Overview

The Sudarium of Oviedo is a piece of linen roughly 84 by 53 centimetres, stained with blood and serous fluid but bearing no image of a face. Christian tradition identifies it with the cloth that covered the head of Jesus, distinguished in John's Gospel from the larger burial wrappings. It is preserved in Oviedo Cathedral in the Arca Santa, a chest of relics that has given the city's Camara Santa its importance as a pilgrimage stop on the road to Santiago de Compostela. Because it carries stains rather than a picture, the Sudarium has attracted forensic rather than photographic study, and much of its modern fame comes from claimed correspondences between its bloodstains and those of the Shroud of Turin. The cloth is shown to the public only a few times a year, chiefly around the feast of the Triumph of the Cross in September.

Radiocarbon testing of the Sudarium of Oviedo in 1994, conducted independently by laboratories at the University of Arizona and the University of Toronto, returned calibrated date ranges in the seventh to eighth century CE, several centuries later than the tradition's claimed first-century origin and considerably later than the disputed medieval date range assigned to the Shroud of Turin by comparable 1988 testing.