that gives the Shroud its Italian name, the Sindone. John's account speaks instead of othonia, linen cloths in the plural, bound with spices in the Jewish burial custom, and mentions separately a soudarion that had been over the head.

Readers have harmonised the singular and the plural for centuries, generally by taking John's plural as covering a sheet together with bindings and a face cloth. The point for a visitor is that the Gospels describe a burial in linen and never describe a marked cloth. No New Testament text mentions an image, and the Church's faith in the resurrection rests on the apostolic testimony.

Where the Image Matches the Passion Narratives

The marks on the cloth line up unusually closely with the Gospel accounts of a Roman execution as applied to Jesus in particular. The scourge marks correspond to a flogging. The punctures around the scalp correspond to a crown or cap of thorns, a mockery recorded of Jesus and not a standard part of crucifixion. The wound in the side corresponds to the lance thrust in John's account, and the fact that the legs are unbroken corresponds to John's note that the soldiers did not break his legs. The nail wounds appear at the wrists rather than the palms, which departs from almost all medieval and Renaissance painting and agrees with what is now understood about how a body can be supported on a cross.

Sceptics read the same convergence in the opposite direction. A skilled medieval artist working from the Gospels would produce exactly this set of marks, because the Gospels were his source. The wrist wounds are the harder case for that reading, and the arguments about them turn on how much a fourteenth-century forger could have known about anatomy under load. For the wider question of how the Church distinguishes a verified miracle from a devotional story, see our guide to miracles and how the Church verifies them, which sets out the standard the Church applies when it does reach a judgment. It has reached no judgment of that kind about the Shroud.

7. Lirey and the First Firm Record

The Shroud's documented history begins in the middle of the fourteenth century in a village in Champagne. The cloth appears in the possession of Geoffroi de Charny, a French knight of considerable standing who founded a collegiate church at Lirey, in the diocese of Troyes, and who died at the battle of Poitiers on 19 September 1356 carrying the French royal standard. How he came by the cloth he never said, or if he said it, no record of the answer survives.

Public showings at Lirey in the 1350s drew crowds and drew objections from the local bishop. The fullest surviving objection is a memorandum written in 1389 by Pierre d'Arcis, Bishop of Troyes, addressed to Clement VII at Avignon. D'Arcis wrote that his predecessor, Henri of Poitiers, had investigated the earlier showings, had established that the cloth was a work of human art, and had obtained the confession of the artist who made it. D'Arcis asked that the showings be stopped.

In 1390 Clement VII permitted the showings to continue on a condition: that whenever the cloth was displayed, it be announced publicly and audibly that it was a figure or representation of the shroud of Christ rather than the true shroud. That ruling is the earliest authoritative statement anyone made about the object, and it is worth reading carefully. A pope of the Avignon obedience allowed the devotion and forbade the claim.

How Both Sides Read Lirey

Sceptics treat the d'Arcis memorandum as close to conclusive: a bishop reports an earlier investigation, a confession, and a manufacture, within living memory of the object's first appearance. Defenders of the Shroud make three replies. The confessed artist is never named and the confession itself does not survive, so the report is second-hand. D'Arcis had a jurisdictional and financial dispute with the canons of Lirey and a motive to shut the showings down. And Henri of Poitiers is documented approving of the Lirey foundation at a date that sits awkwardly with the account of his hostility.

What no one disputes is that before Lirey the trail runs out. Proposals connecting the cloth to earlier objects point most often to the Image of Edessa, a cloth bearing a face of Christ taken to Constantinople in 944 and lost in the sack of the city by the Fourth Crusade in 1204, with the suggestion that it was the Shroud kept folded so only the face showed. That argument is a reconstruction built on descriptions rather than a documented chain of custody, and it should be presented that way.

The 1389 memorandum of Bishop Pierre d'Arcis and the 1390 ruling of Clement VII are preserved in the collections of the Bibliotheque Nationale de France and have been published in full in the standard documentary editions of the Shroud's history. The death of Geoffroi de Charny at Poitiers on 19 September 1356 is recorded in the French chronicles of the campaign.

8. Chambery, Fire, and the Move to Turin

The cloth passed out of the Charny family in 1453, when Geoffroi de Charny's granddaughter Margaret ceded it to Duke Louis I of Savoy. The Savoys housed it in the Sainte-Chapelle of their castle at Chambery, and the House of Savoy owned it from that point until the twentieth century.

