Closely bound to the honouring of the saints is the veneration of their shrines, the tombs, relics and holy places associated with them, which have drawn pilgrims and prayer across the Christian centuries and beyond. From the early church, the graves of the martyrs became places of gathering, prayer and the celebration of the Eucharist, on the conviction that the saint was especially present and especially ready to intercede where their body or relics lay. Around these holy graves grew the great pilgrimage shrines of Christendom, and the practice of enshrining relics beneath altars, of translating the remains of saints to places of honour, and of seeking healing and blessing at their tombs became a defining feature of medieval and later Catholic and Orthodox devotion.
The veneration of relics and shrines expresses the same theology as the honouring of the saints themselves: the holy person, alive with God, remains linked to their earthly remains and to the places sanctified by their presence, and the pilgrim who comes to pray there seeks their intercession and the grace held to flow through such contact with the holy. The practice is not confined to Christianity, the shrines of Sufi saints across the Muslim world, of Jewish sages, and of holy figures in many traditions draw the same devotion of pilgrimage, prayer and petition, testifying to a widespread religious impulse to seek the sacred at the tombs of the holy. Within Christianity the cult of relics and shrines was among the practices most sharply attacked by the Protestant Reformers as superstition, and it remains a living and characteristic devotion of the Catholic and Orthodox worlds, where the great shrines continue to draw pilgrims in their millions.