A fragment of wood sealed inside a 1,350-year-old stone chest, recovered from the ruins of Balatlar Church on Turkey’s Black Sea coast, is believed by excavation leaders to be a relic of the cross upon which Jesus Christ was crucified. That is according to Professor Gülgün Köroğlu of Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, who in 2013 first detailed the findings from the dig at the Sinop site, describing the chest as the most significant artefact her team had recovered.
“We have found a holy thing in a chest. It is a piece of a cross, and we think it was part of the True Cross,” Köroğlu told the Hurriyet Daily News, displaying a fragment of the chest — carved with a small cross along its sides — to reporters at the site. The chest, which Köroğlu believes served as a symbolic coffin for the relics of a holy person, has been transferred to the Sinop Archaeological Museum, where it is now held as what the Christian world has named the “Holystone.”
The Balatlar Church carries a history stretching back some 2,300 years — originally constructed as a Roman Imperial bath in the second century, converted to a place of Christian worship as early as the fourth or fifth century, and rebuilt as a Byzantine church in A.D. 660. Köroğlu’s team has recovered more than 2,000 human skeletons from the site, alongside frescoes depicting Jesus, Mary and the Apostles, which are still visible on the church’s interior walls.
Hikmet Tosun, Sinop’s provincial director of culture and tourism, said the excavation had reshaped the province’s cultural standing. “The excavations here have been very effective in the enrichment of our museum,” Tosun told reporters, noting that the dig had contributed more than 11,000 works to the museum’s warehoused collection and drawn sustained scholarly attention from Greece and Italy.
A 500-year debate over how much of the True Cross survives
The question of authenticity hangs over every claimed relic of the True Cross — a scepticism most pointedly articulated by the Protestant theologian John Calvin, who in the 16th century observed that the combined fragments claimed across Christendom would fill a large ship. That critique was later tested empirically: the 19th-century French archaeologist Charles Rohault de Fleury catalogued every known True Cross relic and concluded that even together, they would amount to less than a third of the timber in a cross three to four metres high.
The Balatlar fragment joins a catalogue of contested Christian artefacts that has generated sustained scholarly debate. A 2,000-year-old ossuary first unearthed in 1981 — initially heralded as the earliest known Christian artefact for an apparent depiction of Jonah swallowed by a fish — was later reassessed by classical and biblical scholars as bearing decorative carvings misread as Christian symbolism.
A separate ossuary said to hold the bones of the brother of Jesus, exhibited at a Toronto museum in 2002, remains hotly disputed, as does a papyrus fragment known as the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife, which many scholars consider a forgery.
Authentication testing continues at the Sinop Archaeological Museum, where the stone chest remains on public record. For Köroğlu, the significance stands regardless of what the laboratory returns: “This stone chest is very important to us. It has a history and is the most important artifact we have unearthed so far.”
Please note: This is a story that Wood Central has curated to coincide with Good Friday.
