Incredible archaeology breakthrough as lost altar found 'where Jesus was crucified'
It has long been believed that a long-lost crusader altar was hidden at the holiest Christian site. Now, it has been found in a major archaeological breakthrough.
Archaeologists working in the holiest site of Christendom have discovered a lost crusader altar in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, located in the Christian Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem.
The 4th-century church was apparently built on the site where Jesus was crucified. It is also the location of Jesus’s empty tomb, where he was buried and resurrected.
Archaeologists from the Austrian Academy of Sciences (OAW), working in collaboration with the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) made the sensational discovery while conducting a study of the church interior.
They found the altar within one of the rear corridors connecting to the middle chamber.
Leaning against a wall for decades was a neglected stone slab that tourists have been writing graffiti on. When the stone was turned, it was revealed to be a long-lost crusader altar from the medieval period, consecrated in 1149.
“We know of pilgrimage reports from the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries about a magnificent marble altar in Jerusalem,” says Ilya Berkovich, historian at the Institute for Research on the Habsburg Monarchy and the Balkans at OAW.
In 1808, a large fire wrecked much of the Romanesque part of the church, with the altar thought to be lost in the destruction.
Questions still remain as to how the slab could have stayed hidden for so long, but provides new information about a previously unknown connection between Rome and the Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem.
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The altar is decorated with a unique technique for producing marble decorations, known as “Cosmatesque”, mastered exclusively by guild masters in papal Rome.
According to the OAW: “The technique was characterised by the fact that its masters could decorate large areas with small amounts of the precious marble, which in medieval Rome was mainly scraped from ancient buildings – by assembling small marble splinters with the greatest precision and attaching them to stone supports to create geometric patterns and dazzling ornaments.”
Archaeologists suggest the altar must have been created with the Pope’s permission, who likely commissioned one of the Cosmatesque masters to honour the holiest church in Christendom.
