Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften

Abstract:
With the emergence of Christianity in Late Antiquity, a growing devotion of martyrs and saints as well as the cult of their relics spread in the Mediterranean area. A privileged focus of this phenomenon was the Holy Land, where many sacred bodily remains were identified, and then exported in the entire Christian oecumene, thereby becoming an instrument for the dissemination of the cults of saints. Indeed, bones and holy ashes were the prominent objects of veneration, and many churches and sanctuaries were equipped with special liturgical furnishings designed to accommodate the venerated relics. The archaeological evidence of these sacred spaces reveals that a common pattern of strategies was employed by Late Antique churches to place and arrange the sacred fragments they possessed. In order to understand their forms, locations and veneration systems, as well as their use and functioning, the aim of this paper is to pay special attention to the typological definition of the reliquaries found in the churches of the provinces of Palaestina and Arabia. The sacred installations that allowed the visual contact with relics will then be analysed to point out how these holy remains had a peculiar role in framing the liturgical and devotional space of the ecclesiastical buildings. A particular emphasis will be given to the results of the most recent archaeological excavations carried out in the region under examination.