In December 1532 the Chambery chapel caught fire. The Shroud was folded inside a silver reliquary; the metal began to melt and burned through the layers of linen, producing the symmetrical pattern of holes and scorches that still runs down the cloth. Water thrown to save it left the diamond stains. The Poor Clares of Chambery repaired it in 1534.

In 1578 Duke Emmanuel Philibert had the Shroud brought to Turin, his new capital. The move is traditionally connected with St Charles Borromeo, Archbishop of Milan, who had vowed to walk to Chambery to venerate the cloth, and for whom the Alpine crossing was shortened by bringing it south. Turin has held it ever since.

From a Dynasty to the Pope

Umberto II, the last King of Italy, died in exile in 1983 and left the Shroud by will to the Pope, so ownership has rested with the Holy See since that year. The Pope appoints the Archbishop of Turin as pontifical custodian, and the archbishop decides on conservation, on scientific access, and on whether and when the cloth is shown.

9. The 1988 Radiocarbon Dating

On 21 April 1988 a strip of linen was cut from one corner of the Shroud in the sacristy of Turin Cathedral, in the presence of the archbishop, the scientific advisers and the laboratory representatives. The strip was divided and portions were given to three accelerator mass spectrometry laboratories: the University of Arizona, the University of Oxford, and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. Control samples of textiles of known date were supplied alongside the Shroud material.

The three laboratories reported independently and the results were combined and published in Nature on 16 February 1989. The conclusion, at ninety-five per cent confidence, was that the linen dated from between AD 1260 and AD 1390.

P. E. Damon and colleagues, "Radiocarbon Dating of the Shroud of Turin", Nature, volume 337, 16 February 1989. The sampling on 21 April 1988 was carried out under the authority of the Archbishop of Turin as pontifical custodian and is recorded in the archdiocese's own account of the operation.

Two things about that range deserve stating plainly. The first is that the laboratories were working blind in intention and to a published protocol, and the three results agreed with each other. The second is that the range ends within a few years of the Shroud's first documented appearance at Lirey. A medieval date and a fourteenth-century first record are a consistent picture, and that consistency is the single strongest argument that the cloth is a work of the fourteenth century.

The Archbishop of Turin announced the result publicly in October 1988 and the Church did not contest it. Cardinal Anastasio Ballestrero, then archbishop, presented the finding and said that the Church continued to hold the Shroud in veneration as an image of the Passion. The Holy See made no declaration that the result was wrong, and it has made none since.

10. The Objections to the Dating

The 1988 result has been challenged continuously since it was published, and the challenges have to be reported fairly, because some of them are serious work by serious people and some of them are not. Three lines of objection carry weight.

The Sample Site

All the material tested came from a single small area at one corner of the cloth, along an edge, close to a region that had been handled for centuries when the Shroud was held up at showings. Standard archaeometric practice prefers several samples from separated locations, precisely so that a local anomaly cannot drive the whole result. The single-corner sampling was a compromise forced by the custodians' unwillingness to cut more of the cloth, and it is a real methodological weakness that the original team acknowledged in principle.

The Repair Hypothesis

Raymond Rogers, a chemist who had worked on the 1978 examination and who had publicly accepted the medieval date when it was announced, later examined threads from the radiocarbon sample area and from elsewhere on the cloth. He reported that the sample region contained cotton fibres and a gum and dye combination that he did not find in the main body of the linen, and argued that the corner had been mended at some point with newer material spliced invisibly into the weave, so that the laboratories had dated a repair. He published the finding in the journal Thermochimica Acta in 2005, shortly before his death.

Raymond N. Rogers, "Studies on the radiocarbon sample from the Shroud of Turin", Thermochimica Acta, 2005. Rogers was a member of the 1978 Shroud of Turin Research Project team and a chemist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

The Raw Data Reanalysis

In 2019 a group of researchers obtained the individual subsample measurements behind the 1989 publication through a freedom of information request to the British Museum, which had coordinated the project, and published a statistical reanalysis in the journal Archaeometry. They argued that the subsample results were more scattered than a single homogeneous age would predict, and that a single date range for the whole cloth was therefore not supported by the data as strongly as the published paper implied.

T. Casabianca, E. Marinelli, G. Pernagallo and B. Torrisi, "Radiocarbon Dating of the Turin Shroud: New Evidence from Raw Data", Archaeometry, 2019. The raw measurement data were released by the British Museum following a freedom of information request.

