Le reliquie veneziane di san Luca evangelista

ABSTRACT In the Church of San Giobbe in Cannaregio in Venice where held, between 1463 and 1986, some relics of a saint identified as Saint Luke the Evangelist. This paper points out that the identification of this holy body as the Evangelist happened before the arrival of the holy body in Venice from the region of Bosnia, just conquered by the Turks. The Abbey of Santa Giustina in Padua, also claiming the possession of the Evangelist real body, commissioned to Cardinal Bessarione an inquiry about the relics. He recognized in the Venetian body the one believed to be the Evangelist’s one by the whole Balkanic Orthodoxy. The body is known since 1416, in the kastron of Roghì, near Arta, in the Epirus Latin-Greek Despotate, ruled by the Tocco of Cefalonia family. When Epirus was conquered by the Turks, in 1449, the relic was bought by the orthodox Despots of Serbia, George and Lazar Brankovic. Probably during this same year (but not after the following), they transferred the relic to Smeredevo, their capital city. Ten years later, on the occasion of the marriage of Helena Brankovic, George’s daughter, with Stefan Tomasevic, King of Bosnia, the body was transferred to Jajce, the capital of his Kingdom. According to a document produced during the inquiry (whose lost Greek original presumably followed the relic all over its Balkanic history) the sacred body was bought in Constantinople, during the Latin Empire, by Patriarch Athanasius III of Jerusalem, transferred to the Holy City and then, after the City was conquered by the Fatimids in 1244, sold to Greek merchants in Acre. In 1245, when the document was written, the relic seems to be in Thebes of Boeotia. Now, the sacred body is identified as the one of saint Luke the New, monk of Stiris in Phokis († 953), and it is preserved in the Holy Monastery of Hosios Loukas, in the Greek Orthodox Metropolis of Thebes and Livadia