Sudarium of Oviedo

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.

The relic's verifiable history is bound to the Arca Santa. According to Asturian tradition the chest was carried out of Jerusalem before the Persian sack of 614, moved across North Africa to Spain, kept at Toledo, and taken north into the mountains of Asturias during the Muslim conquest, finally housed at Oviedo. King Alfonso VI and the Cid are associated with the opening of the chest in 1075, and a document of that year lists its contents. Some scholars connect the cloth with a face cloth mentioned by an anonymous pilgrim of Piacenza around 570, though the link is uncertain. From the medieval period onward the Sudarium has remained at Oviedo, surviving a fire that damaged the Camara Santa in 1934 during the Asturian revolt, after which the chamber was rebuilt.

The Sudarium's documented custodial history in Spain is considerably older than its claimed origin: it has been kept at Oviedo, in the Camara Santa of the Cathedral of San Salvador, since at least the early medieval period, with a documented inventory reference from 1075, when King Alfonso VI had the chest containing it formally opened and its contents catalogued. Its earlier history, how and when it reached Spain from the Near East the tradition claims as its point of origin, rests on legendary rather than documentary evidence, a gap of several centuries between the traditional first-century origin and the earliest solid documentary attestation in Spain that the radiocarbon results, placing its material in the seventh or eighth century, would in fact largely close if the dating is accepted at face value.

Devotional tradition holds the Sudarium to be the very cloth of John 20:7, and since 1989 the EDICES investigators led from Oviedo have argued that its pattern of stains matches blood flowing from a crowned, upright then reclined head, that the blood is type AB, and that points of the pattern align with the face of the Shroud of Turin. Critics note that type-AB findings on aged relics are difficult to confirm, that claimed alignments with the Shroud are subjective, and above all that radiocarbon testing reported by Baima Bollone gave a date around the 7th century, centuries after the crucifixion. The laboratory itself cautioned that oils and handling could have skewed the result, and defenders lean on that caveat. As with the Shroud, the scientific dating points away from the 1st century while the tradition maintains an origin at the tomb; the honest classification is therefore debated.

Tradition holds the Sudarium wrapped the head of Jesus separately from the larger burial Shroud, per the account in John 20:7 of a face cloth found apart from the other linens in the empty tomb, and proponents of a link between the two relics argue that bloodstain patterns on the Sudarium correspond to those on the Shroud of Turin's own face image closely enough to indicate the same person. This claim originates chiefly with Spain's Centro Espanol de Sindologia, an advocacy body dedicated to relic research rather than an independent forensic authority, and it has not been corroborated by forensic scientists outside that circle.