Where the Objections Stand

Each of these objections has been answered, and the answers are also serious. On the repair hypothesis, Mechthild Flury-Lemberg, the textile conservator who had the whole cloth open in front of her during the 2002 restoration and who examined its reverse, has stated that she found no evidence of any invisible reweaving anywhere on the Shroud, and textile specialists have argued that an undetectable splice of the size required is beyond what hand weaving can do. On the statistical reanalysis, other statisticians have replied that heterogeneity between subsamples of this kind is common in radiocarbon work, that it widens the uncertainty rather than shifting the centre of the range, and that no plausible correction moves a thirteenth-century result into the first century.

A different line came in 2022, when a team at Italy's National Research Council led by Liberato De Caro applied wide-angle X-ray scattering to a linen sample, measuring the degradation of the cellulose structure, and reported a result they said was compatible with a first-century origin. The method is not an established dating technique for linen, its calibration depends on assumptions about the temperature and humidity history of the cloth over two thousand years, and it has not been independently replicated. It belongs in an honest account of the argument and settles nothing.

The 2022 wide-angle X-ray scattering study was carried out by Liberato De Caro and colleagues at the Institute of Crystallography of Italy's National Research Council (CNR).

11. What Science Has and Has Not Settled

In October 1978, at the end of that year's exposition, a team of American scientists working as the Shroud of Turin Research Project was given five days of direct access to the cloth with a large array of instruments. Their published report in 1981 stated that they found no pigment, paint, dye or stain composing the image, that the image was chemically and physically superficial, and that they could offer no explanation of how it had been formed.

One member of the wider project reached the opposite conclusion. Walter McCrone, a microscopist, examined sticky-tape samples lifted from the cloth and reported that he found iron oxide and vermilion pigment in a gelatin binder, and concluded that the image was a painting in a dilute wash. His colleagues on the project disputed his identification and his interpretation of the particles, and the disagreement was never resolved between them. McCrone maintained his position for the rest of his life and published it at length.

Blood, Pollen, and the Sudarium

Forensic tests on the stained areas have reported the presence of human blood, and the identification of blood is generally accepted, though claims about blood group and about the chemistry of the serum have been contested. Whether the stains were formed by contact with a wounded body or applied is a separate question and remains argued.

Claims based on pollen deserve particular caution. Max Frei, a Swiss criminologist, took tape samples in the 1970s and reported pollen grains from plants of the Near East, which would place the cloth in that region at some point. Frei's sampling technique and his identifications have been heavily criticised, and his credibility was damaged in his last years by his role in authenticating the forged Hitler diaries. His pollen work should be treated as unverified.

The Sudarium of Oviedo, a smaller bloodstained cloth kept in the Cathedral of Oviedo in Spain and attested in Spain from the early medieval period, is often brought into the argument, since researchers have claimed correspondences between its stain pattern and the face on the Shroud. The date of the Sudarium's arrival in Oviedo is itself argued over. If the correspondence held and the Oviedo cloth's earlier history held, it would place a related object well before 1260. Both halves of that argument are contested by specialists.

A parallel argument runs through art history. The Pray Codex, a Hungarian manuscript of the 1190s, contains a drawing of the burial of Christ in which the figure has no thumbs visible and the cloth carries a pattern of small circles in an L-shaped group, which Shroud researchers read as the poker holes. Critics reply that the circles are a common decorative motif and that the resemblance is being read backwards from a known conclusion.

12. What the Church Has and Has Not Declared

The Catholic Church has never declared the Shroud of Turin to be the burial cloth of Jesus Christ. No pope, council or dicastery has issued a judgment of authenticity, and no Catholic is required to believe anything about the cloth. What the Church has done is permit and encourage veneration of the Shroud as an image of the Passion, which is a different act with a different weight.

Popes have been careful about this and their careful words repay attention. Pope John Paul II venerated the Shroud in Turin on 24 May 1998 and called it a mirror of the Gospel, saying that the Church entrusts to scientists the task of continuing to investigate and that she has no specific competence to pronounce on such questions. Pope Benedict XVI came in May 2010 and called the Shroud an icon written in blood. Pope Francis venerated it in June 2015 and, in a message sent to an earlier exposition, described it as the icon of a man scourged and crucified. The recurring word across three pontificates is icon.

That word is doing real theological work. The Church's teaching on sacred images is that the honour given to an image passes to the one it represents, so that whoever venerates an image venerates the person portrayed in it (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2132). On that basis a Catholic can kneel before the Shroud with a completely clear conscience while holding no position at all on carbon dating. The prayer goes to the crucified Christ. The linen is the occasion, and its date does not change where the prayer goes.

