Where Is the Head of John the Baptist? The Relics and Their Churches

The story begins in two Gospels. Mark 6:14-29 and Matthew 14:1-12 tell how Herod Antipas imprisoned John, how Herodias held a grievance against him, and how, at a banquet, Herod swore an oath to Herodias's daughter, Salome, who asked for John's head. John was executed, and his disciples came and buried his body (Mark 6:14-29, Bible Gateway). The Gospel accounts stop there. They say what happened to his body; they do not say where his head was kept afterwards.

The Church still marks his death. The Roman Catholic feast, the Memorial of the Passion or Beheading of Saint John the Baptist, falls on 29 August (Vatican News). The Vatican connects the date with ancient observances in fifth-century France and sixth-century Rome, and with traditions about the finding of John's head (Vatican State). The scene also became a subject for painters; Caravaggio's *Salome with the Head of John the Baptist*, now in the National Gallery in London, is one example, though a painting tells us about the artist's world, not about where the relic went.

The Great Umayyad Mosque in Damascus stands on a site that was a temple and later a Christian church. The French Ministry of Culture's archaeological resource on the mosque says the fourth-century church there was associated with John the Baptist, and that relics of his head were placed in an aedicule, a small shrine. When Caliph al-Walid I turned the site into a mosque in 705, the shrine stayed inside the prayer hall (French Ministry of Culture).

It is still there. In Islamic tradition, John the Baptist is the prophet Yaḥyā, and the shrine is identified with him. Both Muslim and Christian visitors respect it, so the head of John the Baptist is honoured there by two faiths under one roof.

Amiens Cathedral, in France, states that its relic is the face, the front portion of John the Baptist's head, and that it arrived from Constantinople in 1206 (Amiens Cathedral). The French Ministry of Culture's record gives the details: Walon de Sarton brought it to Amiens after the Fourth Crusade and presented it to Bishop Richard de Gerberoy on 17 December 1206. The present reliquary combines medieval rock crystal with nineteenth-century metalwork, and the French heritage record describes the object itself as the anterior part of a human cranium, the front of a skull (French Ministry of Culture, Amiens reliquary).

The relic gave Amiens its own cult of John the Baptist. The Metropolitan Museum of Art holds a fifteenth-century alabaster plaque showing John's head as it was venerated at Amiens, a piece of devotional art rather than the relic itself (The Met).

Science has also looked at the Amiens relic. The Institut Faire Faces reports that a radiographic analysis in 1959 characterized it as human, from an adult man who died in his thirties, with a broad estimated date range and a possible Palestinian origin (Institut Faire Faces). That analysis did not establish that the man was John the Baptist. The institute has since proposed a wider multidisciplinary study, including imaging, biology, dating and genetics; it is a proposal, and its results are not part of this story yet.

In Rome, the church of San Silvestro in Capite states that its relic has been venerated there since at least the late twelfth century, with the name "de Capite" appearing by about 1192 or 1194 (San Silvestro in Capite).

The church is open about what it holds and what it does not know. It describes the relic as the top part of a skull fitted into a wax skull, and it acknowledges that the relic's earlier provenance is not currently established. Its tradition connects the relic with a head once venerated at Constantinople, and its account says that in 873 the head was being venerated at the Stoudios monastery there. It also draws a clear line between its own fragment and the anterior cranium kept at Amiens, so the two churches are describing different parts.

The church quotes the historian Ilaria Toesca, who treated the precious reliquary as evidence of how highly the relic was valued, not as biological proof of whose it was. That is a useful way to read many relics: the craft and care around them tell you how much they meant to the people who kept them.

The Residenz in Munich, cared for by the Bavarian Palace Administration, preserves a major collection of reliquaries associated with the Counter-Reformation. The administration says the collection was formed from 1577 onward, with papal permission, and that about sixty reliquaries survive (Bavarian Palace Administration). Secondary accounts of the collection identify one reliquary as holding what the Wittelsbach rulers believed was John the Baptist's head. The Residenz's own page describes the collection as a whole and does not make that claim for the John relic itself, so it is best understood as what the Wittelsbachs believed, as those accounts report.

Orthodox Christianity remembers the head through a series of findings. The Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch describes the first finding as taking place in the middle of the fourth century near Jerusalem, through a revelation to two monks, after which the head was taken to Emesa, modern Homs, in Syria. It describes a second finding around 430, in the time of Bishop Uranius of Emesa (Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch).

A third finding is commemorated in Orthodox calendars: the recovery of the head from concealment at Comana and its return to Constantinople, traditionally dated to the ninth century. The Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America keeps a dedicated observance for the Third Finding (Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America). Other traditions name fragments or associated relics in Jerusalem, Constantinople, Antioch and elsewhere. These are distinct local traditions, each kept by its own community, rather than links in one continuous chain that history can follow from start to finish.

If you are wondering how one man could leave so many relics, the historian Patrick J. Geary gives the most helpful answer. He argues that medieval communities did not value relics only as objects. They treated them as sources of identity, protection, healing, prestige, pilgrimage, donations and political legitimacy. Between roughly the eighth and twelfth centuries, relics were divided, translated (moved from one church to another), exchanged, purchased, stolen, and sometimes acquired through stories of a miraculous finding. Their movements often followed political and military networks, including the Crusades. A relic's value depended on the community recognizing what it was and what it could do (Patrick J. Geary, "Sacred Commodities").

Amiens is a clear example. Its account of Walon de Sarton bringing the relic from Constantinople in 1206 shows how medieval Christians could describe the removal of relics from conquered Eastern churches as a "pious theft," the subject of Geary's book *Furta Sacra* (JSTOR). Modern historians also read such transfers in terms of conquest, competition, economics and institutional power (Amiens relic history).

So, how many heads of John the Baptist are there? There is no agreed count. Several institutions claim the head or parts of it, and the best-known claims often concern different portions: the front of a skull at Amiens, the top of a skull at San Silvestro, and the head shrine in Damascus. Medieval writers already knew of competing claims, and later traditions added more fragments and reliquaries. Mary Magdalene's relics have a similar history of rival claims, told in our story on Mary Magdalene's skull at Saint-Maximin.

These are the questions people ask most often about the relics.

The head of John the Baptist is less a single object than a set of traditions that grew up wherever communities believed they held a part of him: in a mosque in Damascus, a cathedral in Amiens, a Roman church named for the head, a palace collection in Munich and the Orthodox memory of three findings. Each keeper describes its relic in its own words, and several of them say plainly that they hold a fragment. Historians like Patrick Geary explain how relics travelled; scientists have examined at least one of them closely, without naming its owner. None of that takes anything away from the faith of the people who pray before these relics. If you want to see how other churches have kept the bones of saints, our stories on skulls in Christianity, the Saint Valentine skull, the catacomb saints and the Otranto Cathedral skulls follow those traditions further.

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