Christ in Celtic Christianity: Britain and Ireland from the Fifth to the Tenth Century (review)

relics even though they were not sure where the saint’s remains were buried. Bakirtzes suggests that church leaders might have deliberately forgotten where the relics were to foil imperial requests to move them to Constantinople.By the eleventh century,pilgrims visited Demetrios’church to fill ampullae with miracleworking myron, an aromatic liquid which had begun to flow from beneath the church.After Italians took the relics to the West, the Thessalonians conveniently discovered a new detail of Demetrios’ martyrdom. He had fallen into a well at his death, and this well, now by the side of the church, was the true source of the myron. In the fifteenth century, Turkish pilgrims came to visit the shrine of Demetrios, and Sultan Murad II even sacrificed a ram in honor of the saint.