The same logic explains why the Church has been content to leave the scientific question open. Christian faith rests on the public revelation given in Christ and handed on by the apostles, and that revelation is complete; no relic, image or private revelation adds anything to it (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 67). A Church whose faith depended on a laboratory result would be a Church with a serious problem. This one has no stake in the result and can afford to wait.

The Feast and the Devotion

Turin keeps a local liturgical observance of the Holy Shroud on 4 May, a feast associated with the House of Savoy and with the cloth's presence in the city. The observance does not appear on the general calendar of the Latin Church. Devotion to the Shroud is a permitted popular devotion in the ordinary sense: an aid to prayer that the Church regulates and does not require.

13. What a Visitor to Turin Actually Sees

Assume there is no exposition, which is the situation almost every visitor will find. Turin still gives a pilgrim a full day, and it is worth doing properly.

The Cathedral

The Cathedral of St John the Baptist is a working church, open for prayer and for Mass. Inside, in a side area of the nave, is the sealed conservation case holding the Shroud, generally with a full-size photographic reproduction displayed nearby so that visitors can see the image at true scale. That reproduction is a more useful experience than most people expect, because it conveys the sheer length of the thing, which no photograph in a book does. There is normally a place to kneel. People do.

The Chapel of the Holy Shroud

Guarini's chapel reopened in 2018 after the long restoration that followed the 1997 fire. It is reached from within the royal museums complex beside the cathedral, and standing under the dome is the architectural highlight of the visit: a cone of thirty-six interlocking segmental arches stepping upward in a spiral, with light entering between them so that the structure appears to dissolve as it rises. Fire damage is still visible on the black marble in places, and the restorers left some of it legible on purpose.

The Museum of the Holy Shroud

A short walk from the cathedral, in the crypt of the church of the Most Holy Sudarium, the Confraternity of the Holy Shroud maintains the Museo della Sindone. This is the place to spend real time. It holds Secondo Pia's original camera and glass plates, Giuseppe Enrie's 1931 photographs, full-scale reproductions, reconstructions of the 1532 reliquary, and displays laying out the scientific investigations and the arguments on both sides. A visitor who works through it comes out with a far better grasp of the evidence than one who has only stood in the cathedral.

What Else Turin Holds

Turin is also the city of St John Bosco, and the Basilica of Mary Help of Christians in the Valdocco district holds his tomb and the buildings where he began his work with the boys of the industrialising city. Pilgrims who have come a long way for the Shroud often find that Don Bosco's Turin is what stays with them, and the two sites sit within a short tram ride of each other.

14. How to Hold an Open Question

Most writing about the Shroud has already decided. One kind of article treats the 1988 dating as the end of the matter and the ongoing research as motivated reasoning. Another treats every objection to the dating as proven and speaks of authenticity as established fact. Both are more comfortable to write than the truth, and both leave a reader worse equipped than when they arrived.

The truthful position takes longer to state. There is a linen cloth in Turin bearing an image nobody has been able to explain or to reproduce in all its properties. Its documented history begins in the 1350s and its only direct dating places its manufacture in roughly that period. Substantial objections to that dating exist and have themselves been substantially answered. The Church permits veneration of the cloth as an image of the Passion and has declared nothing about where it came from.

A Catholic can walk into Turin Cathedral holding exactly that and lose nothing. The Passion the cloth depicts is certain on grounds that have nothing to do with linen: the four Gospels, the apostolic preaching, the witness of the martyrs, the faith the Church has handed down. If the cloth is fourteenth-century, an unknown artist made a work of devotional genius whose method is still not understood, and the Christ it points to is unchanged. If it is first-century, nothing the Church has said would have to be withdrawn.

What the Shroud does reliably, for believer and sceptic alike, is make the Passion physical again. A crucifixion is an abstraction until you see a scourged back laid out at full human scale. The image insists on a body: a specific man, of a specific height, with specific injuries in a specific order. That insistence is why the image has held attention for six centuries, and it is available to anyone standing in front of a reproduction in the cathedral, whatever they conclude about the carbon.

Turin is worth the journey for that, and a pilgrimage is worth making with the question still open. If you are working out what a pilgrimage is for in the first place, our guide to what a pilgrimage actually is covers the practice and its purpose, and the guide to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre covers the tomb itself.

15. Frequently Asked Questions